South Africa: Irvin Jim (NUMSA) on new working-class leadership and prospects for socialist politics

In three parts.

[For more on NUMSA, click HERE. For more on South Africa, click HERE.]

Presentation by Irvin Jim, general secretary of National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa; chaired by John S. Saul.

March 6, 2014 – Left Streamed, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission – The dramatic upsurge of popular grass-roots protest in South Africa's townships and rural areas in recent years has marked a “rebellion of the poor” in that country. The working-class itself has also been assertive, prompting the African National Congress administered state's horrific massacre of dissident mineworkers at Marikana in 2012.

Until recently, leading trade unions have confined been within the tripartite governing coalition of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country's largest trade union federation.

Now the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA), with more than 340,000 members, has begun to break that mould, under the leadership of its general secretary, Irvin Jim, a longstanding socialist militant in the union. At its Special National Congress in December NUMSA heralded a new socialist political direction for South Africa.