NALSU NEWS: Lucien van der Walt | "The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and the Battle to Organise across Southern Africa" (Workers World News)

Source: Workers World News (ILRIG), December 2024, no. 129, p. 3

The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), founded in 1919 in South Africa was active into the 1950s. It remains an extremely important part of the history of the broad working-class, and of rural people, in our region, rich in experiences and lessons. In this short article, recently published in ILRIG's Workers World News,NALSU's Professor Lucien van der Walt, tells its story and explains why it matters. 

TEXT below 

(PDF / mirror: The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and the Battle to Organise across Southern Africa" (Workers World News)

(ILRIG: https://ilrigsa.org.za/workers-world-news-issue-129/)

ONE BIG UNION
The ICU was founded in 1919 in Cape Town, and rapidly became a mass movement across southern Africa - not just South Africa.

These days, unions are based in specific countries and linked through regional and global union federations. The ICU was very different.  Its aim, spelled out at its 1920 congress, was to become One Big Union for workers "south of the Zambezi" river.

It grappled with an interlocked regional economy, dominated by South Africa and reliant on racist, labour-repressive systems. The regional working- class, black African, Coloured, Indian and white, included large migrant and immigrant layers. For example, almost one in two black workers on South Africa's goldmines were Mozambican; most black workers in Harare, Zimbabwe, were foreign-born.

The One Big Union was to unite all, everywhere. In 1920, the ICU was established in Namibia; in 1927, in Eswatini and Zimbabwe; in 1928, Lesotho; it even moved north of the Zambezi, established in Zambia, 1931.

Some sections were short-lived. Others proved more durable: Namibia and, especially, Zimbabwe. As late as 1955, the Reformed ICU was the leading protest movement in Harare, outliving the ICU in South Africa by a few years.

The ICU's regional nature requires that we must remember, not just ICU stalwarts in South Africa like Clements Kadalie and A.W.G. Champion, but also those active elsewhere, like William Adriaanse, Keable 'Mote, Joseph Kazembe, and Charles Mzingeli.

THE UNION AS POLITICAL MOVEMENT
Today, liberation history is written around political parties, like the ANC but the ICU was not the union wing of any party: it competed with parties. It was the main people's movement expressing current demands and future hopes.

At electrifying mass rallies, and in its press, ICU speakers demanded land redistribution, workers' control of production, women's rights, and the abolition of racism and colonialism -it sometimes spoke of a revolutionary general strike to remake society.

Unlike nationalist and left parties, the ICU did not set its sights on state power. It spoke of workers and the union directly taking over farms, factories, mines, and workshops.

The ICU never confined itself to collective bargaining, servicing members, or the workplace -if anything, it neglected such work. It organised in townships, including among women traders. No other union in the region has recruited as many farmworkers. It also drew in legions of small black farmers, including tenants on white-owned land.

With perhaps 150,000 members in South Africa, and active in seven countries, the ICU terrified governments. It helped forge an insurgent, popular, working-class counter-public and identity. And it overshadowed parties like the SA Communist Party (at 3,000 members in 1929), the ANC (under 4,000 before the 1940s), not to mention groups like Zimbabwe's Bantu Voters Association.

THE ICU'S POLITICS
The ICU was not politically monolithic: no union can be.

ICU politics were an especially unstable mixture, drawing on Marcus Garvey's Pan-Africanism, Christianity, liberalism, and revolutionary syndicalism. 

Some SACP writers have suggested that the ICU derived its anti-capitalism from Marxism - and that the ICU turned sharply rightwards after 1926, when Kadalie expelled communists. But the ICU must be understood on its own terms, as something unique. Its anti-capitalist, class politics came from many sources, not only Marxism.

The vision of a revolutionary general strike, and of workers and One Big Union - not the state - directly taking over means of production, came from revolutionary syndicalism. This anti- parliamentary, anti-party, anti-state outlook traces back, not to Karl Marx, but his anarchist rival, Mikhail Bakunin.

Nor is the ICU's evolution from 1926 accurately captured by the claim of a rightwards shift. The union drew closer to the social democrats, on the left. In 1926, too, its executive resolved on a general strike against new racist Bills. The 1927 congress  reaffirmed  this  thinking.  It  remained  so commonplace that many members believed that the ICU would seize white-owned farms on Christmas Day that year.

PROMISE AND WEAKNESS
The shifting mixture of ideas gave the ICU great flexibility. However, it was never translated into a coherent framework or concrete programme. The union's  positions  shifted;  its  messaging  fluctuated wildly. The ICU also operated in the context of sustained economic crisis, which accelerated with the 1929 Great Depression. Small black farmers were, meanwhile, under siege from growing restrictions on renting and buying land.

THE DIVIDED WORKERS
ICU  structures  were  flimsy,  limited  popular participation and control, and were abused by ambitious leaders like Kadalie and Champion and it struggled to forge workers' unity.

Contrary to nationalist myths, most whites were working-class: in fact, white workers founded the first unions, engaged in militant strikes; they were the core of the early SACP. But many white workers feared - correctly -that white employers would happily replace them with cheaper workers with fewer rights, from the other races

Local syndicalists and communists argued that the solution lay in "levelling up": equal rights and equal wages for all, driven by united unions. But most white-based unions opted, instead, for protection through job colour bars, locking other workers out  of  specific jobs  and  labour  markets.

When the ICU sought to join the mainly white SA Trade Union Congress, it was rejected and had more initial success in uniting black and Coloured workers, as well as black workers from different countries. Kadalie himself, his biographer Henry Dee shows, often argued for "levelling up" - but across the whole region.

But Coloured workers, central to the early ICU, had largely left by the late 1920s. Few Indians ever joined.

Many ICU speakers indulged in a narrow nationalism that reflected- and reinforced - this narrowing base and had elements of national-populism.

RACE, NATION, CLASS
While people, ideas, and movements flowed across borders, this usually in distinct ethnic, national, and racial channels. There were also strong anti-immigrant and "tribalistic" sentiments amongst black workers across the region, as well as riots.

Loud voices in the ICU in South Africa, for example, demanded restrictions on immigration and priority for local blacks. Champion, went even further, moving into Zulu nationalist (and anti-Indian) sentiments.

IMMIGRATION AND CHEAP LABOUR
Calls for closed labour markets and reserved jobs were, clearly, not unique to the white-based unions. We must be careful not to dismiss this labour-protectionist politics using psychological explanations, as merely "prejudice" and "xenophobia."

Workers in the region were locked in competition for jobs and resources, often against cheaper labour, often of a different ethnic, national and / or racial background. For example, foreign black workers were often preferred by employers. 

Unions, the ICU included, were relatively weak, and did not inspire confidence that any general "levelling up" was possible.

THE LIMITS OF ICU COUNTER-POWER
The ICU had little capacity or scope to win gains or keep its promises. Thundering demands existed alongside mild daily activities, like lobbying authorities, court cases, and business and land purchase schemes. Hopes for reform co-existed uneasily alongside a vision of revolution from below at some future stage.

While truly remarkable in its regional vision and promotion of solidarity across borders, the ICU proved unable to back this with joint action. For example, there was no system to coordinate sections in different countries. It made sense to many workers, of all races and nationalities, that unions try to set up boundaries, and appeal to states to block the entry of other, cheaper workers into specific labour markets, jobs, and territories.

But in this way, workers and unions entrenched divisions in the working-class.

AN IMPORTANT LEGACY
The ICU is worth remembering, despite its failures. First, for its pioneering effort at globalisation-from-below, its cross-border vision, and its spectacular growth, including rural organising. Second, for its model: not reliance on parties and government, but on popular mobilisation, and workers' control of the economy.

AUTHOR: Professor Lucien van der Walt, author and worker educator, is director of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), Rhodes University.

ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) 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. 

MORE: http://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu