NALSU NEWS: Looking back on module one in our short course programme for unions, workers.
Sunday 31 August 2025 saw workers from the engineering, metals, and manufacturing sectors convene in Makhanda, the Eastern Cape. They came for the first in a new cycle of university-based short courses offered by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), Rhodes University. The first (of four) courses was on "Political Economy and Economic Policy," with five lively days of learning, grappling with the challenges of today, structured academic skills development, and engaged, constructive, debates. It is part of NALSU's short course programme "Policy, Theory and Research for Labour Movements”, hosted by Rhodes University, in partnership with the merSETA.
"Political Economy and Economic Policy": daunting words but covering vital issues with which the working-class movements and people are grappling daily. With unemployment affecting one in three, factories closing, small towns dying and the rust-belt growing, tariffs and global turmoil incoming, and infrastructure falling apart, what can be done?
Before talking about solutions, it’s essential to go beneath the symptoms, and see what's happening.
The course unpacked states, capitalism, and class formation. It examined the development and contradictions of the modern South African economy. Import-substitution-industrialisation helped build a powerful manufacturing sector, and a huge industrial proletariat. South Africa is not a poor raw materials exporter, as some claim, but rather, became a Newly Industrialised Country (NIC) decades ago. But its large manufacturing sector was also weak and uncompetitive: it was both helped and hindered by apartheid repression, and it was deeply shaped by the fractured and uneven character of the South African state, and the monopolistic structure that developed in South African capitalism.
The course examined how, from the late 1970s, there was a growing move towards what came to be called neo-liberal measures, and away from Afrikaner economic nationalism. This meant opening markets, rolling back protections, and restructuring state-owned enterprises. These measures were adopted, unevenly and fitfully, in the last years of National Party (NP) rule, and continued, also unevenly and fitfully, under the new democratic government led by the African National Congress (ANC). The course unpacked these policies and their rationale, as well as the economic liberalism and neo-classical economics that underpin them.
Was an alternative possible? Organised labour certainly thought so, and the non-racial nationalist ANC was elected in 1994 on the basis of the union-initiated Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). This aimed to democratise workplaces and policy, and empower communities in development, projecting massive upgrades to townships, former homeland areas, and education. Inspired in part, by Keynesianism and social democracy, the RDP was gutted, and then replaced by something new: the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy.
Although much of GEAR and the policies that it spawned were never fully implemented, it was clear that neo-liberalism was back, wracking the ANC-led Alliance and the society with tensions that opened the door to the rise of Jacob Zuma and state capture. Just as import-substitution-industrialisation was shaped by the dynamics and politics of the old South Africa, GEAR-type policies were deeply shaped by those of the new South Africa and linked closely to BEE measures and tendering.
Still, was the RDP ever feasible? Did the emerging world order of the 1990s permit such a project? Was GEAR inevitable in the era of the old Washington Consensus? And are we coming to the end of the neo-liberal era, as even Washington under Trump goes back to tariffs and economic nationalism, as the BRICS herald a multi-polar but still highly unequal world, and as societies fracture and fear? And what does all of this mean for union strategy? For saving jobs and creating more? For building workers' power?
The course was energised by songs that lifted the spirit, and by the solidarity, mutual respect and honest engagements views shown by the workers, who hailed from different unions: MEWUSA, NUM, NUMSA and UASA, representing the four key union federations, COSATU, FEDUSA, NACTU and SAFTU.
The energy, commitment, and contributions from people across the labour movement made the week of seminars unforgettable. And it was wonderful to reunite on the weekend of 18-19 October for revisions, clarification ... and the sit-down exam.
Thank you one and all for coming. A heartfelt thank you to the NALSU team — Valance Wessels, Singisa Mdungwana, Lucien van der Walt, David Fryer, Louise Hagemeier, Leroy Maisiri — for enabling these conversations. And special thanks to the Graham Hotel for their warm hospitality throughout.
Together, we continue building knowledge, solidarity, and collective strength.
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ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned, and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour, and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.