Ceruti argues the new UDF signifies a crack within the Alliance and for the necessity for the social movements to get involved in it to build mass struggle.
You are remarkably pessimistic about the power of our politics and the potential of these hairline cracks forming in the ANC monolith. If the left keeps on refusing to get involved and fight these fights, we’ll stay lily-white but all the people who are getting involved in this kind of thing because they want an alternative to neoliberalism/Mbeki/unemployment etc,will end up disappointed with nowhere else to go, more fodder for the Zumas and other unscrupulous populists of the world.
People get involved in a thing like this because they want justice, jobs etc and they believe that unity strengthens us. Maybe Cosatu leadership is out to ‘hegemonise’ the thing but that’s not entirely up to them, is it now? Maybe if you were a little less focussed on contesting the leadership of these things (which of course Cosatu is going to win for a while, being really very much larger than us and anything we’ve ever done, even if they’re really slow to ever mobilise that power) you could see the potential for starting to build something on the ground that allows the independent left to take the next step in building its influence among the rest of the world. Sure we pulled 20,000 to the WSSD, but that’s not our real size and we’ve never repeated the feat. We (the new social movements) matter, but we are going to disappear if we don’t wake up.
I don’t know how this new UDF thing is going to unfold but should we not at least check it out, not with a perspective to win positions in its bureaucracy but with a view to see what can be set moving on the ground and to take a lead in doing that.
Feel free to hang around waiting for the whole working class to simultaneously see the light, but then I’d recommend finding a job with a really good pension and also starting to build up a well stocked bomb shelter, because the longer capitalism survives the more the danger of barbarism. Me, I’d like to see us seize any chance we can to encourage the possibility of revolution.
Ceruti is an activist in the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Anti-War Coalition in Johannesburg.
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