Renewing Workers' Education: a radical vision ed. by Linda Cooper and Sheri Hamilton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Renewing Workers' Education: a radical vision ed. by Linda Cooper and Sheri Hamilton Linda Chisholm (bio) Linda Cooper and Sheri Hamilton (eds) (2020) Renewing Workers' Education: a radical vision. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Since 1994 the landscape of both unionism and attendant forms of worker education in South Africa have changed dramatically. These are linked on the one hand to the changing world of work and on the other to the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (COSATU) alliance with the state and the formalisation and institutionalisation of worker education through accredited skills training. Despite the human capital rhetoric that envelops it, the system of which this is a part has not only been singularly unsuccessful in building institutions that are capable of nurturing new skills, it has also de-politicised and weakened earlier forms of worker education. Renewing Workers' Education: a radical vision aims to reinvigorate a flagging labour movement and its declining educational initiatives by providing new insights into the recent shifts in both. It brings together a range of authors with deep experience in labour and education who provide penetrating and rich interpretations of the current conjuncture and what is to be done. In so doing it participates in a broader trend to rethink the productive possibilities of Marxism today within the labour movement. Following an introduction describing the malaise confronting worker education in the contemporary union movement, there are four sections respectively focusing on the history of worker education, institutionalised worker education, new trends in the 'local and global periphery', and conceptual tools for re-thinking worker education. In the first section, the historical chapters by Dinga Sikwebu, who has been active for 40 years in union work and education, Kessie Moodley (one-time director of the Workers' College in Durban) and Namibian worker educationist Herbert Jauch as well as UCT's Jonathan Grossman give a [End Page 111] sense of the vision of worker education that informed historical expressions of it. All three draw attention to the importance of informal learning and education that occurred as part of worker organisation, mobilisation and strike as distinct from more formal processes. None glosses over or romanticises this history. Sikwebu for example discusses some of the limitations of experiential learning when 'political education (becomes) "ideological cattle-dipping"', while Moodley and Jauch emphasise the fact that both formal and any other form of worker education, even in the 1970s and 1980s, was always secondary to the main task of representing workers in wage negotiations and focused predominantly on shop stewards, officials and office-bearers. They describe the links between the Durban-based workers' college and similar Namibian initiatives and show how in both contexts 'workers' education was increasingly seen by workers themselves … as a tool for personal career advancement, either in the union or at the workplace' (24). Inasmuch as they also deal with the theme of university-involvement in worker education, a major agent in worker education since 1994, Grossman's chapter illustrates his own engagement as a university-based sociologist in solidarity educational work with dismissed workers. One of the highlights of the book is a chapter by Mphutlane Wa Bofelo opening the second section on whether institutionalising workers' education is democratising or domesticating. Like a later chapter by Mandy Moussouris and Lucien van der Walt he does not see accredited skills training and radical workers' education as mutually-exclusive. Wa Bofelo provides a strong argument that in fact 'individual ambitions of upward social mobility' as represented in the attraction to the skills development discourse are not mutually exclusive from 'collective aspirations and the agenda of social transformation' (54). Indeed, he shows that working with the system is not new in South Africa and that struggles for registration and recognition within the framework of existing legislation characterised the glory-days of the 1980s and sat side-by-side with fierce independence for control over and content of worker education. Similarly, unions both developed their own independent spaces and worked with academics–these were not mutually-exclusive strategies. The challenge then as now is how, within the spaces that exist, to expand the scope of workers' education so that it embraces 'a diversity of organisational and...