The neto regime whered in srich the election of Mandela (ebone) and inhertied by Taco Mocki toas shaped by trade union struggles against apartheid capitalism The Trade Union (Notebooks for Study & Research, IIRE). £4 including 1109 London N4 2UU. Recent Notebooks for Study and Research have focussed on dilferent aspects of a world in the process of globalisation: its effects on women; the ideology and reality of new production systems; and the role of the IME World Bank and World Trade Organisation.
The latest Notebook looks at the social and political impact of these changes on a particular country: South Africa.
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new working-class generation took shape in South Africa under the impact of rapid industrial growth. just as in Brazil, though on a smaller scale, several industrial sectors took off thanks to the investment of mining profits or simply because of foreign investment.
As this development occurred, the Black working class mushroomed. As a result, the new wave of industrialisation in the Third World contributed in the 1980s to the greatest political and social mobilisation in South African history, of which the trade-union movement was one of the central driving forces.
This period saw the emergence of a particularly interesting national working-class current: the current that was behind the foundation of the trade-union federation FOSATU (Federation of South African Trade Unions) in 1979.
The author of this Notebook, Claude Jacquin, covered South African events during this period for the fortnightly International Viewpoint under the pseudonym Peter Blumer, and carried out research and studies during ten visits to South Africa between 1982 and 1992. Jacquin calls the core group that founded and led FOSATU "the independent trade-union Left". He shows that it was one of the most noteworthy political/tradeunion tendencies of the period beginning in the mid-1970s and ending at the beginning of the 1990s, the period covered by this study. It emerged and developed in Alan Thornett's firsthand account of trade union struggles in the car industry from the 1970s, with serious lessons for trade union activists today. Pocupine Press. 448 pages, illustrated. £11.95 plus £2 post and packing, from Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU. dose relation with the structural changes that appeared in South Africa as carly as the mid-1970s. Through a study of this trade. union current, Jacquin simultaneously follows the political, social and economic changes that ultimately brought an end to the apartheid system as it had existed until the early 1990s. Indeed, the current partially changed its initial project and then went on to play a role in negotiating the reform of South African society.
Unions and politics In describing this evolution, Jacquin raises two questions: the first concerning trade-union practice in a society and a world undergoing dramatic changes; the second concerning the link between trade unionism and politics in the very specific context of apartheid's social structure and later of post-apartheid South Africa.
The changes in South African society were of a contradictory nature, Jacquin contends. The main issue raised for the Left was how to combine "democratic" emancipation and social nocraton. waat tac speculie» political and ideological contribution could be of trade-union currents organised fundamentally at the level of single firms. In fact, a fusion between national liberation and social liberation does not only require a certain level of cconomic and social development, he shows. Nor does it simply depend on the objective existence of a social force in whose interests such a double liberation would be. It necessitates as well a certain number of initiatives, challenges and political projects. It cannot happen without organised forces that prove able to push through the spontancous social dynamic. Jacquin describes the many obstacles that emerged to block this road. The world political environment in the mid-goos was no longer propitious for radicalising programmes. Neo-liberalism was all the rage; strategic doubts infiltrated the ranks of the most radical. Above all, souta airica s complex social formation meant that any organised socialist project would necessarily confront other currents identifying with nations, liberation alone and pure democratic reconstruction.
There was no open motorway to the post-capitalist promised --Socialists against racism and fascism Essays by 12 authors including Ernest Mandel 130 pages £5.00 including postage from Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU L-land; a new society was not going to be "objectively" or spontaneously ushered in by the social reality of proletarian development. The way to a new society had to be charted, promoted and built, not just preached. But all the forces, trade-union or political, that made the attempt ultimately failed, for a multitude of reasons that this study tries to show. This failure does not make the current ANC government's choice for neo-liberal management of South African society any more "realistic": this choice is very remote from any idea of "national democratic revolution" nut forward as an alternative ta socialism in the debates of the 1980s. This pamphlet should contribute to lively debates both in South Africa and internationally.
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