South Africa's Troubled Alliance and the Road Ahead
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- Published on Friday, 20 March 2015 00:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1092 .... March 20, 2015
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South Africa's Troubled Alliance and the Road Ahead
An Interview with Karl Cloete
The expulsion of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) from COSATU in November 2014 was a watershed moment in the post-apartheid labour movement. The expulsion is a product of, and has deepened further, the crisis in the Alliance between the African National Congress (ANC), Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), as well as the internal crises of each of the three component parts of the Alliance.
In addition to fighting inside COSATU for a radical shift amongst South African trade unions, NUMSA also played a major role in the establishment of a new United Front which held its first... People's Assembly in December 2014 under the slogan Kwanele Kwanele! Enough is Enough! A formal launch will take place in April 2015.
These events come a year after NUMSA's historic Special National Congress which called on COSATU to break from the Alliance; concluded that the possibility of the SACP returning to working-class struggle was ‘very remote’; resolved to take the lead in setting up a new United Front to bring together unions, social movements and community campaigns and also to explore the establishment of a new Movement for Socialism.
Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon interviewed Karl Cloete (in Johannesburg on 19 December 2014), the union's Deputy General Secretary, about a tumultuous year and the road ahead in 2015.
