Irvin Gymnastics: The Devious Art of Political Contortionism

Jeremy Cronin, 2nd deputy secretary general of the South African Communist Party (SACP)., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Red Alert

Irvin Gymnastics - the devious art of political contortionism

By Cde Jeremy Cronin

The NUMSA leadership clique under Irvin Jim is increasingly ratcheting up its reckless game of brinkmanship, organisational dissidence and electoral boycotting. Despite the rhetoric, the project plays directly into the hands of the most reactionary, anti-worker forces in our society. No wonder an array of neo-liberal commentators are hailing it as the future political "game-changer", just as they once hailed Cope and, more recently if very briefly, Agang.

Because of its location within the working class movement, however, the capacity of the Jim project to cause damage should not be underestimated. It is a project brimming with destructive sectarian intent, and therefore devoid of any sustainable capacity to unify and advance working class power and struggle. Like COPE, it will end in tears, wrecked on its own inner competing ambitions. It is both narrowly sectarian AND an eclectic potjiekos brew of conflicting ideologies. It is simultaneously rigidly dogmatic AND erratically opportunistic. It is a project of political contortionism, riddled with contradictions:

It wants to transform a trade union, NUMSA, simultaneously into a broad general workers' union AND a tightly-knit, "Marxist-Leninist" "red union" that uses union resources to act as a pseudo-vanguard party. The Jim project likes to decorate its statements with quotes from Lenin, but nowhere does it quote what Lenin actually had to say about trade unions. The Jim clique chooses not to cite Lenin critiquing trade unionists seeking to substitute themselves for a political party. Nor do they mention how Lenin castigated with biting sarcasm the "imprudent Left Communists" who "stand by, crying out 'the masses, the masses!'…and invent a brand-new, immaculate…'Workers' Union', which is guiltless of bourgeois-democratic prejudices…a union which [at the same time] they claim will be (!) a broad organisation." (The exclamation mark is Lenin's.)

Some commentators (Carol Paton writing in the Business Day, and citing Alec Erwin, for instance) characterise the Jim project as a familiar return to the "workerism" of the 1980s. It is true that there are strong workerist features in the Jim project, particularly in the syndicalist tendency noted above - manipulating a union organisation as a vehicle for party (or personal) political ambitions. However, we should remember that there were always two different "workerist" tendencies in the 1980s, especially within NUMSA itself. The one was stridently anti-capitalist, advancing a platform of a war of class against class. The other was more firmly rooted in centrist, social democratic corporatist traditions.

So which of these characterises the Jim project when it dons workerist clothing? The answer is sometimes the one, sometimes the other, and neither consistently! We are all familiar with Jim's anti-capitalist rhetoric - the capitalist media loves to act as a megaphone for his radical posturing. But there is also another Jim, a corporatist Jim, whom we occasionally glimpse in the media. This is the Jim, for instance, who complained to a media briefing in September last year that the "employers were no longer treating the union as an 'insider' but rather an adversary." He told the Business Day that "this called into question the hard-fought right of collective bargaining."(Business Day, 30 September 2013)

Using an anti-ANC-SACP ticket, the Jim project wants to appeal, amongst other things, to NUMSA's own long-standing and relatively principled ultra-left minority tendency with roots in Trotskyism. But (borrowing from a trick learnt from the DA's "adopt a Madiba" tactic), the Jim clique also brands itself as the "true" upholders of the SACP's revolutionary legacy, in contrast to the supposed positions of the present-day SACP leadership. The clique quotes favourably from the SACP's 1989 "Path to Power" programme, the Party's characterisation of minority rule in SA as "colonialism of a special type", necessitating a national democratic struggle in alliance with the ANC, etc. But these are precisely the strategic perspectives on which the relatively principled ultra-left within NUMSA has always opposed the ANC-SACP alliance! (Without trusting Jim, they - the Trotskyist ultra-left in NUMSA - are happy to go along for the ride for the moment, seeing in Jim a useful battering ram to achieve their long dreamed of Alliance break-up).

As long as NUMSA understood itself to be a progressive trade union whose prime focus was to recruit and school the maximum number of workers in the metal and related sectors, regardless of the individual workers' political affiliations, the contest of different left tendencies within the union was not a problem (in fact, it was often a strength within NUMSA). But the Jim clique's attempt to transform NUMSA into a "vanguard" formation will lead (and already is leading) to the fragmentation rather than unity not just of COSATU, but NUMSA itself.

For instance, the clique constantly evokes the important NUMSA/COSATU traditions of shop-floor democracy, but quickly forgets these when NUMSA workers in Rosslyn invite the SACP to address them in a lunch-time meeting in February this year. The workers, many of whom are SACP members, were forbidden to proceed with the meeting. They were instructed top-down that NUMSA "no longer has any relationship with the SACP".

This bureaucratic enforcement of a sectarian line is paraded by the Jim clique as an example of "democratic centralism", of "revolutionary discipline" - but the very same clique is happy to undermine collective discipline and decision-making when it suits them. This is glaringly obvious in the case of the clique's decision that NUMSA should organise along so-called "value chains", rather than within an industrial sector. There may (or may not) be merit in this approach.

However, for the moment, it stands in blatant contradiction with the most important founding principle of COSATU - "one industry, one union". When confronted with this act of defiance by COSATU and asked to explain why their membership of the federation should not be suspended, the Jim clique responded that the "value chain" approach was "merely a proposal for further discussion in the federation". In practice, however, the clique has simply gone ahead, unilaterally implementing this and other sectarian "points for discussion".

The Jim project has cobbled together the leaderships of eight other unions in a factional bloc within COSATU on a "save Vavi" cult of the personality ticket. NUMSA has been paying the federation affiliation fees of some of these unions, while at the same time poaching (with "vanguard" arrogance) members of these unions from under the noses of these very same (hired) friends. Notice that, besides money, the only thing that holds this bloc together is a "save Vavi" sentiment - which, by the way, does cde Vavi no favours by linking him into a divisive, sectarian agenda. The vast majority of the worker memberships of these unions (and indeed of NUMSA itself) while they may feel sympathy for cde Vavi, do not support Jim's anti-ANC, anti-SACP views. Moreover, they are deeply concerned about Jim's adventurist brinkmanship, fearing rightly that if not checked it will lead to the implosion of COSATU with a ripple effect on every single union.

The Jim project preaches anti-corruption, while seeking by every trick in the book to prevent cde Zwelinzima Vavi from having to answer to serious charges within the federation. It correctly castigates corruption that is inherent in a capitalist dominated society, while at the same time secretly flirting with the EFF, led by the most corrupt representatives of tenderpreneuring and capitalist compradorism. Notice also how Jim and his clique have failed to clarify the detailed concerns raised by the SACP in regard to NUMSA's investment companies. When we suggested that it might reassure NUMSA members if Jim and his deputy general secretary (and business partner) Karl Cloete undertook life-style audits, we were told that they would do so if SACP general secretary, cde Blade Nzimande did likewise. They had forgotten that cde Nzimande has precisely undertaken such an audit! Since then we have heard absolutely nothing except deafening silence on this score from the Jim clique.

The Jim clique portrays the current ANC-led state as nothing but the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", yet the same clique doesn't hesitate to take its own federation COSATU to court, placing decisions on internal COSATU organisational procedures in the hands of the (arguably) more conservative wing of this supposed "bourgeois dictatorship" - the judiciary.

The clique tells us that for 20-years the ANC-led government has done "nothing for the workers and the poor", and yet NUMSA is the industrial union that has benefited most from government programmes. Over the past five years, in the context of the global capitalist crisis and weaknesses in the auto export market, the ANC-led government has invested R22bn in 183 auto sector projects, preserving 46,000 jobs and adding 9,850 more jobs. Government (with the support of NUMSA) is also using the leverage of public procurement to re-industrialise and expand jobs, including in the metal sector. For instance, at least 80% of bus bodies, 65% of rail rolling stock, 100% of power pylons, 90% of telecom cables procured by the state and SOEs must be locally manufactured. Already these procurement requirements are resulting in a switch from imports to local manufacturing and local jobs.

The Jim clique was among the first of many to jump opportunistically onto the band-wagon of the terrible Marikana tragedy - but they did so with entirely ignoble sectarian intentions. In the name of the NUMSA CC they condemned the "savage, cowardly actions and excessive force used by the police, which invariably ["inevitably"?] led to the deaths of 44 workers…" As the proceedings at the Farlam commission underline, the police, and particularly their command structures, have a great deal to answer for, and not just in regard to Marikana. But the NUMSA statement on the Marikana death-toll deliberately obscured the fact that the first ten of the 44 deaths at Marikana in the tragic week of mid-August 2012 were not at the hands of the police, but included two policemen, two security guards protecting the National Union of Mineworkers' offices, and six NUM members - all killed by anti-NUM vigilantes seeking to violently displace NUMSA's fellow COSATU affiliate from the platinum mines around Rustenburg. In the months and years before and in the year and a half since, there have been many more deaths of NUM members at the hands of these vigilante forces. We have yet to hear a single word of working class sympathy or concern from the Jim clique.

The same statement in the name of the NUMSA CC did another classical piece of Jim gymnastics when it told us, on the one hand that the Marikana tragedy was proof that the police were simply an instrument of bourgeois rule and "will do anything to defend the property rights and profits of this class, including slaughtering the working class". And then, a few sentences later, pleaded that these "organs of class rule, particularly the police, should not be used recklessly and violently to intervene in industrial disputes involving workers and bosses." Leaving aside the presumption that what was at play in Marikana was a simple "industrial dispute between workers and bosses", what does this sentimental pleading mean - that the organs of supposed "bourgeois class dictatorship" shouldn't be unduly reckless or violent as they go about their inevitable slaughtering work?

The confusion thickens when, later in the same statement, economic policy matters are discussed. The statement calls for "strengthening of the state sector in mining in particular…" But we have just been told that the post-1994 state and government's "strategic task and real reason for existence is the defence" of the capitalist "Minerals/Energy/Finance Complex"! If there is any logical consistency in all of this, then the Jim clique must be calling for the mines to be taken over by a state that operates in the interests of mining capitalists!

And finally, on a related note, observe how the Jim clique constantly calls for the nationalisation of the mines, the banks, SASOL, and of "white monopoly capital" in general - but no mention is ever made of nationalising a highly oligopolistic auto sector! But, then, that is the sector in which much of its membership is located.

There is only one word for all of these ideological contortions, this virtuoso display of political gymnastics - that word is: OPPORTUNISM.

[This is the first of a two part intervention on "Irvin Gymnastics". In the second instalment we will locate the historical origins of this sectarian agenda and locate it within the context of the changing trade union terrain in SA.]

Cde Jeremy Cronin is SACP 2nd Deputy General Secretary

- See more at: http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=4243#sthash.oTd9SxhV.dpuf