COSATU and the Tripartite Alliance since 1994

Abstract

The hundreds of thousands of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) members, and millions more in the broader working class whose votes propelled the Alliance from liberation movement to governing coalition, voted for the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). COSATU placed itself, and the socialist aspirations of a large part of the organised working class in South Africa, within a corporatist strategic framework that relied on the political and economic institutionalisation of the RDP’s ‘radical’ textual possibilities. The COSATU leadership followed with another document, ‘An Alliance Programme for Socio-Economic Transformation’. COSATU began the post-1994 period full of confidence that its membership in the Alliance would provide the organised working class with the political and organisational means to influence, fundamentally, the character of the newly captured state and the socio-economic policies it would implement. The elite-led political corporatism of the Alliance will leave workers further divided and with consistently less effective leverage over socioeconomic change.