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Unionists like Vavi and Ntshalintshali are in danger of becoming rusted relics of their own ideological past

Prince Mashele
By Prince Mashele
29 Aug 2022
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The era of Fordist mass production, which drew millions of people to work in industrial assembly lines, is over. The proletariat that union movements like Cosatu and Saftu were originally meant to organise is a dwindling phenomenon across the world.

Last Wednesday, Cosatu and its stepbrother Saftu put their differences aside and decided jointly to stage what they called a “national shutdown”.

When the two union federations finally did it, the whole thing turned out to be a toy gun. Only Zwelinzima Vavi and Bheki Ntshalintshali were seen shouting in front of a small rented crowd. The national shutdown they had imagined took place only in their heads.

As Vavi and Ntshalintshali were huffing and puffing, South Africans remembered all the years the two men spent defending the mess caused by the ANC. These are the same protagonists who once declared their preparedness to die for Jacob Zuma, the convicted criminal who used the ANC to capture and collapse our state.

There was a deafening ring of irony when Ntshalintshali announced that South Africa is “on the verge of a failing state”. We all know that, come 2024, the same Ntshalintshali will wear an ANC T-shirt, as he has done in the past, to convince us to vote for the same party that has brought our country to this point.

When Cosatu was still a proper trade union federation in the 1980s, it mobilised its members and society to boycott and bring down the National Party’s apartheid government. The leadership of the union at the time was not confused; they understood clearly that the then government was responsible for the politico-economic situation in the country.

All sane people know that life is difficult in South Africa today largely due to bad governance, corruption and the incompetence of the ANC. Why are Ntshalintshali and Vavi not mobilising society to remove the ANC, in the same way that their predecessors mobilised South Africans to remove the National Party?  

Both Cosatu and Saftu knew that petrol, food and electricity prices would not come down a day after their sham shutdown. The point was not to bring prices down; it was to make us forget that it is the ANC that has been worsening our problems.

Fortunately, South Africans are not idiots. They know how we got here. And they understand that a vote is more powerful than Vavi and Ntshalintshali’s illusory shutdown. In 2024, the people shall speak.

Relics


Regarding our country’s socioeconomic problems, Cosatu and Saftu offer no solutions. The leadership of these federations are incorrigible relics of old and discredited ideas. The only thing they know is to complain about the bogeyman of “neoliberalism” and to cultivate blind faith in Karl Marx’s socialist utopia.

Marxism is like drugs. It is addictive and renders those who swallow it incapable of grasping reality. It is truly shocking that, in 2022, there are people in South Africa who are still enthused by socialist promises.

Look around the world and show me one country where socialism has lifted millions of people from poverty and created wealth. China took the path of economic progress in the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping ditched socialist thinking and travelled to borrow lessons from countries that were pursuing market-based economies – such as Singapore, Japan, France and the US. For the longest time, China has been the largest sender of students to study at US universities. Would Vavi or Ntshalintshali send their children to study in Cuba or Venezuela?



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That socialism has failed is a well-known historical fact. Boris Yeltsin even lamented that Russia and her people were “unlucky” that “it was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us… instead of some country in Africa”.

Yeltsin’s lament was made in 1991, two years after Joe Slovo tried to rescue socialism by ascribing its collapse to what he called “distortions at the top”.

Slovo was a sad example of the blinding power of ideology. Armed with a sharp intellect, he still could not see the obvious defects of Marxism. 

Marx’s blind obsession


The idea that in a capitalist system of production workers are victims of exploitation by those who own the means of production was one of Marx’s serious blind spots. Compare the conditions of workers in the Soviet Union with those in the US during the Cold War, and ask: which system exploited workers? Under which system did workers make socioeconomic progress? Even in today’s world, there is no socialist example of progress.

Blinded by his obsession with “exploitation”, Marx manufactured his “negation of the negation” theory, which led to the now-discredited claim that the most advanced capitalist society would be the first to be negated by a socialist revolution.

If Marx’s ideological claim was indeed a scientific law of history, as he purported it to be, the US (or the UK even earlier) would have been the first society to experience a socialist revolution. In the end, the prediction proved the hollowness of historicism.

What Marx did not understand is that a worker in a capitalist system does not dream of becoming a revolutionary; they want to graduate into the middle class and, if possible, to become rich.

That has been the dream and indeed the progression of workers in all market-based societies around the world. In South Africa, the best examples of graduation from the conditions of a lowly worker into the cushy circles of the pampered class are Vavi and Ntshalintshali themselves.

After a long day of yelling at a sham national shutdown, the so-called revolutionaries jumped into German luxury cars to go and rest at homes located where rich people live. They don’t live among workers. Indeed, Marx did not imagine Vavi and Ntshalintshali graduating from the proletariat into the bourgeoisie.

The biggest problem with the socialist ideology is that it is too simplistic to account for the dynamism of economic change. Its simple logic condemns employers in a capitalist system as exploiters of workers. In the age of artificial intelligence, where machines take over work from flesh-and-blood workers, who exploits who?

If Vavi and Ntshalintshali are true socialists – that is, if they are genuine champions against exploitation – they must pop a bottle of champagne each time they hear that a factory, mine or farm somewhere in South Africa has replaced workers with machines. For there would be no human exploitation in such a factory.

Beyond ossified ideologies


The era of Fordist mass production, which drew millions of people to work in industrial assembly lines, is over. The working class (the proletariat) that union movements like Cosatu and Saftu were originally meant to organise is a dwindling phenomenon across the world.  

In the emerging future, where robotics and 3D printing seem set to replace workers, millions of unemployed people will miss the exploitation of the old capitalist factory. Unions will be replaced by philanthropic organisations that provide material and spiritual support to a growing mass of unexploited people. Marxists will not know how to make sense of such a new world.

The ideational framework and vocabulary of the rusted relics of the ideological past, such as Vavi and Ntshalintshali, are too narrow to enable the transcendence of the rigidity and formulaic method of the old world. Our new world, and indeed that of the future, can only be navigated by a nimble imagination that sees beyond the conditioning of old and ossified ideologies.

Solutions to our socioeconomic problems will not come from anachronistic dogmatists who use old tactics (such as national shutdowns) to maintain their expired relevance. We need new thinkers who can keep up with the speed of today’s knowledge economy, leaders who can combine imaginative power and moral anchorage to fashion dynamic institutional arrangements that can protect and prevent the masses of the people from the real risk of being dumped in the dustbin of economic irrelevance.

When everything is said and done, the people of South Africa will not forget that most of their economic and political problems were created by the ANC, assisted by Cosatu under the leadership and active participation of Zwelinzima Vavi and his long-time comrade, Bheki Ntshalintshali. DM

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