Lucien van der Walt talks to paper with Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich on the radical anti-nationalist, anti-apartheid, workers’ control-based “workerist” politics of the mass-based Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, 1979-1985), and its approach to the national question. The paper appears in Eddie Webster and Karin Pampallis (eds), 2017, The Unresolved National Question in South Africa: Left thought under apartheid. The footage is from the panel at the 4 May 2017 launch of the book at Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. A PDF of this chapter is at https://wp.me/p34LBU-yp
South Africa’s unresolved “national question” is shown by the failure to create one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy. This directs attention to how various strands of left thought have addressed the national question during apartheid, and the relevance for today and in the future. The book has chapters on Marxism-Leninism, Congress , Trotskyism, Africanism, Afrikaner nationalism, Zulu ethnic movements, Black Consciousness, feminism, constitutionalism and workerism.
Lucien van der Walt 