SACP's divisive role in the fracas within COSATU
As a party that purports to stand for the unity of workers, one expected that the South African Communist Party (SACP) will do its utmost to avert the implosion that is tearing the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) asunder. Alas, the party that claims to be the vanguard of the country's working and poor people has thrown its weight and support behind the majority faction within COSATU's central executive committee that expelled the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) from South Africa's biggest trade union centre.
Despite pious platitudes about "working class unity, including a respect for a diversity of views amongst the organised working class", at its meeting earlier this week the Communist Party's political bureau (politburo) concluded that COSATU's executive "was left with no option but to take the drastic and unpleasant step of expelling NUMSA".
The politburo described the jettisoning of more than 350 000 metalworkers from COSATU as "a case of self-expulsion" and that NUMSA's leadership courted dismissal. In a cynical call to "rebuild a united and militant COSATU", the Communist Party calls on NUMSA members "not to follow the divisive path of their leadership".
Interestingly, the tone of the Communist Party response is markedly different from that of the African National Congress (ANC) which describes the expulsion of NUMSA "as bad for COSATU itself, bad for the ANC, bad for the Alliance, bad for progressive forces as well as for society in general". Whether behind the ANC's sentiments on the boot given to metalworkers is nervousness about the organisation's future electoral fortunes, the ruling party's view is that the dismissal of NUMSA from COSATU "can never be celebrated and calls on the federation to conduct a detailed analysis of the impact of this decision".
Unfortunately, the party whose constitution enjoins it to "unite different strata of the working class" sings a different tune. In the Communist Party's statement there is not an iota of how the expulsion of NUMSA may cause a split in COSATU. There is also no whiff of how employers and the capitalist class will be the beneficiaries of any permanent fracture that emerges in the 29-year old union federation. For the Communist Party, the problem is the recalcitrant NUMSA leadership that has repeatedly been involved in "diving in the box" for public sympathy.