THE COMMUNIST CADRE

The ideal type of leadership I now address is closely linked to the type of organisation NUM became as it was increasingly controlled and shaped by Gwede Mantashe, its general secretary from 1998 to 2006. Mantashe was then elected secretary general of the ANC in 2007. This internal reconfiguration is closely related to a changing balance of forces in the union, which started in the early 2000s when, after Kgalema Motlanthe, James Motlatsi left NUM. A former NUM head office employee once described Mantashe to me as a ‘hard-core communist’, a national leader in the SACP – a party my interlocutor described as the ‘most Stalinist in the world’, recalling that when Mantashe heard about the coup d’état against Gorbachev, in 1991, he ‘was so happy when he arrived at work’. With this in mind, I will first consider the question: what does it mean to be a communist cadre in twenty-first century South Africa? This will then allow me to consider NUM's departure from the type of leadership described earlier, which combined administrative and organisational skills with some form of involvement and proximity with the membership base. In this configuration of the leader–member relationship, the top-down dynamic that structured NUM over time was tempered by mechanisms that allowed the base to retain some degree of worker control, which corrected the union's centralising tendency. In Mantashe's ideal of organisation, ‘discipline’ became the preferred type of allegiance, which was mechanically imposed on the union in line with the principle of ‘democratic centralism’. While Ramaphosa and most of his fellow historical NUM leaders had never been convinced communists, Mantashe was, and under his leadership NUM was brought closer to and almost ‘infiltrated’ by the SACP at its top level. This, along with discipline and a critical reduction in internal debate, endowed NUM leadership with an increasingly legitimist character. The increase in the influence of the SACP on union structures was also experienced politically in the ANC with the rise of Jacob Zuma to power. After years of marginalisation and even victimisation under Thabo Mbeki's two terms as president, those he used to pejoratively label ‘ultra left’ – as if it were an insult – were back in business.