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Inside Labour: The bane of spin

WHEN the world seems to be spinning out of control, beware the spin doctors. They serve those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and who to try to maintain the exalted positions of their paymasters.

In media, “spin” is the practice of promoting the cause of an individual or entity, be it a political party, idea, business or whatever, with disregard for facts or reality. This can be done by distorting or ignoring facts that do not favour the cause being supported, or by deflecting attention from any uncomfortable arguments by attacking individuals or groups supporting an opposing view.

It is the opposite of the role of the historian or journalist. Their function is to seek out the nuances in order to try to get as close as possible to that elusive concept, truth.

I raise this now because a current fiction being promoted in the labour movement is that the reasons for the bitter breach between Numsa and dismissed Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi on the one side and the Cosatu executive on the other, is some new aberration.

As I have clearly spelled out, both in this column and in my Labour Wraps, it is not.

READ: Labour Wrap: A 30-year labour war

In fact, there is a long history of animosity between much of the emerging modern trade union movement in South Africa and the exiled ANC and its allies, especially the self-exiled and Communist Party (SACP) controlled SA Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu).

But this claim, says the regime’s retiring - but master - spin doctor Mac Maharaj, amounts to me “bending history” by claiming that the formation of Cosatu faced “initial opposition from the ANC and SACP”. Of course it did.

To claim otherwise is a falsification. And there exists a wealth of documentary evidence about what Kally Forrest in her book, Metal That Will Not Bend, refers to as the “old ANC/Sactu antagonisms to independent union activism”.  

Resistance by the ANC and SACP to the emergence of modern unions and a new federation in South Africa actually dates back more than 30 years. Sactu, an SACP creation, went voluntarily into exile wih the ANC and SACP while still claiming to be "the true representatives of the workers of SA".

But faced in 1985 with the reality of a new Cosatu federation, the ANC and SACP quickly changed their tune. However, this does not alter the history.  

Politics is a messy business

But such matters are never simple and clear-cut. As I have already noted, “there are neither heroes nor villains, angels nor devils” and I pointed out that “it is quite a messy business, as all politics is” because the sole unifying factor for the various parties in the 1980s was opposition to apartheid.

To claim otherwise is, I think, intellectually unhealthy. It is also fundamentally dangerous in that it aims to stifle critical thought and expression, ignoring the nuances in favour of a simplistic “my leader/party/country right or wrong”.

In March 1986 a joint alliance/Cosatu communique noted that “lasting solutions can only emerge from the national liberation movement, headed by the ANC, and the entire democratic forces of our country, of which Cosatu is an important and integral part”. This made Sactu irrelevant and, in the following year in Lusaka, it was formally proposed that Sactu be dissolved. That it took another three years for this to be put into effect is an area for discussion.

Cosatu and its unions remained independent, although allies of the ANC. This was made clear at the 1987 congress of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA, where that union agreed to support the ANC’s Freedom Charter, but only as “a set of minimum political demands” that could be subject to amendment.

This history is important. If we do not understand it, we cannot hope to have a clear idea of the present — or where we should proceed in future. These are all issues for debate and discussion, not for spin.

Mac Maharaj has suggested that I should “stand corrected” about my statements. Perhaps, on the eve of his retirement, it is not too much to hope that he could consider doing so.

* Terry Bell is a political, economic and labour analyst. Views expressed are his own. Follow him on twitter @telbelsa.

Add your voice to the big labour debate or simply ask Terry a labour question.

- Follow him on twitter @telbelsa

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