What has happened to the decade of the working class?

FOR the past two decades, I was part of the collective that maintained that, in economic terms, the first decade of our democracy disproportionately benefited white business relative to the working class.

We then agreed that we must campaign to ensure that the second decade belonged to the working class in economic terms. The question we must now ask is: What happened to the decade of the working class?

It is not difficult to conclude that it has not materialised. Inequality has increased, levels of poverty remain high despite the increase in social grants, and more people than before live on less than R524 a month. Unemployment remains higher than before. In short, in economic terms, the working class remains in the same, if not a worse, position. As we mark the end of the second decade, we can confidently say again that it is capital, not the primary motive forces of the revolution, that has more reasons to celebrate democracy.

I was among those who led the charge that as long as the democratic movement embraced policies that protected the interests of white business, the deep-seated structural crisis of South African society would never be resolved.

At one point, people would celebrate an increase in the quantity of low-quality housing. At another, they would decry the worsening levels of inequality. Piecemeal solutions to a systematic crisis rooted in colonial dispossession and capitalist exploitation will not work.

Towards the end of the decade that we declared a decade of the working class, ANC president Jacob Zuma acknowledged: "Having scored many achievements during the first 18 years, there is also widespread consensus that we have been unable to reach the goal of a truly prosperous, inclusive, non-racial and nonsexist society. The triple challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment persists, affecting Africans, women and the youth in particular.

"We are therefore calling for a dramatic shift, or giant leap, to economic and social transformation so that we can be able to deal decisively with the triple challenge ... the economic power relations of the apartheid era have in the main remained intact."

When the ANC president uttered these revolutionary words, I could not hide my excitement that, finally, the era of neoliberal denialism was over and that the country now was turning a new page.

Inspired by the work we had done to look at the political and economic developments not only in South America, but elsewhere, the 11th national congress of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) took radical decisions to give practical meaning to the call that we should now embrace radical economic transformation.

At that congress, workers committed to engineer their own "Lula moment" and adopted a series of practical measures to do so. They included "strategic nationalisation and state ownership, and the use of a variety of macroeconomic and other state levers to regulate and channel investment, production, consumption and trade to deliberately drive industrialisation, sustainable development, decent employment creation and regional development".

The congress further insisted that the radical economic shift required that "institutionally, the Treasury, which constitutes the biggest obstacle to the government's economic programme, needed to be urgently realigned; a new mandate needed to be given to the Reserve Bank, which must be nationalised; and the National Planning Commission should be given a new mandate to realign the national plan in line with the proposed radical economic shift". Aspects of the New Growth Path also needed to be realigned in line with the proposed new macroeconomic framework. All state-owned enterprises and state development finance institutions needed to be given a new mandate.

Regarding the labour market, the congress called for an end to the apartheid wage structure and the crafting of a new national wage policy. These proposals included a national minimum wage, mandatory centralised collective bargaining and ensuring social protection for the unemployed.

Importantly, the "congress warns the government not to even think about implementing e-tolls while negotiations are continuing, and we will continue to do everything in our power to reverse this regressive tax on commuters".

Cosatu has not been able to implement its resolutions. The government has sensed its weaknesses and wasted no time in scoring against workers. E-tolls have been implemented and so has the youth wage subsidy. Labour brokers have not been banned, the remaining concerns regarding the Protection of State Information Bill have not been addressed, and the National Development Plan (NDP) has been rammed down the throats of workers. No work has been done to rally civil society and our people behind the call for a radical economic shift.

My excitement about a radical phase of economic transformation has been severely deflated, as well as the hope for a decent work agenda. The main thrust is that, whatever is to be done towards 2030, it must be done within the framework of the NDP. However, the framework of the NDP is neoliberalism.

It does not call for any change in macroeconomic policy. It says nothing about the property question and the need to change the mandate of the Treasury and Reserve Bank. It fails to put forward measures to regulate and control the financial sector. Contrary to what the liberals at the South African Institute of Race Relations say, it calls for a state that rests in the clutches of private-public partnerships to build infrastructure to take raw minerals out of the country.

The most enthusiastic supporters of the NDP remain the Democratic Alliance and big business associations, as well as the billionaires in and outside the democratic movement. It is a fallacy to think these social forces have now become revolutionaries who seek to build an egalitarian society based on the redistribution of wealth from themselves to the marginalised and destitute working class.

Neoliberal denialism is not dead. For example, we are told that employment is bigger than ever before. This is an attempt to pull wool over the eyes of the working class. Yes, employment numbers are at their highest, but the context is that, in 1994, we had a population of 40 million. Today, it is 53 million. Overall, the unemployment rate in 1995 was 31%, but today it is 36%.

There is hardly a debate about youth unemployment, which even the tycoons assembling this week in Davos admitted was now the second-highest in the world.

The working class must refuse to place its future in the clutches of neoliberals. We have failed to secure the second decade for the working class because of the dominance of neoliberalism in the ranks of the democratic movement. There is no reason to think the same medicine will deliver different results.

Lenin warned against a phenomenon whereby principles take second place to political expediency when he said: "Organisation not based on principle is meaningless and, in practice, converts the workers into a miserable appendage of the bourgeoisie in power."

Vavi, who has been suspended as Cosatu's general secretary, writes in his personal capacity