THE PAPER: With a mass black worker base, the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, 1979-1985) was the country's largest, most radical union and working class movement. This paper is a partial recovery of its radical, distinctive politics of "workerism." "Workerism" rejected nationalism, both ANC and BC, as a multi-class bourgeois ideology that subordinated the working class; it rejected Marxism-Leninism as undemocratic; and was denounced by both ANC and SACP. FOSATU sought a radical new South Africa, with a massive redistribution of power and wealth, extensive "workers' control," and an end to racial/ national oppression, driven by an autonomous, bottom-up, left, non-racial "working class movement." Why, then, did "workerism" get defeated by the (initially) relatively weak formations representing African nationalism and Marxism-Leninism? And what can be learned for autonomous, popular movements today?

THE AUTHOR: Sian Byrne previously worked at COSATU's National Labour & Economic Development Institute (NALEDI). Her current research is a comparative historical study of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in South Africa, and Solidarność in Poland in the early 1980s, using a global labour history perspective. Her research interests include anarchism and syndicalism, revolutionary workers' movements, global and transnational labour history, and the national question in the colonial and postcolonial world. Sian Byrne is the current recipient of the Ruth First Scholarship at Rhodes, named after the assassinated South African communist and anti-apartheid activist.

THE PAPER: The radical left and the working class have played a major role in popular struggles, including anti-colonial movements. The settler societies of Algeria and South Africa both had substantial, rooted Marxist communist traditions in the twentieth-century. These traditions shared common values, but their political trajectories varied profoundly. This paper considers how factors like differences in patterns of working-class formation, the socialist tradition of each country, the role of the Communist International, the level of repression, and links to the nationalist FLN and ANC, respectively, help explain divergent patterns. 

THE AUTHOR: Allison Drew’s books include South Africa's Radical Tradition: A Documentary History (2 volumes); Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left; We are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria; and Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873-1936. Her work focuses on the relationship between socialism and nationalism, and intellectuals and political movements, and individual rights and collective social justice. She has worked or studied at universities on three continents

www.ru.ac.za/nalsu