The statement on Saturday by Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), after a special meeting of its central executive committee, gives a very worrying signal about the direction in which South Africa is headed.
Whereas the direction from January 1990 in South Africa was strongly towards democracy, Vavi's statement - in tune with similar speeches at the conference of the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA) in Boksburg the previous weekend by President Jacob Zuma and the president of Cosatu, Sidumo Dlamini - signals a powerful reverse tide, towards a return of dictatorial government.
In his statement, Vavi made strong criticism of the increasing influence of a relatively new trade union among the miners in the platinum reef at Rustenburg in North West, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), which over previous months - ahead of the massacre of miners at Marikana on 16 August, and since then even more so - has wrested leadership in the Rustenburg area away from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The NUM is a concrete pillar of Cosatu and its ruling Alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).
The triumvirate of SACP, the Cosatu executive and the reigning Zuma faction of the ANC, assisted by the present and past executive of MKMVA, are now driving ahead in a blunt offensive using every means necessary to secure Zuma's re-election as ANC president at its elective conference at the end of December, and thus his re-election as State President in 2014.
Vavi has a perfect right to criticise the strategy and tactics of Amcu, a union which is a non-member of Cosatu, and thus outside the direct political control of the ruling Alliance. That is in the nature of trade union politics. It belongs to the normal push and shove of democracy.
What needs clear attention, though, is Vavi's description of Amcu and its political supporters as "the forces of counter-revolution".
He told reporters that Cosatu will hold a rally in Rustenburg next Saturday, stating: ""We call on all workers in the North West, and also Limpopo andGauteng to attend a rally and reclaim the Rustenburg area from the forces of counter revolution."
Language of this kind is historically a recipe for violent suppression of constitutional politics and trade union organisation, and is hostile to the spirit and the letter of the 1993 Interim Constitution and the 1996 Constitution.
His words reinforce a serious problem with the language and concepts of the "National Democratic Revolution" (NDR), as employed by the SACP and the ANC. As argued in a paper published in the September special issue of the South African Historical Journal by Professor Irina Filatova, former professor of history at the University of Natal and an expert in the history of the Soviet Union and its influence in South Africa, the source of NDR theory is purely Soviet, based as this state was on an explicit totalitarian dictatorship - the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat", propounded by Karl Marx.
As Ms Filatova argues in her paper, headed "The lasting legacy: The Soviet theory of the 'National-Democratic Revolution' and South Africa", the ideological apparatus of the NDR is "still playing itself out on South African soil. The Soviet theoretical legacy is not going away." (p.537)
Whatever the place of words such as "democracy" in the concept of the NDR, it is the justification of dictatorship as practised in the Soviet Union and its subject states such as the former German Democratic Republic which informs the ideology of Vavi when he describes the NUM's trade union rivals in this way. Ruthless suppression of dissent by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is brought vividly to mind when he describes his opponents - which he named as "the Rustenburg Joint Strike Co-ordinating Committee and the Democratic Socialist Movement" - as "the forces of counter-revolution".
Agents of counter-revolution! That was exactly Stalin's method, when he labelled his real or perceived political opponents in the Moscow show trials as the agents of Adolf Hitler. This was the normal language in sending Old Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Radek and Stalin's one-time ally, Bukharin, to their fate
According to the South African Press Association (Sapa), "Vavi said the Democratic Socialist Movement had a right to exist."
But there is a radical confusion of concepts here: the Soviet theory of "counter revolution" totally denies the right to exist of its adversary, when it describes its political rivals as "counter-revolutionary." Like the Push-me-pull-you, Vavi is facing two ways at the same time.
It is interesting that Vavi in his statement to the press appears not to have made any reference to strongly argued accounts of deliberate killings of mineworkers at Marikana by NUM officials on 11 August (reported by Jared Sacks) and by armed police on 16 August, reported by Greg Marinovich (here and here).
If there were any logic to an argument that South Africa is now at an extremely dangerous moment in its political life, it was surely in this direction that Vavi should have pointed (but didn't): to a primary role in the killing of miners allegedly carried out by affiliates and state servants of the ruling political elite.
Like Zuma the previous week referring to his critics in the ANC as "the enemy within" (and "enemy agents"), together with Cosatu president Sidumo Dlamini's call "to have MKMVA members using their guerrilla military skills to work with us on the ground", Vavi's language last Saturday is - as I argued on 16 October - "the language of the coup".
It is a bad omen. If Vavi - one of the more critical, independent-minded members of the Alliance - should have lent his voice in this way to a practice of government by force, fraud and corruption, he should remember the fate of Bukharin.
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