Workers' Education in The Global South

Workers’ Education in the Global South
Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

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Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

Workers’ Education in
the Global South
Radical Adult Education at the Crossroads
By
Linda Cooper
leiden | boston
Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Acronyms viii
1 Introduction: A Workers’ Education Event in 1980s South Africa 1

1 Reclaiming the Radical Tradition 2
2 Defĳining Workers’ Education 4
3 A Brief History of Workers’ Education in South Africa 10
4 Framing the Book Theoretically and Methodologically 14
5 Concluding Comments 22
2 ‘The Sun Shall Rise for the Workers’: The Contested Political Purposes of
Workers’ Education 26
1 Introduction 26
2 Conceptualising the Purpose of Workers’ Education 27
3 Key Lines of Ideological Contestation in Workers’ Education 30
4 Workers’ Education at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Radical
Resistance, Pragmatic Accommodation 35
5 Gathering Contradictions: A Possible ‘Breakthrough into Learning
Activity’? 39
6 Conclusion 43
3 ‘Healing the Breach’ between Intellectual and Manual Labour: The

Epistemology of Workers’ Education 45
1 Intellectual and Manual Labour and Hierarchies of Knowledge 47
2 Radical Approaches to Knowledge 50
3 Knowledge in South African Workers’ Education 54
4 Views on Knowledge in SAMWU 58
5 Views on Knowledge in the Workers’ College 63
6 Emerging Tensions and Contradictions 66
7 Conclusion 68
4 What Is ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ in Workers’ Education? 71

1 The South African ‘Knowledge Wars’ 73
2 Knowledge Use in SAMWU 75
3 Gramsci on Organic Intellectuals and Knowledge Production 81
4 Knowledge Diffferentiation in Workers’ Education 83
5 Organic Intellectuals: ‘Braiding’ New Knowledge 85
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vi Contents
6 Tensions and Contradictions in the Knowledge Practices of Workers’

Education 87
7 Conclusion 89
5 The Pedagogy of Workers’ Education: Conscientisation or

Indoctrination? 92
1 Introduction 92
2 ‘Visible’ and ‘Invisible’ Pedagogy 95
3 Non-Formal Workers’ Education Programmes under Apartheid 96
4 samwu’s Pedagogy: A ‘Mixed Pedagogic Pallet’ 107
5 Conclusion: Holding the Tension – A Complex ‘Balancing Act’ 113
6 Informal Learning: Workers’ Education as Praxis 118

1 Learning through Organisational Praxis 120
2 Workers’ Education and Cultural Praxis 131
3 Workers’ Education and Mass Action 134
4 Conclusion 143
7 Workers’ Education and the Formal System 146

1 The Apartheid Labour Market and Skills Development 148
2 Transition to Democracy – But Also to Neo-Liberalism 149
3 Unions and Post-Apartheid Education and Training Policies 151
4 What Went Wrong? 156
5 Navigating the Accreditation Terrain 162
6 Conclusion 170
8 Reinventing Workers’ Education 175

1 Distinctive Features of Workers’ Education as an Activity System 175
2 The Contribution of Radical Workers’ Education to Our Knowledge
Archive 179
3 Radical Workers’ Education at the Crossroads? 182
4 Finding a Way Forward: Re-Inventing Workers’ Education 183
5 Rethinking ‘Workers’ Education’ – Rethinking ‘Work’ 186
References 189
Index 208
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Acknowledgements
Many people contributed to shaping the ideas put forward in this book, and I
mention only a few here. I am grateful to my adult education colleagues at UCT
and DITSELA staff for our rich discussions on workers’ education. Jeanne Gam-
ble, Judy Harris and Alan Ralphs have helped me to think through a wide range
of questions around knowledge. I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Grossman
for very many of the book’s insights into workers’ knowledge and their pro-
cesses of learning. I thank Dinga Sikwebu, Kessie Naidoo and Sheri Hamilton
whose critical reflections on current workers’ education practices continue to
stimulate my thinking. Brenda Cooper helped me to get started on this book
journey, and she and Lucia Thesen’s encouragement helped me to complete it.
I am grateful to D. W. Livingstone for his careful editing and support through-
out the writing. Finally, I could not have written this book without the support
of my life partner and comrade, John Mawbey, whose lifetime of experience in
the labour movement speaks through all of the pages of this book.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the millions of workers whose struggles over the past
50 years gave us hope that another world is possible. Their words and actions
taught me much of what I understand about workers’ education. The book is
also dedicated to those workers educators with whom I had the privilege of
working, and whose memory lives on with those whose lives they enriched:
Zora Mehlamakulu; Edward van Wyk; Moses Mbothwe; Althea McQueen; Tony
Sardien and Mike Louw.
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Acronyms
ABET Adult Basic Education and Training

ANC Africa National Congress
CHAT Cultural Historical Activity Theory
CTMWA Cape Town Municipal Workers Association
COSATU Congress of South African Trade Unions
CUSA Council of Unions of South Africa
CWAO Casual Workers Advice Office
DITSELA Development Institute for Training, Support and Education for Labour.
#FMF FeesMustFall
FOSATU Federation of South African Trade Unions
FSST Foundation Shop Steward Training
GEAR Growth, Employment and Redistribution
IAS Industrial Aid Society
IIE Institute of Industrial Education
ILRIG International Labour Research and Information Group
LACOM Labour Sub Committee of South African Council for Higher Education
LRA Labour Relations Act
LRS Labour Research Services
LSO Labour Service Organisation
NALEDI National Labour and Economic Development Institute
HRDCSA Human Resources Development Council of South Africa
ICU Industrial and Commercial Union
SACTU South African Congress of Trade Unions
MAWU Metal and Allied Workers Union
NACTU National Council of Trade Unions
NGO Non Govermental Organisation
NQF National Qualification Framework
NUMSA National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa
OBE Outcomes Based Education
#OMF OutsourcingMustFall
RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme
RPL Recognition of Prior Learning
SACP South African Communist Party
SAMWU South African Municipal Workers Union
SAQA South African Qualifications Authority
SETA Sector Education and Training Authority
TUC Trade Union Congress
TUPQ Trade Union Practices Qualification
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Acronyms ix
UKZN University of Kwazulu-Natal

UTP Urban Training Project
UWC University of the Western Cape
WIEGO Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising
WPGWU Western Province General Workers’ Union
YCW Young Christian Workers
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Workers’ Education Event in 1980s

South Africa
It is 1986 and workers’ and community struggles in South Africa are at a height.
So is the harsh repression of the apartheid state. Despite this, at a church venue
in the south of Johannesburg, a group of about 25 shop-stewards representing
members of the Metal & Allied Workers Union (MAWU), are in a four-day seminar
focused on the theme of ‘What is Socialism?’ Participants are highly motivated,
organisationally experienced and politicised.
The first two days of the seminar include general inputs and discussions on
socialism focusing on issues such as key features of a socialist economy, the mean-
ing of workers control of production, and the relationship between trade unions
and the socialist state. For the next two days, members of a labour service organi-
sation (LSO) researching international labour history and current labour issues,
run a workshop on ‘African Socialism’. On request from this union, the group has
been researching four booklets intended for a worker readership, dealing with
post-colonial developments in Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Kenya
respectively. This is an opportunity for the LSO staff to workshop the materials
collected and get a sense of how workers will engage with the topics and issues.
Inputs are presented on the anti-colonial struggle and post-independence devel-
opments in each country, followed by small group discussion around questions
that draw on workers’ own experiences.
One of the facilitators takes detailed notes on key questions posed by work-
ers during the LSO workshop. A selection of these are: Was there a class struc-
ture in pre-colonial African society? Did Nyerere not rely too heavily on capitalist
countries to build his version of socialism? Why were workers not able to exercise
control over factory production in post-liberation Mozambique? Should there still
be wage differentials under socialism? Are the Zimbabwe trade unions the ‘van-
guard’ of the current struggle or just the labour wing of the new, post-colonial
government? Why did the trade union movement in Kenya not resist its capitalist
path of development after independence?
After the workshop, the LSO facilitators critically evaluate their sessions with
the union organiser. The inputs were too long they feel, and “we all still tend to
pack in too much information, present the material too academically”. They note
that the MAWU organiser is far more willing than they are to take a strong politi-
cal position in answering key questions, and they ponder the question: how to
© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004428980_001
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2 chapter 1
balance promoting broad, critical debate while at the same time giving partici-
pants political direction?
1 Reclaiming the Radical Tradition
This description of a workers’ education event in South Africa in 1986 is sig-

nificant in many ways. It provides an entry point to this book by immediately
illustrating some of the distinctive features of a radical tradition of workers’
education. It shows the highly politicised orientation that workers’ educa-
tion has often assumed in many parts of the world, indicating an interest that
extends far beyond simply trade union issues. It illustrates workers’ quest for
answers to key questions that are posed in the course of their struggles for a
better future, and points to the forward-looking, ‘utopian’ visions of the future
that frequently find expression in workers’ education. It demonstrates the
importance that the radical tradition of workers’ education places on workers’
experiences as a source of knowledge, while at the same time placing value on
knowledge of history and on conceptual understanding. It highlights the ten-
sions often experienced by those playing the role of worker educators between
wishing to give ‘political direction’ on the one hand, and on the other, playing
the role of ‘critical pedagogue’ which requires them to provoke critical think-
ing and debate.
This book has its origins in my own experiences: I was one of the LSO facili-
tators in the 1986 workshop described above. The experiences of working as a
labour educator in the 1980s during a uniquely militant period in the history
of the South African workers’ movement, raised many challenging questions
and cemented a longstanding desire to understand and theorise this particular
strand of radical pedagogy. The book aims to do a number of things. It aims to
outline the contours of workers’ education as one particular strand within the
tradition of radical adult education and to do so by drawing on a case study of
the South African workers’ movement. In doing this, it aims to contribute to
our understanding of learning and educating in non-formal and informal con-
texts, to deepen understanding of how knowledge is generated in collective,
social action or social movement contexts and to suggest how such knowledge
may enrich our formal knowledge archive.
The book aims to show that the traditions of radical workers’ education,
and those specific to the South African context in particular, can inform cur-
rent debates around knowledge, education, learning and pedagogy, including:
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Introduction 3
What purposes should education prioritise? What knowledge or whose knowl-

edge is most needed to take society forward in the 21st century? How can we
refigure dominant forms of knowledge so as to afford recognition to more
diverse ways of knowing, and thereby contribute to ‘decolonising’ the curric-
ulum and enriching our formal knowledge archive? What kinds of pedagogy
and learning can promote the experimentation and risk-taking – the ‘not yet’
knowledge – necessary to envision radical alternatives? Historical and contem-
porary studies of workers’ education show that many of these questions have
emerged out of, and been grappled over, in workers’ movements at different
times and in different places. Given the struggle against apartheid capitalism
in South Africa – a struggle which placed education and the development of
‘critical consciousness’ at its heart – and the relatively recent and yet incom-
plete process of transition to democracy, these questions have been posed in
particularly sharp ways, and with particular ‘southern’ inflections.
While affirming the value of the radical tradition of workers’ education, the
book acknowledges that at the end of the second decade of the 21st century,
radical adult education stands at a crossroads.1 While the formal education
and training system functions largely to reproduce social inequality and the
dominant culture, radical traditions of adult education have always had as
their purpose to challenge and transform culture and societal power struc-
tures more generally. However, internationally, there has been a strong move
towards formalising and accrediting almost all education and training against
national qualifications whose key measure of value is whether or not they
contribute to a country’s global competitiveness. There remain some areas of
education oriented critically towards globalisation and the social inequalities
that characterise it, and propelled by a collective, social purpose and trans-
formative vision. However, they are increasingly difficult to sustain in the
face of a climate of individualism, avarice and self-absorbed focus on upward
mobility.
Over the past few decades, the radical tradition of workers’ education has
been seriously weakened not only in South Africa but in many parts of the
world. Much of this can be attributed to what the International Labour Organi-
sation has called ‘unfair globalisation’. This has brought with it the casualisa-
tion of labour, increasingly precarious forms of paid employment (particularly
in the global south), the undermining of unions, and attacks on workers’ rights
won in earlier periods (Koen et al., 2018, p. 6). Ironically, South Africa’s tran-
sition to democracy has exacerbated these trends. The post-1994 period saw
the adoption by the new, democratic government of neo-liberal economic
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4 chapter 1
policies dominant in the rest of the world. In addition, this period saw the
political alignment of the South African labour movement with the post-apart-
heid state, a significant change in its dominant politics and social vision, and
a steady move towards the institutionalisation and de-politicisation of work-
ers’ education. As a recent research report by the labour movements’ research
arm, the National Labour and Economic Development Institute (NALEDI) has
noted, the radical tradition of workers’ education is under threat (Koen et al.,
2018). There has been a strong call by those within and outside of the workers’
movement in South Africa for the renewal of this tradition (see Koen et al.,
2018; Cooper & Hamilton, in press), and for the revitalisation of radical adult
education more broadly (see von Kotze & Walters, 2017), in order to address
issues of poverty and inequality and to re-energise the struggle to build col-
lectivism, solidarity and social justice.
Reflecting on and theorising the historic practices of radical workers’ educa-
tion and understanding how its character has changed over time is an impor-
tant first step towards reclaiming this tradition and re-visioning what it might
mean in the future. This book draws amongst other theoretical traditions on
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), an approach which is particularly
suited to tracking changes in social systems over time and their related cultural
and pedagogic practices. It investigates and identifies key features of workers’
education – what may be seen as its ‘systemic logic’ – and explores how these
have been shaped and reshaped over time by its location within wider activity
systems (the labour movement and other social movements, and the local and
global political economies) with their multiple tensions and contradictions.
2 Defining Workers’ Education
Before proceeding to a definition of workers’ education, the question must be

posed: who are the workers in the workers’ education initiatives described and
analysed in the pages that follow?
2.1 Historical Development of the South African Working Class

The definition of working class adopted in this book is embedded within a
Marxist paradigm that foregrounds the structurally-embedded relations of
exploitation and domination related to capitalist production. It also takes
account of the intersectionality between these and other significant social
relations that shape social inequality, such as ‘race’ and gender (Olin Wright,
2015). However, identifying the parameters of the working class requires that
we locate it in specific time and place.
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Introduction 5
The case studies in this book are drawn from South Africa in the period
between 1970 and 2012, in other words, the last two decades of a slowly retreat-
ing Apartheid, and the first two decades of the new democracy. This was also
a period of transition to new forms of employment that have led to a new divi-
sions and hierarchies within in the South African working class.
The class structure of South Africa was historically shaped by early colonial
conquest, land dispossession and the ideologies of white supremacy. However,
it was the impact of the mineral revolution in the late 19th century that gener-
ated the particular form of cheap migrant labour regime that lay at the cen-
tre of the country’s economy for much of the 20th century. Deep level mining
necessitated the concentration of capital in large monopoly companies and
demanded a small but crucial supply of skilled labour and large numbers of
cheap, unskilled labour. The key to a cheap labour supply was further land
dispossession and impoverishment of rural areas, and the introduction of a
highly coercive system of influx control for black mineworkers (Marais, 1998).
The white working class comprised a combination of mainly British immi-
grants and poor rural Afrikaners pushed off the land by increasingly capital-
intensive agriculture. Following the Rand Revolt in 1922 where the white
working class was defeated in a major class war, the state acted to avert future
such action with its concomitant danger of white and black workers acting
in combination. While white workers were given union rights2 and benefited
from higher wages, job reservation and social benefits, black migrant work-
ers were excluded from organising and remained highly exploited and disen-
franchised. A pattern for a racial division of labour was entrenched, separating
skilled white workers from unskilled African workers (Davies, 1973).
Over time, the apartheid economy became increasingly unsustainable.
The expanded development of manufacturing industries from the 1930s had
already seen an increased rate of African urbanisation. The rapid expansion
of the economy in the 1950s and 1960s accentuated this trend and saw black
workers moving increasingly into semi-skilled positions. The 1970s saw a major
downturn in the South African economy (aggravated by the global economic
accumulation crisis), the success of liberation movements in other Southern
African countries, a wave of strikes by black workers in Durban in 1973 and the
1976 Soweto youth revolt. By the end of the 1970’s the Apartheid state and capi-
tal knew that they had an economic, political and social crisis on their hands.
The state adopted a ‘total strategy’ of repression and reform, including an
attempt to promote the expansion of a black middle class, particularly in the
apartheid ‘homelands’. However, in the closing years of apartheid, black South
Africans remained overwhelmingly working class, employed in unskilled or
semi-skilled jobs, or unemployed and part of the urban and rural poor. The
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6 chapter 1
black middle class had grown but lacked any distinct class identity (Lodge,
1983; Marais, 1998).
Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the black middle class has grown
in size as a result of black economic empowerment, affirmative action, and
state employment of many more black people. However, three decades into
democracy it remains relatively small although now sharing a more distinct
race/class identity. Post-apartheid, South Africa remains one of the most
unequal societies in the world in terms of wealth and income distribution
(Seekings & Nattrass, 20083), which is still patterned primarily on racial and
gender grounds. This has much to do with the forms of workplace restructur-
ing associated with neo-liberalism, and greater differentiation within the black
working class, that have taken place over the past three decades.
2.2 The Post-Apartheid Working Class

Webster (2005) writes of three ‘worlds of work’ emerging in post-apartheid
South Africa, also characteristic of other countries in the global south. The first
two worlds are comprised of those who ‘earn a living’ within the formal sector
of the economy. The first world of work is comprised of ‘core’ workers who are
increasingly integrated into the global economy (such as those employed in
the auto industry) and who constitute what Standing (2011) has termed, the
‘salariat’. They enjoy a regular income and possess relatively high levels of edu-
cation or specialised skills. Those in the second world of work are also formally
employed, but their conditions of work have steadily deteriorated. They work
under increasingly intensive and authoritarian conditions of work – what von
Holdt (2003, p. 301) has termed the ‘neo-apartheid workplace regime’. They
possess what Webster calls ‘generic skills’ and frequently move between full-
time, part time, sub-contracted and casualised jobs (many in the retail or ser-
vice sectors). This group of workers represents Standing’s ‘precariat’ (Standing,
2011) who constantly face being pushed into more precarious employment or
into unemployment.
Webster’s third world of work comprises growing numbers of informal trad-
ers, hawkers and service providers in the informal economy, who engage in a
wide range of livelihood strategies in order to ‘make a living’.4 The third world
of work also includes those millions of people who are unemployed and simply
‘survive’ through subsistence activities.5 The latter are part of the “new hunter-
gatherer type societies” amongst the urban poor who scrounge, beg or steal
for a living, or who work under new forms of servitude (Sitas, 2001, as cited
in Webster, 2003, p. 62). It is important to note that there is a relationship of
‘asymmetrical interdependence’ between the formal and informal sector, and
the majority of working-class households depend on family members working
in both these sectors of the economy (Webster, 2005, p. 57).
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Introduction 7
In this book, the working class is viewed as comprising all those who par-
ticipate in Webster’s three ‘worlds of work’. The following chapters will show
that unionised workers make up only a small proportion of the working class,6
they are employed mainly in the ‘first world of work’, and their numbers have
diminished over time. Furthermore, those enjoying access to structured work-
ers’ education programmes comprise an even smaller proportion of workers.
Nevertheless, it will also be shown that a great deal of informal learning and
‘teaching’ takes place in the myriad of spaces where workers gather together,
share experiences, and offer each other support and solidarity. The following
sections proceed to argue the distinctiveness of workers’ education, and to
demarcate the boundaries of the field of workers’ education that forms the
focus of this book.
2.3 The Distinctiveness of Workers’ Education

A tight definition of worker education is difficult because its boundaries
are fluid and dynamic, moving within the full range of learning experiences
of workers. In his history of Canadian worker education, Welton (1991, p. 25)
argues that the boundaries of workers’ education should be drawn sufficiently
widely so that we can study both the ‘schools of labour’ – “the socially organ-
ized workplaces, embedded in networks of economic, social, and political con-
trol”, as well as ‘labour’s schools’ – “those spaces (that) workers themselves,
their leaders, or sympathetic pedagogues open up for reflection on the mean-
ing of their work and culture”.
Historically, while supporting access to skills development for workers, work-
ers’ organisations have been concerned to draw a strong distinction between
workplace training and their own education initiatives aimed at advancing
the social, economic and political interests of their class. It is the latter which
is the focus of this book, although it will be shown later how the boundaries
between workplace training and workers’ own education, as well as the bound-
aries between workers’ education and the formal education system, have been
eroded in the last few decades. Partly in response to this erosion of bounda-
ries, there has been a move from within the labour movement and amongst
worker educators in South Africa to reassert the distinctiveness of workers’
education.
The argument about the distinctiveness of workers’ education is fore-
grounded in Newman’s (1993) seminal work on trade union education. He
focuses on the power/authority nexus of the trade union as an organisation,
and its impact on the nature of trade union pedagogy. He argues that trade
union education is distinct from other forms of education not simply because
of its methods or content, but rather because of the particular kind of ‘con-
tract’7 that the worker educator enters into with the organisation. He contrasts
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8 chapter 1
this relationship with that which characterises both workplace training and
liberal-humanist traditions of adult education. In workplace training the con-
tractual relationship is essentially hierarchical and ‘one-way’ in nature: “the
trainer helps participants in the courses develop the knowledge, skills and
attitudes necessary to achieve the organisation’s (i.e. management’s – LC)
objective” (Newman, 1993, p. 27). In the liberal-humanist tradition of adult
education, the educator and learners relate as equals, collaborating in the
design of the learning programme.
In union education on the other hand, there is a more complex set of three
‘contracts’. In the first of these, the union employs the educator8 and the edu-
cator is accountable to the union’s policies and identified education priorities.
Once into the training room, the second ‘contract’ between union educator
and worker-participants comes into play. Although there is an element of hier-
archy in this relationship, there is relative equality of status between educators
and participants. The most crucial element in union education is however the
Third Contract:
The trainer is not a party to the third in the sets of contracts … yet it could
be argued that this contract has the most profound influence on the way
union training is conducted. The third contract is between the partici-
pants in the course and the union they belong to and is summed up in the
saying: ‘The members are the union’. (Newman, 1993, p. 35)
In this relationship, union representatives and elected officials are account-

able to the members of the union, some of whom make up the worker partici-
pants in the training room. These participants are, in turn, accountable to the
workers who elected them and are expected to use the knowledge they have
gained to benefit the collective within the union and the workplace.
A crucial point is signalled by Newman’s depiction of the third contract with
a dotted line, as this represents its fragility. It is this third contract which repre-
sents democracy within the union, and if it is broken, then:
… it is as if the triangular set of contracts has ‘snapped’ into the verti-

cal, hierarchical set that prevail in management training. The union
becomes the boss, telling the trainer what to do, and the trainer becomes
the propogandist, peddling a non-negotiable line to the participants ….
(pp. 39–40)
The consequences of the weakening or breaking of the ‘third contract’ in work-

ers’ education will be an important focus in later chapters of this book.
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Introduction 9
figure 1.1 The third contract in trade union education (from Newman, 1993, p. 32)
2.4 Defining Workers’ Education

In a task team on workers’ education set up in recent years by the Human
Resources Development Council of South Africa (HRDCSA), labour represent-
atives insisted on distinguishing workers’ education from vocational and skills
training, as well as joint management/worker education addressing enterprise
management issues. They argued for the recognition of a tradition of workers’
education which is political education focusing on “worker rights and interests
and the advancement of their socio-economic and political wellbeing” (Jones,
2013, p. 9). Drawing on views expressed by labour movement activists as well
as successive conferences on worker’s education, the 2018 NALEDI research
report on workers’ education also sought to assert the political identity of
workers’ education, saying:
Worker education is education of workers by workers (through their

organisations), for the purposes that they themselves determine. Worker
education is worker-controlled and working-class oriented with a core
objective of building working class unity, collective organisation and soli-
darity. It is aimed at building working class consciousness for the purpose
of advancing working class struggles for progressive alternatives and
against capitalism. (Koen et al., 2018, p. 23)
This book follows this definition of workers’ education and is particularly

interested in those forms of workers’ education aimed at the broader consci-
entisation’ of workers, that is, the process through which they would “develop
a critical understanding of their society and an awareness of how to change
it” (Walters, 1989, p. 85). Although many examples in this book are drawn
from trade union education, workers’ education is not synonymous with trade
union education. As the NALEDI research report notes, there are many diverse
providers of workers’ education in South Africa, and workers’ education has
historically assumed a variety of forms. These forms have included popular
education, basic literacy, community development education, political party
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10 chapter 1
education as well as trade union education. The key, defining feature is that it
is “controlled and determined by working class institutions in workers’ inter-
ests” (Koen et al., 2018, p. 10).
This book draws on examples from a range of workers’ education initiatives
including structured, long-term and short-term education programmes and
one-off workshops, but it shows that the making and sharing of knowledge
amongst workers has also been linked to working class cultural production
and forms of mass media aimed at informing workers and building campaigns.
Equally significant have been the variety of forms of informal and experien-
tial learning: insights and understandings arising from everyday struggles on
the shop-floor, experiences of meeting, organising and taking part in collec-
tive decision-making, and experiences of mass action such as strikes or stay-
aways.9 This rich array of workers’ education practices can be illustrated via a
brief review of the history of workers’ education in South Africa.
3 A Brief History of Workers’ Education in South Africa
3.1 Workers Education under Apartheid10

Workers’ education in South Africa has a long and rich history, and over time it
developed some unique features, some of which continue to inform the prac-
tices of workers’ education today.
From the earliest years of racial capitalism in South Africa, there is evi-
dence that workers both learnt from and taught each other through their lived
experience. For example, in February 1920, 71,000 black workers on the mines
embarked on the largest strike in the history of South Africa up to that time.
Despite being excluded from the trade unions of white miners, black workers
had learnt lessons about the power of collective action by observing the strikes
of white workers’ in 1907 and again in 1913 (Bonner, 1979). The Industrial and
Commercial Workers’ Union of South Africa (ICU), the first general union for
black workers in Southern Africa,11 underwent dramatic growth in the 1920s
and yielded a mass movement (Bradford, 1987). Whatever its weaknesses as a
union, both urban and rural workers learnt the possibilities of resistance and
collective defence through organisation (Bonner, 1978).
Early workers’ education not only took place through experiential learning
but also through conscious interventions by those who sought to influence
and shape workers’ consciousness. The 1930s and 1940s saw the emergence
and decline of a range of industrial unions and federations of black workers
whose leadership in many cases had emerged out the Communist Party night
schools of the 1920s or Trotskyist-oriented workers’ schools in the 1930s (Bird,
1990; Soudien, 2019).
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Introduction 11
During the 1950s, as the Nationalist Party government introduced legisla-

tion to deepen apartheid divisions within trade unions, the South African Con-
gress of Trade Unions (SACTU) which was aligned with the African National
Congress (ANC), tried to keep alive the tradition of non-racial unionism. After
widespread repression of political leaders and organisations in the late 1950s
and early 1960s SACTU ceased functioning openly. Throughout the 1960s, work-
ers once again relied on memory and informal, collective discussion in order
to ‘pass on the message’ about workers’ rights and the need to organise. The
forces of resistance were regrouping however, and in the early 1970s, the Black
Consciousness Movement, based largely amongst black students and intellec-
tuals, began to reach out to workers through Freirian-inspired literacy projects
(Naidoo, 2016).
In February 1973, thousands of black workers in Natal embarked on a wave
of strikes that marked the beginning of the revival of a politicised, non-racial
labour movement. This strike wave had a powerful demonstration effect. It
showed that despite the existence of apartheid laws and practices which denied
black workers the right to organise or go on strike, they could still demand and
win some rights through collective action and force of numbers. Following the
strikes there emerged a range of worker education projects (the first sustained
education projects since the 1930s and 1940s) that acted as catalysts for the
establishment of a wide range of industrial and general unions. Throughout
the 1970s, as these new unions grew, equally important processes of learning
and educating took place informally, but these were not totally separate from
more organised education initiatives. The experiential knowledge gained by
workers generated a growing ‘thirst’ for a more systematic knowledge of theory
and history and for a deeper understanding of international politics and the
economy (Grossman, 1999). The response to this can be seen in the emergence
in the late 1970s and early 1980s of numerous labour service organisations and
a range of literacy and language projects established by activists from outside
the workers’ movement, as well as a growth in media forms aimed at worker
readership (see Cooper, Andrews, Grossman, & Vally, 2002 for more detail).
In 1979 the state-commissioned Wiehahn report recommended the recogni-
tion and registration of black trade unions. Despite a vigorous debate about
the desirability or otherwise of registering with the state (WPGWU, 1979;
Fine, de Clerque, & Innes, 1981), a number of key unions did register. In particu-
lar the Federation of South African trade Unions (FOSATU) insisted that the
state accept non-racial registration. Registration allowed for recognition agree-
ments with employers which would make it easier to collect union subscrip-
tions and provide time off for shop-steward meetings and training. These new
resources of time and material resources saw workers’ education flourish. The
education programmes of FOSATU and the rival black consciousness-oriented
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12 chapter 1
Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA) became increasingly planned and

structured. There was also a blossoming of workers’ cultural activities in the
early 1980s in the form of theatre, poetry, dance and song, as well as workers’
self-education initiatives through reading and discussion groups.
The early 1980s was a period of growing, nation-wide political struggle
against the apartheid state. Wider trade union unity was forged with the for-
mation in December 1985 of the non-racial Congress of South African Trade
Unions (COSATU) and the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU) that
brought together a number of black consciousness unions. Much education
under COSATU took place through campaigns and stay-aways that involved not
only organised workers but also gained wider support from working class com-
munities. COSATU also promoted more structured education programmes,
attempted to build workers’ control over their own education by establishing
education committees at different levels, and began holding an Education
Conference every two years (Andrews, 2003).
There developed a more self-conscious philosophy of what workers edu-
cation meant in the South African context. A resolution taken at COSATU’s
first education conference in 1987, argued that workers education needed to
develop a socialist alternative to apartheid Bantu Education and capitalist
education and an understanding within the working class “that their struggle
forms part of the world struggle against oppression and exploitation” (COSATU,
1987, cited in Andrews, 2003, pp. 74–75). Workers’ education should be a way of
ensuring maximum participation and democracy; should discourage individ-
ualism, competitiveness and careerism; it should be directed against racism,
sexism, elitism and hierarchy; and it should promote a collective outlook and
working class consciousness (ibid.).
By the end of the apartheid era, these historical circumstances had revived
and renewed a tradition of radical workers’ education that – while not being
unique in either historical or international terms – nevertheless enjoyed cer-
tain key features that continue to shape understandings of workers’ education
in South Africa today. These included: respect for the knowledge and skills of
workers gained primarily from life experience and the experience of organ-
ising and active struggle; a culture of sharing of knowledge where all work-
ers were seen as both learners and potential educators; an emphasis on the
political character of workers’ education, and importance placed on workers’
control of their own education; and a commitment to ensuring that education
contributes to the radical transformation of society (see Cooper, 1998; Cooper
et al., 2002). It is these distinctive features of the radical tradition of workers’
education in South Africa, echoing the character of critical or radical pedagogy
more broadly and elsewhere, that this book seeks to explore in more detail.
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Introduction 13
3.2 Workers’ Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa

For many South African educators and activists, the closing years of the 20th
century felt rather schizophrenic. In their collective memory lay the not-so-
distant experiences of the ‘struggle years’, now sitting alongside the experience
of a transition to a democratic, non-racial, post-apartheid South Africa in a
relatively short space of time. The labour movement experienced in a con-
densed and truncated way a change in its role similar to that which took place
over decades elsewhere in Europe and North America. Like elsewhere, the
union movement’s role as ‘social partner’ of the new ANC in government and
of business brought legislative changes that significantly benefitted workers.
However, after only a few years in power, the ANC government embraced the
neo-liberal economic policies that were already dominant globally, and work-
ers began to be buffeted by retrenchments and casualisation of jobs, leading to
a significant drop in union membership12 and growing stratification amongst
workers. Organised labour’s alliance with the ANC in government also had
demobilising effects as layers of leadership left for government and the private
sector, diminishing its strategic and organisational capacity to protect mem-
bers from the impact of globalisation.
These broader trends have been mirrored by changes within workers’ edu-
cation. Simply put, the dominant discourse in workers’ education has moved
away from a concern to develop a radical, alternative vision of the future to a
narrower emphasis on technical skills to equip leadership and full-time staff
with the economic, policy and legal expertise to engage with government and
business. This has been accompanied by moves towards the institutionalisa-
tion of labour education, increasing pressure for union education to become
credit bearing, and a readiness to draw on ‘global market’ discourses around
workplace education and training (Cooper, 1998). There have been some
important, new initiatives to counteract these developments – educational
projects that attempt to reach casual, unorganised and unemployed workers
(that will be dealt with in the final chapter of this book) – but these remain
embryonic.
It is patently clear that the historical traditions of radical workers’ education
in South Africa cannot simply be re-established, however strong the politi-
cal will. The context today is singularly different to that of 30 years ago and
a process of reclaiming these traditions of workers’ education needs to reim-
agine new forms of radical workers education. In creating a new set of radical
workers’ education practices, it might help to understand what it is that lies
at the heart of this tradition of radical pedagogy – what constitutes its key
features and ‘systemic logic’. In exploring this systemic logic, the analysis in
this book draws on some key concepts from a number of related theoretical
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14 chapter 1
perspectives. Foremost amongst these is the post-Vygotskian perspectives of

Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT).
4 Framing the Book Theoretically and Methodologically
4.1 Cultural Historical Activity Theory

Sawchuk (2006) has argued that Cultural Historical Activity Theory “offers
a deeply human, historical and materialist response to questions of self”
(p. 607). The origins of CHAT lie in the radical critique by the early 20th cen-
tury Russian social psychologists, Vygotsky and Leont’ev, of individualised
psychological models of human development. In keeping with an historical
materialist approach, Vygotsky’s key interest was in how natural human activ-
ity serves as a major impetus for learning; in fact, learning can be understood
as activity. Vygotky’s approach was deeply influenced by “the basic Marxist
observation that ‘social being’ determines ‘consciousness’ far more than the
other way around” (Sawchuk, 2007, p. 205). Learning is a social and culturally-
based activity, with social interaction, social history, experience and culture
all playing a major role in the education process. The means whereby indi-
vidual consciousness is shaped via the social is Vygotsky’s concept of media-
tion. His notion of tools of mediation describe the role of both people as well as
socio-cultural tools, in particular language, that assist the learner to appropri-
ate the cultural tools (including knowledge) developed through social history
(Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 52–55).
Leont’ev (1978) developed these ideas further, emerging with the concept of
learning as a developmental ‘activity system’ as a way to account for learning
in all its forms, including structured education as well as informal, everyday
learning. CHAT emerged from this as an approach that offers a socio-cultural
analysis of learning, as “rooted in active, living, contingent and contradictory
social and materials relationships” (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011, p. 57).
‘Activity’ in this tradition is not used in a common sense way but as a highly
specialised (and contested) concept. Activity systems are collective, systemic
formations that have evolved over lengthy periods of historical time, often tak-
ing the form of institutions and organisations (Daniels, 2001, p. 86). An activity
system is made up of six elements, namely object, subject, mediating artefacts,
rules, community and division of labour (Figure 1.2).
The object of an activity systems speaks to its broader social purpose and
includes the vision of what it strives to achieve in society. “The object of activ-
ity is a moving target, not reducible to conscious short-term goals” (Engeström,
1999, cited in Daniels, 2001, p. 91). The subject of the system includes individuals
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Introduction 15
or groups that play a role in the activity system, while the community of the
activity system is the wider grouping or constituency in which subjects are
embedded. Tools of mediation describe the range of symbolic, social and mate-
rial artefacts – language in particular – that subjects use to reach their goals.
The rules of an activity system determine what and how subjects perform their
activities or roles within the activity system, while the division of labour speaks
to who does what and who is allowed to do what (Daniels, 2001, pp. 89–94).
At the heart of Vygotsky’s thinking and the theoretical approach of CHAT is
the notion of tensions and contradictions being the motive force for change
within activity systems over time. As Sawchuk et al. note: “all activity is at
heart contested or conflictual; it is … deeply shaped by social as well as indi-
vidual struggle” (2006, p. 4). Each activity system holds the potential for what
Engeström (1987) has called, expansive transformation. The key sources of
change and development are contradictions – historically accumulating struc-
tural tensions within or between elements of an activity system, or between
activity systems. When contradictions are aggravated, participants begin to
question and deviate from the system’s established norms, and this can poten-
tially escalate into a deliberate, collective change effort, what Engeström calls
“breakthrough into learning activity” (Engeström, 1987, p. 41). This ‘imaginative
praxis’ involves thinking outside of the given context and collectively produc-
ing new understandings and new knowledge, the ‘highest’ form of learning
(Engeström, 1987, pp. 8–10). Stetsenko (2008, p. 471) argues that “collabora-
tive purposeful transformation of the world is the core of human nature and
the principled grounding for learning and development” (original emphasis).
These collaborative transformative practices are “contingent on both the past
figure 1.2 The elements of an activity system (adapted from Daniels, 2001, p. 89)
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16 chapter 1
and the vision for the future and therefore are profoundly imbued with ideol-
ogy, ethics and values” (ibid.).
What do all these dimensions of CHAT mean for the conceptual approach
adopted in this book? Sawchuk’s work (2006, 2007, 2011) demonstrates the
value and versatility of this framework for studying workers’ consciousness and
processes of learning. Workers’ education in South Africa, as elsewhere, may be
viewed as an activity system – a collective, systemic formation that has evolved
over a lengthy period of time. This book seeks to unpack some of the key fea-
tures of the radical tradition of workers’ education in the South African con-
text as an activity system. The analytical approach focuses not so much on the
‘mapping’ of constituent elements of workers’ education as an activity system,
but rather on exploring the changing relationship between them over time.
These relationships are complex in that they are not unidirectional but are
reciprocal in character and often characterised by tensions and contradictions
(Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011, p. 68). The book explores (a) the relation-
ship between the purposes (or ‘objects’) of workers’ education, its ideology,
ethics and values (‘rules’) and its tools of mediation (including language, cul-
ture, mass action, and organisation). (b) It focuses on the relationship between
educators and learners (its subjects) and the corresponding division of labour
between novices and experts, leaders and led, and hierarchies between them.
And (c) it examines the shifting relationship between workers’ education and
broader working class communities, other social and political movements,
the state and capital (i.e. between this activity system and others over time).
It explores how broader historical and current socio-economic and political
power relationships have impacted on workers’ education as a local system.
It will be shown in Chapter 3 that the non-binary, dialectical approach of
CHAT to questions of knowledge proves particularly useful in examining the
practices of workers’ education. As Sawchuk, Duarte and Elloummini (2006,
p. 1) argue:
Just as the concept of labour allowed Marx to overcome Cartesian dual-

ism, the concept of activity does the same for the social sciences with
regards to learning. The concept of activity unites the subject and object,
overcomes the dualism of lower versus higher mental functions, the
inner world of meanings and the outer world of determinations.
The use of this approach seeks to understand how changes within and between
key elements of workers’ education as an activity system has led to tensions and
contradictions that have opened up possibilities for change. It will be shown
that recent developments at a local and global level have placed increasing
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Introduction 17
strain on radical workers’ education as an activity system, leading to conflict

and contradiction within and between elements of the activity system –
it’s purposes, the composition of the community in which it is embedded, the
roles of educators and learners, the knowledge and methodologies it draws on
as mediating tools, and its ideologies and values. The book does not assume
that the transformation of an activity system is always ‘for the good’13 and
seeks to show that transformation and change often results in greater hardship
for the majority of people. At the same time, it will point to what Stetsenko
(2008) has called the ‘collaborative transformative practices’ of workers’ edu-
cation that are imbued with an ethical and idealistic vision of a future society.
Some contemporary CHAT research has been critiqued for its overly struc-
turalist analysis, for its inadequate analyses of power relations, and for adopt-
ing a “managerialist ethic of improvement” (see Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk,
p. 72) rather than an orientation towards transformation. This book, however,
will follow in the tradition of the CHAT scholar, Stetsenko (2008, 2010) who
argues that Vygotsky’s original project was “closely aligned with ideology, eth-
ics and politics of social justice and equality” (Stetsenko, 2010, p. 15), and will
draw on the conceptual resources of CHAT as a means of tracking the shifting,
transformational orientation and potential of the radical tradition of workers’
education in South Africa.
4.2 Combining Other Theoretical Perspectives

Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk (2011, p. 91) show that educational research
from a CHAT perspective has often been combined with other theoretical
resources in a highly productive way. However, they caution against an overly
eclectic approach that results in the oversimplification of core CHAT con-
cepts, or the conflation of CHAT concepts with other incompatible concepts.
This book will draw on a number of additional theoretical resources, notably
from the work of Gramsci, Lave and Wenger, Bakhtin and Bernstein. However,
where this is done, an argument will be made to motivate how the use of addi-
tional, selected concepts complements and possibly enriches those of CHAT.
In particular, it will be shown that Gramscian concepts such as hegemony and
the role of organic intellectuals can not only enrich and complement CHAT,
but that Gramsci and Vygotsky also shared much in common methodologically
(Colucci, 1999). Both distinguished between two forms of knowledge: common
sense/everyday concepts and good sense/scientific concepts. For both, their
ideas were founded on the Marxist concepts of historicity and praxis or activ-
ity and grounded in a dialectical logic that saw people as active subjects in
their world. They both also attributed a fundamental role to language in the
development of culture and in learning.
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18 chapter 1
4.3 Three Moments in South African Workers’ Education

Each of the following five chapters focuses on a particular theme that is related
to some of the elements of workers’ education as an activity system. Chapter 2
begins with the purpose of workers’ education. Chapters 3 and 4 deal respec-
tively with its epistemology (assumptions about knowledge) and its knowledge
practices. These two chapters conceptualise knowledge as both an object in
itself and as a tool of mediation deeply embedded in the rules and values
of this activity system. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the structured pedagogy of
workers’ education and on workers’ processes of informal learning respectively,
with a particular focus in each chapter on the changing nature of the tools of
mediation used, and on changes in the division of labour between ‘educators’
and ‘learners’. Chapter 7 interrogates how broader social changes in the post-
1994 period have been accompanied by significant shifts in some of the key
elements of workers education and have reshaped the form and character of
workers’ education as an activity system.
In brief, the book puts forward the argument that central to an understand-
ing of the logic of the radical tradition of workers’ education is its transforma-
tive purpose, although there has almost always been fierce contestation over the
precise form that social transformation should take. These two features – the
explicit political purpose of radical workers’ education, and the fierce ideo-
logical contestation over the exact nature of these goals – provide one key to
understanding both its epistemology and its pedagogy. Although workers’ edu-
cation has historically valued and drawn on knowledge derived from workers’
own experience, it places equally strong value on the acquisition of concep-
tual tools that will assist workers to make sense of ‘the bigger picture’ of local
and global power relations, and of the oppressive structures that shape their
experiences. This has meant that workers’ education as one strand within the
radical tradition has more often been didactic rather than facilitative in its
pedagogic approach. Even when workers’ education has deployed more facili-
tative methods, it has remained ideologically aligned, seeking to build workers’
identity as a class, and a working-class vision of the world.
In keeping with the methodological approach of CHAT, each of the chapters
from Chapter 2 to Chapter 5 attempts to identify the distinctive features of
workers’ education and its ‘systemic logic’, and to track how these have shifted
over time. In developing a picture of continuities and changes over time, three
‘moments’ in the history of South African workers’ education are drawn upon.
The first moment covers the period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s dur-
ing which the contemporary labour movement was born. As noted above,
this was a period of bitter struggle by workers against the apartheid state
and against laws that aimed at preventing black workers from organising or
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Introduction 19
enjoying democratic rights as citizens. An exploration of this moment shows

how the particular nature of the struggle at this time helped to shape many of
the distinctive ideological features and educational practices of workers’ edu-
cation in South Africa, some of which continue till today.
The second moment used to illustrate how the features of workers’ edu-
cation in South Africa have shifted over time is approximately ten years into
democracy. Here, the book draws on a case study of the Cape Town Branch of
the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU). This might appear a
strange choice given that the early history of this branch was quite a-typical of
other unions affiliated to COSATU. The Cape Town branch of the union had its
origins in a relatively conservative union that was formed by ‘coloured’ munici-
pal workers in the early years of the 20th century.14 Under apartheid, the West-
ern Cape was a ‘coloured labour-preference area’ where municipal labour was
undertaken primarily by an urbanised, coloured working class rather than by
black, African migrant workers as elsewhere in the country. For much of its
existence up until the 1970s, not only did black African workers comprise a
minority of its members, but the union’s leadership was dominated by a group-
ing of relatively well educated, higher paid and conservative white-collar work-
ers. After 1979 however, a new grouping of more militant, politicised worker
leaders took control of the union and in 1985 led it into affiliation to COSATU,
and into mergers with other black municipal unions located elsewhere in the
country to form SAMWU. In the following years SAMWU developed an exten-
sive set of education programmes, grounded within the radical tradition of
workers’ education.
The choice of this case study was dictated by a number of factors. I had
previously carried out extensive research on workers’ education in this union
in the early 2000s (see Cooper, 2005) and therefore had a rich reservoir of data
to draw on. Equally important was the fact that the complex changes that had
begun to impact on working class communities by the end of the first decade
of democracy in South Africa had been experienced particularly acutely by
municipal workers. South Africa’s re-entry into a global economy dominated
by a neoliberal, ‘free-market’ ideology led to cuts in state expenditure and the
privatisation, corporatisation and outsourcing of public utilities and munic-
ipal services (McDonald & Smith, 2002). Municipal workers felt the impact
of this in the form of job losses and casualisation of labour. In addition, they
found themselves facing councillors and managers across the negotiating table
who, only a few years previously, had been their ‘comrades’ in the union move-
ment or in fraternal political organisations. Their union federation, COSATU,
was in an alliance with the ANC in government and the South African Com-
munist Party. COSATU and SAMWU mounted an independent critique of the
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20 chapter 1
neo-liberal, macro-economic policies impacting on service delivery to poor

communities but all too often, some leaders would object to and dilute cam-
paigns in favour of compromises with their allies. A focus on SAMWU at the
end of the first decade of democracy is a case study that highlights the ten-
sions and contradictions that were emerging in the labour movement’s guiding
ideology as a new discourse of competitive individualism began to filter into,
and deeply destabilise the radical political character and collectivist ideologies
that had predominated earlier.
The third moment – the case of the Workers’ College in Natal – is draw upon
in order to identify continuities and changes in workers’ education two dec-
ades into democracy. The Workers’ College was established in Durban in 1991
to provide advanced training to trade union as well as community activists
from other working class organisations. Originally established in partnership
with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN),15 it subsequently became inde-
pendent but retained an access agreement with the university. Here I draw
on findings from a four-year, national research project on Recognition of Prior
Learning (RPL), where the Workers’ College was one of the case studies inves-
tigated (see Cooper & Ralphs, 2016). Its own offerings (four ‘diploma’ courses)
remained non-accredited, but it placed significant emphasis on the develop-
ment of participants’ conceptual, rhetorical and academic writing skills. On
successful completion of a Workers’ College diploma course, students could
qualify to enrol for a part-time five-year Bachelor of Social Science degree.16 In
the RPL research project, the Workers’ College represented a particular form of
‘best practice’ in terms of RPL; for the purposes of this book, it represents an
attempt to retain many of the traditions of radical workers’ education, while
at the same time responding to the new contextual factors reshaping workers’
education. It also illustrates how workers’ education as a form of ‘specialised
pedagogy’ seems particularly adept at equipping working class, adult learners
with both the experiential and conceptual knowledge to enable their success-
ful transition into formal study.
An issue that requires some attention in this introductory chapter is how to
justify the focus of this book on South Africa as a means of speaking to the field
of radical adult education in general.
4.4 The Broader Relevance of Workers’ Education in South Africa

Of what broader relevance is a study of South African workers’ education, and
how generalizable are the conclusions reached for workers’ education else-
where, or for the field of education more broadly?
I have noted elsewhere (Cooper, 2014) that a wide body of scholar-
ship has accumulated in recent years critiquing the fact that the dominant
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Introduction 21
epistemologies and theoretical paradigms in the social sciences have been

forged in the global north.17 Nevertheless the locatedness and potential Euro-
centrism of these paradigms is not acknowledged, and they are assumed
to have universal relevance (see for example, Bhaba, 1994; Connell, 2007;
Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012; Connell, 2018). The argument is that the domi-
nant epistemology of the social sciences, which emerged as disciplinary fields
during the early era of imperialism and colonial conquest, is rooted in unequal
global and local power relations. One of the foremost proponents of this view,
the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, focuses particularly on the disci-
pline of Sociology:
Sociology was formed within the culture of imperialism and embodied

an intellectual response to the colonized world. This fact is crucial in
understanding the content and method of sociology, as well as the disci-
pline’s wider cultural significance. (Connell, 2007, p. 9)
She points out that the most prestigious genre of work in sociology is that of
general theory, and that while general theory is produced in the metropoles
of the world, it is assumed to have universal relevance. In other words, ques-
tions of place and material context are assumed to be irrelevant in the making
of ‘northern theory’. This results in a cycle of loss and a deletion of experi-
ence and thus of knowledge. Through this, the experiences of the majority
of human kind are erased, culminating “not in minor omissions but in major
incompleteness, and a profound problem about the truthfulness of (general
theory’s) arguments …” (Connell, 2007, p. 226). Homi Bhabha (1994) argues
that we need to re-centre our sources of knowledge-making to an ‘ex-centric
site’, that is, an angle of vision that lies outside of the centre, in order to better
understand both the centre and the periphery. Theory can be locally gener-
ated, while still speaking to a global context, but the specificity of the context
within which it is evolved needs to be acknowledged.
This book acknowledges and makes explicit the historical, social context
of its focus and analyses. At the same time however, the book assumes that
some of the insights drawn from its specific focus on radical traditions of work-
ers’ education in South Africa will have value not only to scholars and radical
educators in other parts of the global south, but more widely. In other words,
it aims to contribute to the development of a locally generated but globally rel-
evant framework for the analysis of radical traditions of adult education, his-
torically and in the current conjuncture. Acknowledging the local context does
not parochialise the analyses or conclusions drawn but makes explicit what
might be required to recontextualise that knowledge within a different locale.
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22 chapter 1
The book does not seek to develop a new ‘grand theory’ out of its study of
workers’ education in the global south. It draws on a range of critical social
theorists many of whom developed their conceptual frameworks in what can
be seen as the global north. However, it aims to broaden the ‘angle of vision’ of
the theoretical lenses that these frameworks offer, and to rework them to take
account of the experiences, perspectives and collective actions of those who
are often not seen as significant social actors in the global scheme of things.
These theoretical resources are brought together in new configurations in
order to illuminate and interpret phenomena particular to the Southern Afri-
can context. However, this is done with the hope that it can also help to extend
the theoretical propositions offered, and their power of ‘analytic generaliza-
tion’ (Burawoy, 1998, p. 16; Babbie & Mouton, 2001, p. 283)18 to a more inclusive
range of variations.
5 Concluding Comments
Some final remarks are required on the presentation of the research material
in the chapters that follow, the use of racial terminology, and some of the limi-
tations of my own positionality.
In a number of places, as in the opening chapter of this book, chapters
present a detailed vignette to provide a descriptive account of ‘pedagogy in
process’ at particular times or in particular places. This is done in order to com-
municate a vivid and holistic picture of selected workers’ education events.
Although the vignettes may have the appearance of narrative realism, they
are by no means pre-analytical. They are carefully selected, constructed narra-
tives designed to foreground particular issues taken up in later analyses. Where
particular people are referred to they have been given pseudonyms to ensure
anonymity.
Given the history of racism in South Africa, it would be preferable to avoid
the continued use of racial categories. However, this is extremely difficult
given that historically constructed racial categories continue to carry impor-
tant social meanings and impact on post-apartheid society in South Africa.
In this book, the term ‘Black’ is used in a generic sense for all South Africans
historically disenfranchised under apartheid. ‘African’ refers to black South
Africans who speak indigenous languages such as isiXhosa, isiZulu or seSotho.
‘Coloured’ refers to South Africans of diverse cultural origins, most of whom
speak Afrikaans as a home language and who were also disenfranchised under
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Introduction 23
apartheid. ‘White’ refers to South Africans who were classified as ‘of European
ancestry’ and enfranchised under apartheid.
Finally, my own positionality needs to be acknowledged. As Ann Gray has
noted: researchers and writers do not ‘speak from nowhere’ but are always
socially and materially located (Gray, 2003, p. 111). I was part of a group of privi-
leged, white, middle-class and well-educated South Africans who was inspired
by the ideals of the workers’ struggles from the early 1970s onwards, to offer
support to the emerging, non-racial trade union movement in a variety of
roles. My interest and involvement in workers’ education began as a student
activist in the early 1970s and has continued over 40 years in roles such as writ-
ing for a workers’ newspaper, working for a Labour Service Organisation, pub-
lishing workers’ educational booklets, facilitating workers’ literacy classes, and
from my location as an academic, running education programmes for trade
unionists and acting as education advisor for workers’ education organisa-
tions. Between 2001 and 2017, I was part of a team comprised of university
lecturers, DITSELA staff and trade union educators, that developed the cur-
riculum of, and taught, DITSELA’s ‘Advanced Course for Trade Union Educa-
tors’, offered through the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) Higher Certificate
in Adult Education.
At no time throughout my working and activist life could I escape my raced,
classed, and gendered position of privilege within a racially divided, capitalist
society. My positionality has set me apart from the lives and experiences of the
workers whose education practices and learning experiences I have sought to
understand and support. Following Gray (2003) I have tried in the analyses
that follow to exercise reflexivity on my own subjectivities in the hope that it
will help me to move beyond them. As she notes:
If we reflect, therefore on our own subjectivities (and identities) … as the

product of historical, social and cultural discourses, then it is possible to
go beyond ‘the subjective’ when using our own (and others’ experience)
in our explorations of cultural processes. (Gray, 2003, p. 75)
My experiences in workers’ education taught me to value the knowledge that

workers develop through their own experience and the innovative ways in
which they share their knowledge in the context of collectivity. These experi-
ences raised a range of questions and sparked an abiding interest in under-
standing and theorising what seemed to me to be uniquely valuable processes
of learning and educating. This book is an attempt to answer some of these
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24 chapter 1
questions and to offer a way of understanding workers’ education historically,

conjuncturally and theoretically. It is hoped that the conclusions drawn will
help to inform efforts to reinvent and sustain traditions of radical workers’
education in the future.
Notes
1 Tony Brown (2010) shows that critiques of adult education ‘losing its way’ go right
back to the 1980s. Matthias Finger and Jose Asun argued as early as 2001 that adult
education was at a ‘crossroads’.
2 Coloured and Indian workers occupied intermediate skills positions and had some
union rights.
3 They show that the income gap in South Africa has widened considerably since the
end of apartheid.
4 Estimated to be approximately 17,5% of the economically active population
(StatsSA, 2019).
5 The official unemployment rate was put at 37% of the working age population in
mid-2019 (StatsSA, 2019), but is estimated to be much higher than this outside of the
main cities, and particularly amongst youth and women.
6 Approximately 27% – 3 million out of 11 million – employed workers are unionised
(NALEDI, 2018).
7 By ‘contract’ he refers not to the formal employment contract, but rather to the rela-
tions and sets of obligations (formal and informal) that exist between the parties
involved in workers’ education.
8 The educator may also carry other roles or responsibilities or may be elected.
9 Total shut-down involving not only workers staying away from work but closure of
shops, schools etc.
10 More comprehensive reviews of this history may be found in Cooper, Andrews,
Grossman, and Vally (2002) and Vally, Bofelo, and Treat (2013), both of which draw
on theses on the history of workers’ education by Seftel (1983); Maree (1986); Vally
(1994); Ginsberg (1997) and Andrews (2003).
11 Its organisation extended to what is today, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Namibia.
12 Union density fell from 47% in 2000 to 28% in 2017 (Naledi, 2018).
13 See Martin and Peim (2009, p. 133) for a summary of articles that critique some
CHAT approaches for doing so.
14 See Rudin (1996) for a detailed early history of the union.
15 For more detail on its history and education programmes, see Bofelo et al. (2013).
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Introduction 25
16 The College therefore plays a ‘bridging’ role similar to that of American community
colleges.
17 The terms ‘north’ and ‘south’ are being used here not as geographic descriptions but
to index relations of domination and subordination – economic, political, cultural
and in terms of knowledge hierarchies. As Lee (2013, p. 27) has noted, “Eurocentrism
is not a geographic but an epistemological problem”.
18 Babbie and Mouton (2001, p. 283) argue that case study research allows us to expand
our understanding of, and further develop theoretical propositions. They refer to
this as ‘analytic generalization’. In a similar vein, Burawoy (1998, p. 16) argues that
case studies do not generate generalities directly but instead, can help to achieve
more ‘inclusive generalities’ – i.e. theory.
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CHAPTER 2
‘The Sun Shall Rise for the Workers’: The Contested

Political Purposes of Workers’ Education
1 Introduction1
What lies at the heart of workers’ education and gives it a distinct identity?
This chapter begins to unravel the logic that underpins this site of educational
practice and gives it a distinctive character. In doing so, and in keeping with
the methodological approach of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT),
it focuses as a first step on the purposes or objects of workers’ education as an
activity system. My argument is that it is these purposes that define workers’
education and stamp it with a unique identity, differentiating it from formal
schooling, vocational education, work-based training, higher education, and in
some respects, from some other traditions of popular education.
As noted earlier, in South Africa in recent years, virtually all forms of adult
education and work-related education and training have been drawn into a
globally-referenced, national qualifications framework (NQF) whose domi-
nant measure of value is whether or not education and training contributes
to improving a country’s productivity and global competitiveness. Hundreds
of new qualifications have been registered, including for sites of practice that
previously foregrounded a social purpose, such as community education or
youth development. One exception to this is workers’ education programmes
taking place within or allied to the labour movement, most of which remain
non-accredited and driven primarily by a social purpose.2 In Livingstone and
Sawchuk’s terms (2004, p. 50), such education is primarily aimed at realising
the use-value rather than the exchange-value of knowledge, and this use-value
has a transformative character. Throughout history, what has distinguished
workers’ education is its political and ideological purposes, and more particu-
larly, its goal of achieving social change, often of a fundamental kind. As will
be shown later in this book, it is this moral compass that has shaped the ‘spe-
cialised pedagogy’3 of worker education: its content, its educational methods,
its views on knowledge, and the way it constructs the roles of learners and
educators, and social relations between them.
This chapter will trace continuities and changes in the purposes of workers’
education in South Africa context from the early 1970s to the middle of the
second decade of the 21st century. It will present detailed images of workers’
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi: 10.1163/9789004428980_002
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‘The Sun Shall Rise for the Workers’ 27
education at three moments during this 40 year period: firstly, workers’ edu-
cation activities during a period of the re-emergence of a militant workers’
movement in the 1970s and 1980s which played a leading role in the struggle
to end apartheid; secondly, a case study of education within a public sector
trade union approximately 10 years into South Africa’s democracy, after the
labour movement had become involved in the formulation of new education
and training policies; and thirdly, a study of a workers’ college at the beginning
of the third decade into the country’s democracy, in a context where a weak-
ened labour movement is struggling to find new ways to survive and act as
an agent of social change under globalisation. A key focus throughout will be
the different and contesting currents within workers’ education as to what its
purposes should be. First, however, I outline some of the methodological con-
siderations and theoretical resources that have influenced the ensuing analysis
of the object of workers’ education as an activity system.
2 Conceptualising the Purpose of Workers’ Education
The decision to centre the purpose of workers’ education as a means of mak-

ing sense of its particular logic and development trajectory, is grounded in the
theoretical approach of CHAT. According to Foot (2002), an object “… may be
understood in the framework of activity theory as a collectively constructed
entity in material and/or ideal form through which the meeting of a particular
human need is pursued” (p. 134). He emphasises the “critical role of objects in
organising and even defining activities” and argues that an “understanding of
an activity system hinges on understanding its object” (p. 132). In other words,
if we want to understand the workings of a particular activity system, a good
place to start is to focus on its purpose. An activity system may have multiple
objects and this is a source of its ‘multivoicedness’. For researchers, it is often
difficult to pin down exactly what the object of an activity system is as it is
ever-evolving: “just as a horizon is forever unreachable, an object is in principle
uncatchable” (p. 132). The objects of intellectual labour are particularly “slip-
pery and multi-faceted” (p. 137).
Like many other movements for social change, what is striking about the
practices of workers’ education across time and space is the way it prioritises
the social, political and moral purposes of education. Knowledge is not for its
own sake nor primarily for the purposes of work or production. ‘Really use-
ful knowledge’4 (Johnson, 1979a) is that knowledge which opens up visions of
an alternative future and enables social action aimed at transforming unequal
power relations and inequities in the distribution of social goods.
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28 chapter 2
How have the goals of workers’ education been theorised? Very little work
has been done in terms of educational theory to conceptualise variants of
workers’ education.5 We need to look to political theory and theories of ideol-
ogy on the one hand, and to theories of learning in social movements on the
other hand, to find useful theoretical resources.
Gramsci was arguably the first Marxist theorist to take seriously the ideo-
logical project of the workers’ movement. His most important theoretical con-
tribution lay in his concept of hegemony, and the argument that the modern
capitalist state does not rule by force alone but also via ‘consent’ (Bates, 1975,
p. 353). It achieves hegemony over civil society by presenting the interests of
the dominant class as if they are the interests of all. It follows that the working
class cannot achieve a transition to socialism by simply seizing state power: the
working class needs to build an alternative hegemony that will gather support
across a multi-class civil society (Simon, 1982). Winning hegemony is clearly
an educational task; in Gramsci’s own words, “every relationship of ‘hegem-
ony’ is necessarily an educational relationship” (as cited in Coben, 1995, p. 39).
To achieve hegemony, ‘trade union consciousness’ is not enough; the task of
workers’ education is to develop a ‘political consciousness’ that enables the
working class to envision alternatives to capitalism. For Gramsci, workers’ edu-
cation is necessarily partisan: it must adopt a political position if it is to defend
and promote the interests of the working class. At the same time, the working
class needs to forge alliances and a common vision of the future across diverse
groups of the oppressed. Ideology plays a key role in this process, acting as “…
the cement or cohesive force which binds together a bloc of diverse classes
and social forces” (Simon, 1982, p. 25). Gramsci’s conceptual framework helps
to account for the strong ideological and political orientation of workers’ edu-
cation, a feature which I argue sets it apart from humanist and some popular
education approaches to adult education which advocate a facilitative rather
than a directive educator role.6
Theorists of learning in social action and social movements also offer
some useful ways of conceptualising the distinct features of workers’ educa-
tion, drawing attention in particular to the forward-looking and experimental
nature of such learning (Foley, 1999; Freire, 1970; Newman, 1994; Mayo, 2005;
Choudry & Kapoor, 2010; English & Mayo, 2012). For example, Eyerman and
Jamison (1991, p. 68) argue that social movements by definition have a ‘utopian
mission’, and their case study of nineteenth century labour movements shows
how these movements embodied ‘socially experimental activity’ which ‘speci-
fied the contours of the desirable’ and ‘articulated a vision of a future classless
society’ (ibid., p. 82). Social movements are seen not only as sites of learning
but also as sites of knowledge production – a feature which will be explored in
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Chapter 4 of this book (see, for example, Welton, 1995; Holford, 1995; Spencer,
1995; Martin, 1999; Kilgore, 1999).
Some writers have questioned the relevance of theories of social move-
ment learning to understanding the recent or current history of labour move-
ments, particularly in the global north. For example, Holtz (2006, pp. 49–50)
has argued that in the last few decades under conditions of globalisation, the
foundations of historical forms of organisation such as trade unions and social
democratic or labour parties have been undermined. Labour movements have
adapted to neoliberalism to such an extent that they can no longer play a role
as agents of social change. Radical adult educators need rather to recognise the
revolutionary potential of newer movements such as those of the indigenous,
the landless, the homeless, the unemployed and global justice movements that
are particularly prevalent in the global South.
The demobilising impact of globalisation on the South African labour
movement and its impact on workers’ education is a reality and will be consid-
ered later in this chapter and in some detail in Chapter 7. However, we should
be wary of dichotomising ‘old social movements’ (including the labour move-
ment) and ‘new social movements’ too starkly. Von Holdt (2003) argues that
that a ‘radical impulse’ continued to inspire labour movements in the global
South far more recently than for trade unions in the global North. As late as the
1980s in South Africa and in newly industrialised countries such as Brazil, South
Korea and the Philippines, labour movements took the form of ‘social move-
ment unionism’: a “highly mobilized form of unionism based in a substantial
expansion of semi-skilled manufacturing work, which emerged in opposition
to authoritarian regimes and repressive workplaces in the developing world”
(von Holdt, 2003, pp. 8–9). These workers’ movements demonstrated “a com-
mitment to internal democratic practices and to the broader democratic and
socialist transformation of authoritarian societies” (p. 9). Despite the impact of
globalisation on the South African economy and the growing influence of neo-
liberal policies and ideologies from the late 1990s, this chapter will show that
instances of radical workers’ education with transformative intent still flourish
in some pockets of the labour movement today.
Theorists of the ‘everyday’ remind us that we need look not only to height-
ened periods of struggle for evidence of workers’ visions of alternative futures,
but also to the everyday lives of ordinary people. Citing Bakhtin’s notion of
the ‘vitality of the utopian impulse’, Gardiner (2000, p. 17) argues that this
kind of utopianism is not an abstract model of social perfection articulated
by intellectuals and social elites ( the ‘blueprint’ paradigm of utopianism) but
rather: “… a longing for a different, and better way of living, a reconciliation of
thought and life, desire and the real, in a manner that critiques the status quo
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30 chapter 2
without projecting a full-blown image of what a future society should look like”
(Gardiner, 2000, p. 17).
The pages that follow will document the emergence of a strong counter-
hegemonic vision and ‘radical impulse’ in workers’ education in the early years
of the contemporary South African labour movement. They will also show that
the precise meaning of these transformative intentions was strongly contested
in the early years of the labour movement while more recently, these visions
have come to sit alongside – and in increasing tension with – less radical
visions of workers’ education.
3 Key Lines of Ideological Contestation in Workers’ Education
If workers’ education shares in common with other forms of radical adult

education a strong political/ideological orientation or ‘object’, another feature
that distinguishes it is the extent to which its meaning and purpose have been
fought over and contested. Welton, a historian of Canadian workers’ education,
notes that internationally, workers’ education has always been a site of con-
testation and struggle: “The struggles of workers can be viewed as a contest
between supporters of conflicting visions of what constitutes valid enlighten-
ment, empowerment, and transformative action”, a site where “competing dis-
courses struggle with one another for hegemony” (1991, pp. 37–38).
What have been the key lines of contestation in workers’ education? There is
an uncanny similarity in these lines of contestation across different historical
periods and across different parts of the world. Historically, workers’ education
has comprised numerous strands but these have tended to cluster around two
dominant approaches: a radical, transformative approach which emphasises
the building of class consciousness and which can be located in a long-stand-
ing radical or socialist tradition; and an instrumental approach which can be
located within a reformist tradition of trade unionism, and which prioritises
training for organisation-building and to facilitate the conduct of union busi-
ness (London, Tarr, & Wilson, 1990; Aronowitz, 1990).
In practice, workers’ education has always needed to engage with both these
aims, and this is a function of the contradictory location of trade unions within
capitalist society where they are both ‘part of the system’, but in many cases are
also striving to transform that system. The emphasis on one or the other has
shifted according to historical context, influenced by wider political and organi-
sational contestations being fought out within labour movements, as well as
by the rhythms of broader class struggles within society. Engaging with both of
these aims is a source of tension and contradiction for worker educators and has
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often led to fierce contestations over what the main purposes of workers’ edu-
cation should be. Times of upsurge in workers’ self-organisation and militancy
have often coincided with a heightening of contestation – a ‘sharpening of the
blades’ – over what the vision and purpose of workers’ education should be.
This is well illustrated in the historical writings on radical workers’ educa-
tion of London, Tarr and Wilson on the United States (1990); Johnson (1979a),
Lovett (1998) and Philips and Putnam (1980) who wrote about the British
labour movement; and Welton (1991) on Canadian workers’ education. A key
example is the history of the Movement for Independent Working Class Edu-
cation (IWCE) in Britain, and its establishment of a network of Labour Col-
leges in the first part of the 20th century. Within the IWCE, there was intense
conflict over the purpose of the Labour Colleges, reflecting a broader ideo-
logical battle between two, main political groupings for control of the col-
leges and the labour movement as a whole. The ‘plebs’ (the grassroots level
of the workers’ movement) and the ‘tribunes’ (the established trade union
leadership) (Philips & Putnam, 1980, p. 23). The ‘plebs’ view of the colleges –
following the original Marxist character of the IWCE movement – emphasised
their political education role, the importance of retaining autonomy from the
trade union movement, and the need to prioritise rank-and-file education
(MacIntyre, 1980). The ‘tribunes’ saw the college movement as the educational
arm of the trade unions and wanted to give priority to the training of shop-
stewards and officials in techniques of industrial negotiation and union man-
agement. The greatest expansion of the Labour Colleges occurred in the 1920s
in a rhythm that closely followed the growth of the workers’ movement in the
led up to the General Strike of 1926. However, this was a period which saw the
increased centralisation of tendencies within Trades Unions Council (TUC),
and the entry of the Labour Party into parliamentary politics. The defeat of
the 1926 General Strike and its aftermath ‘crystalised and ultimately resolved’
these tensions (MacIntyre, 1980): the TUC and the Labour Party took control
of the labour colleges, and they were ultimately incorporated into the TUC’s
Education department.
Historians of workers’ education generally agree that by the middle of the
last century, the instrumental approach had come to dominate trade union
education in Britain and North America (Field, 1988; Aronowitz, 1990; London,
Tarr, & Wilson, 1990). The later decades of the 20th century saw the grow-
ing importance of a new strand within the reformist tradition – the ‘service’
approach to workers’ education (Aronowitz, 1990; London, Tarr, & Wilson,
1990) – where unions become involved in promoting vocational training
opportunities for their members. This approach to workers’ education was a
response to increased union weakness at the bargaining table (the need to find
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32 chapter 2
benefits other than higher wages to deliver to members), and the desire for
increased career mobility on the part of trade union membership. The service
approach has been criticised for supporting a ‘human capital’ approach to
workers’ education, and as working against union collectivism (see Aronowitz,
1990 and Noble, 1990 on the USA; Fryer, 1990 and Field, 1988 on the UK).
3.1 Ideological Contestation within South African Workers’ Education

The conflicts and contestations described above find strong echoes in the his-
tory of workers’ education in South Africa under apartheid. From the earliest
days of the union movement there were different views and intense debates
over whose interests and whose vision of a future society should guide the edu-
cation of workers.
There were attempts from early in the 20th century to build unions amongst
black workers in South Africa, and many of the early workers’ education ini-
tiatives were influenced by “ideological forces which (sought) to subvert and
radically transform the structures of society” (Bird, 1984, p. 192). In the pre-
World War 2 era, adult education for black workers was led by radicals from
within political movements – the Communist Party of South Africa and Trot-
skyist groupings being most prominent – with considerable political contes-
tation between them (Bird, 1984; Soudien, 2019). Before and after the second
world war, white liberals and some of the mining houses also became involved
in adult literacy initiatives (Bird, 1984). Many radicals were banned and inde-
pendent adult night schools were closed following the coming to power of
the Nationalist Party in 1948 and subsequent repression of political and trade
union organisations in the 1950s. A more lasting growth of worker education
initiatives followed the 1973 strikes in Natal and the broader revival of the trade
union movement in the 1970s. Within a year or two of their establishment, two
of these education and support initiatives – the Institute for Industrial Educa-
tion (IIE) in Natal, and the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg – both
experienced conflict over what the focus and priorities of workers’ education
should be (Seftel, 1983; Maree, 1986).
The IIE in Natal was an off-campus education-cum-research body set up by
academics from the University of Natal. Key ideas contained in six study books
published in English and isiZulu aimed at introducing to union activists key
ideas about union democracy (Webster, 1992). The IIE initially registered the
project as a correspondence college and also offered a Higher Diploma in trade
unionism to unionised workers as well those who simply wished to learn more
about society, history and democracy. However, the leadership of the emerging
trade unions argued that the priority was education embedded in trade union
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organising that would help to develop shop-floor worker leaders in order to

meet the organisational needs of the unions:
We felt it (workers’ education) should be union controlled, that it should

be oriented exclusively towards the specific education needs of the actual
organisations we had and that the correspondence technique was pretty
much irrelevant; that what was needed was to develop BEC [Branch
Executive Committees] programmes, shop steward programmes, organ-
iser programmes …. (Union organiser, as cited in Maree, 1986, p. 337)
The IAS in Johannesburg also started with a broad but more explicitly political
educational brief. It organised courses on trade unionism, history, economics,
law and politics; ran discussion groups; and published pamphlets and a news-
paper. Echoing the conflicts which took place within the Labour College move-
ment in Britain 60 years earlier, the conflict that emerged here was between
those who wished to link workers’ education closely to the building of trade
union organisation, and those who saw it as primarily aimed at the develop-
ment of working class consciousness for more politically transformative goals.
By 1976, however, both the IIE and IAS had been incorporated into, and subordi-
nated to, the emerging trade unions and education work was primarily focused
on servicing the organisational demands of the unions, with political education
being reserved for a relatively small group of workers in leadership positions.
Erwin7 (2017) argues that a focus on organisational needs does not neces-
sarily imply an a-political approach, and that this focus was a strategic choice
in a climate of state hostility towards, and repression of black trade unions.
Byrne, Ulrich, and van der Walt (2017) in fact show how in the Federation of
South African Trade Unions (FOSATU)8 the emphasis on building strong, shop-
floor organisation was in line with its commitment to workers’ control, and
its radical vision of “worker-run unions as the heart of a larger ‘working-class
movement’ … for radical change” (p. 255). With the rise of popular struggles
against the apartheid state amongst youth, students and community-based
organisations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the labour movement began to
put forward a clearer and more elaborated political and ideological identity for
workers’ education. It was opposed to employer-led, workplace training on the
one hand and the state’s ‘Bantu Education’ on the other, both of which sought
to domesticate and exploit the black working class, and it openly committed
itself to a set of radical political goals. In a speech to the Congress of South
African Trade Unions’ (COSATU’s) first National Education Conference in 1986,
the General Secretary articulated the purpose of workers’ education:
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34 chapter 2
(it must) build worker control, collective experience and understanding,

deepening working class consciousness. Education should ensure full-
est discussion amongst workers thus building democracy. Education is a
weapon for shaping mass struggles of the present and the future of our
class. (COSATU, 1986)
Conference resolutions on education noted that “Education is our spear in the

struggle for Socialism” and that “education is vital in the liberation of the work-
ing class” (ibid.). COSATU resolved to offer an education programme that
politicises, mobilises and organises the working class so that they play
the leading role in the liberation of our society and its transformation
into … a system that will serve the needs of those who are now oppressed
and exploited. (ibid.)
Early contestation in South Africa’s emerging labour movement over the pur-
pose and vision of workers’ education therefore gave way by the mid-1980s
to a radical discourse that viewed workers’ education as class-based (with
the emphasis on the majority black working class) and orientated towards
the transformation of society in which apartheid capitalism would give way
to non-racial, democratic socialism. This radical vision had a strong, forma-
tive influence on the broader movement for ‘People’s Education’ within South
Africa at the time (see von Kotze, Ismail, & Cooper, 2016; Cooper & Luckett,
2017). However, this perspective was not dominant across the entire labour
movement (there were more conservative union federations and independent
unions who did not accept this vision of workers’ education), and neither did
it characterise the entire spectrum of education in COSATU. There remained
a great deal of less overt political education such as basic shop-steward train-
ing, training in organising skills and education around labour law that was
pragmatically oriented towards winning incremental gains for workers within
an industrial relations system that was slowly beginning to engage with black
trade unions. Furthermore, the end of apartheid and the transition to democ-
racy in the early 1990s were accompanied by significant economic, political
and ideological policy shifts that reshaped the discourse of workers’ education
in the direction of a more instrumental and service approach.
This brief account of the history of workers’ education in South Africa
shows that it has not been unique. It has reflected international trends in terms
of both its early ideological contestations as well as recent shifts from a more
transformative to a more instrumentalist and service approach. However, the
development of workers’ education in South Africa has been distinctive in two
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important ways. Firstly, a transformative and emancipatory approach to educa-

tion enjoyed a particularly long, prominent and vibrant history, and expressed
itself as a significant counter-hegemonic force as late as the 1970s and ‘80s,
mirroring the militant, action-oriented and oppositional political character of
the growing trade union movement of black workers in the last years of apart-
heid. Secondly, and in relation to this, a service approach to worker education
in South Africa has emerged relatively recently, coinciding with the transition
to non-racial democracy in the 1990s.
The second half of this chapter offers two case studies to show how, at the
end of the first decade of democracy and even 20 years after the end of apart-
heid, radical traditions of workers’ education continue to flourish in some
pockets of the labour movement, but they sit alongside and in increasing ten-
sion with more recent, human capital discourses of workers’ education and
training.
4 Workers’ Education at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Radical

Resistance, Pragmatic Accommodation
For a period of four years in the early 2000s, much of my time was spent in
the Athlone offices of the Cape Town branch of the South African Municipal
Workers Union (SAMWU) observing education events and attending shop-
steward council meetings, as well as attending meetings of union members at
city offices, in municipal electricity and cleansing depots, and in a municipal
caravan park among other interesting locations. For a period of three weeks in
2002, I joined groups of workers participating in a nation-wide strike of munic-
ipal workers as they marched and demonstrated at various centres around the
city. Many of the union members knew me as someone involved in trade union
education support work over the previous 15 years, but during this period,
I was wearing a ‘researcher’s hat’. My aim was – through ethnographic observa-
tions and structured and unstructured interviews – to build a ‘thick descrip-
tion’ (Carspecken, 1996, p. 45) of knowledge, pedagogy and learning in the
union (see Cooper, 20059). I tried to develop a portrait not only of the union’s
organised education programmes, but also of the rich learning and knowledge
exchanges that took place in the ‘everyday’ interactions within the unions, and
in the context of workers’ mass action.
SAMWU had, at the beginning of the 2000s, an extensive and relatively
well-organised set of trade union education programmes. One of the union’s
stated education objectives was the ‘building of working class power’, and this
counter-hegemonic ideology permeated almost all the organised education
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36 chapter 2
events I observed. It found expression, for example, in one shop-steward train-

ing programme, where participants were asked to debate in small groups the
question: ‘why does management have power’? After taking report-backs from
the groups, the union educator presented the union’s answer, as outlined in
the Participant Guide: she explained by means of a diagram – a triangle – the
existence of classes under capitalism and gave a Marxist explanation of the
political and ideological power of the capitalist state. She argued that the cur-
rent South African state was complex in terms of its class composition. While
it was dominated by the ANC, a party that was historically a liberation move-
ment, local government was increasingly acting like ‘a private company’. The
union and mass action by workers through strikes and work stoppages were
the weapons of workers in their struggle against the power of the capitalists,
and socialism was the long-term goal of workers’ struggles (Cooper, 2005,
p. 107). In another example, one of the presenters at a political education
workshop explained the class-based structure of a society based on unequal
distribution of wealth and power:
… we live in a society made up of two classes – there’s a class that rules

and there’s a class like us who sells our labour to (that class) that owns
the factories, that owns the mines, that owns the means of production.
There are two classes in society – two primary classes. (as cited in Cooper,
2005, p. 121)
Union education programmes aimed to transmit values of collectivity, based

on both diversity and commonality in working class experience, and to con-
script members into an anti-capitalist ideology and class-based identity which
would challenge hegemonic power. These values and ideologies – the ‘why’
of union education – were so strong that in many ways they constituted or
substituted for the ‘what’ of these education programmes. Many of the union’s
education events drew in educators with specialised expertise (for example,
in economics or labour law), but their specialist subject-knowledge was never
sufficient to construct their epistemological authority (as it might do in the
formal education system). As educators within this context, they also needed
to understand and empathise with the needs and problems of workers and
identify with the union’s worker-centred goals.
It would be wrong to assume that the political and ideological goals of the
union’s education programmes were simply imposed from ‘above’ by a radi-
cal, left-wing leadership. The ideologically-loaded inputs in union workshops
often co-existed with lively, open debate amongst participants and contesta-
tion between different political positions, and significant attempts were made
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by educators to connect their inputs with the experiences of worker partici-

pants. Furthermore, visions of the future were often articulated by ordinary
workers during routine events in the union. For example, in meetings, workers
frequently voiced their hopes and visions of a future world where there would
be greater democracy; where municipal services would meet the needs of poor
communities; where workers’ children and grandchildren would be assured
a ‘decent future’; and where no longer would ‘the rich get richer and the poor
poorer’.
In 2002 (serendipitously in the middle of my research) municipal workers
in Cape Town joined a national strike that lasted for three weeks and was to
become the largest strike since the democratic elections of 1994. In addition to
wage demands, workers expressed anger and frustration towards councillors
and managers who were perceived as earning exorbitant salaries and being
unconcerned about the plight of workers. The ‘utopian impulse’ of the work-
ers’ movement and the role of workers’ voices in ‘specifying the contours of
the desirable’ were more visible and more audible during the strike than in any
other union setting observed. Visions of the future were visible on the placards
and banners which demanded a Living Wage and audible in the speeches on
the marches that spoke of a ‘united working class’ and a ‘socialist future’. The
strike was not only a collective expression of discontent but also communi-
cated a critique of the current order and acted as a space to imagine alterna-
tives and articulate a vision of what might be possible.
However, as noted earlier, trade unions occupy a complex and contradictory
location as organisations caught between engagement with and the challeng-
ing of the established social order. This tension surfaced in much of this trade
union’s educational work where the aims were often an ambivalent combina-
tion of resistance, transformative vision and pragmatic accommodation. For
example, a key component of SAMWU’s education programme was:
To develop a strong shop-steward movement and to provide this move-

ment with education and training in the skills to promote members par-
ticipation in the union and to protect and advance members interest in
the workplace. (Cooper, 2005, p. 102)
In other words, much of the union’s shop-steward training programme focused

on inducting shop-stewards into roles that involved accepting some elements
of management’s power and providing them with information and skills to
negotiate with management within the limitations imposed by the capitalist
workplace. Despite the centrality of political and ideological ‘consciousness-
raising’ in the union’s pedagogy, the precise nature of how the union should
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38 chapter 2
carry out its counter-hegemonic role was often contested. This was evident, for
example, in one local meeting of shop-stewards, where participants debated
the possibility of a strike over the issue of privatisation, and expressed differ-
ent views on whether to use the law for workers’ benefit, or to challenge it:
Ss110: Management is pushing with this privatisation – because they have this
objective: at the end of office, they will buy into the private companies.
We can’t just sit here – we need to take this thing to the streets! …
Ss2: … SAMWU is affiliated to COSATU – linked to the ANC – how can they [the
ANC government] do this? It’s a huge concern for us in our depot.
Ss3: … We have to find a way to stop them (from privatising) – we have to get
into communities. [Yes …]
Ss3: … To say “Let us take this out to the streets” – we shop-stewards are in
danger of being there on our own – they [union members] don’t want to
support (strike action) … The workers are not willing to go to the streets
even for wages. We need to go back to workers and find out whether
they’re willing …
Ss4: The weapons we have to use have changed. [… Yes …] We have new leg-
islation – we need to use it – use the new laws … we need to rely on the
law – old tactics are no longer effective.
Ss1: I want to disagree … we need to understand: it’s not a matter of wages, it’s
a matter of life and death! We need to go out into the streets … We need to
make clear to members … this new legislation is bringing about privatisa-
tion. This is a matter of life and death! It is our children and grandchil-
dren who will suffer if we privatise ….
(Cooper, 2005, pp. 148–149)
The 2002 strike illustrated the tension that exists between the trade union
movement’s desire for inclusion within the modern, democratic but neverthe-
less capitalist state on the one hand, and its desire to transform that state on
the other. Furthermore, the impact of the political demobilisation amongst
unionised workers in post-apartheid South Africa was also evident. This was
captured in an interview with one shop-steward where she reflected on how
she felt that there was less ‘passion’ in the 2002 strike than in earlier strikes:
People were more … more committed in the past11 to strike, even though
(they had) no food in the house then, compared with now where people
are hesitant, or think twice before they go on strike … there’s that change
of mindset … So it’s this that makes one think – ponder – why was the
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strike that time so dynamic and this time so lackadaisical? … (Cooper,

2005, p. 215)
She grappled to make sense of this ‘weakening of commitment’, concluding

that the ideology of working class solidarity was being rapidly eroded by an
alternative ideology of competitive individualism:
It’s definitely the result of the broader context out there. It’s how people’s
value systems have changed since ‘94 and up to now. … along the line that
collectiveness (has) disappeared. And … it’s not only in the union, it’s also
in communities … We used to have that culture of collectivity and that
has disappeared along the line. People become mean individualists …
shop-stewards even have become more individualistic in their approach
to their functions …. (ibid.)
Another shop-steward interviewed after the strike expressed a worry that an

‘ideology of corporatisation’ of public services had begun to influence workers’
thinking, and that the union was losing the ideological battle against privatisa-
tion amongst its members:
This issue [management discourse] of ‘efficient, affordable, effective’ –

we are being brainwashed by capitalist ideology … which is focusing on
how to improve financial returns and maximise profits rather than on ser-
vice delivery. How do we deal with this? (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 178)
To sum up, this moment in the union’s history demonstrates the continuity of
the radical purpose of workers’ education in South Africa well into the early
2000s. However it also illustrates how globalisation had begun to impact on the
collective traditions of workers’ education as an activity system, creating a ten-
sion between its longstanding commitment to transformation (its ‘object’) and
an emerging, new ideology and value system (the ‘rules’ of this activity system).
5 Gathering Contradictions: A Possible ‘Breakthrough into Learning

Activity’?
This chapter has argued that a paradox lies at the heart of workers’ educa-
tion, and that this gives rise to contestation over what its core purpose should
be. Lines of contestation have clustered around two main trajectories: one
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40 chapter 2
advocating a focus on improving the lives of workers within the existing capi-
talist system, and the other urging organised workers to concentrate their
energies on overthrowing the capitalist system. It is possible to see these con-
tradictions originating from those that are embedded in the broader political
economy of capitalism (Hartley, 1997). The contradictory impulses that these
generate have deepened in the last few decades, exacerbated in South Africa
by the labour movement’s ‘buy-in’ to a new institutional framework for work-
place education and training – one strongly influenced by the discourses of
globalisation, lifelong learning, flexible labour markets and flexible speciali-
sation. These have been associated with new lines of stratification amongst
employed workers, a growing gap in the material living conditions between
those who are ‘insiders’ and those who are ‘outsiders’ to the global economy,
and a new ideology of competitive individualism (Grossman, 1999).
CHAT emphasises the value of multivoicedness within activity systems, and
views tensions and contradictions not simply as ‘problems’ but as moments
which are pregnant with new possibility. In other words, the gathering ten-
sions and contradictions within labour’s vision of workers’ education should
not necessarily be viewed negatively, but rather as harbouring the potential
for something new to emerge. This will not happen automatically, and it will
take serious intellectual work and political will to translate these tensions and
contradictions into the new knowledge and new practices that are required to
effectively challenge the workings and power of global capitalism.
This chapter concludes with a second case study, set approximately 20 years
into a democratic South Africa, of the educational work of the Natal Workers’
College, and explores the way that it has sought to resolve some of the tensions
and contradictions thrown up by the impact of globalisation on workers’ edu-
cation in the ‘south’.
5.1 A Glimpse of a New Horizon?

It is my first visit to the Workers’ College in mid-2012; we drive from King Shaka
airport into the old, industrial south of Durban. This was the past hub of the gar-
ment industry but is now looking empty and dilapidated as many factories have
closed or moved out of the city centre. It takes me a while to realise that that the
street we stop in – now called Magwaza Maphalala Street – was once Gale Street,
well known to trade unionists of the 1970s and 1980s as it was here at Central
Court that many of offices of the emerging trade unions were located. We stop
at a building which looks like an old factory-cum-office block, and I learn that it
once housed the offices of the Garment Workers’ Union in the 1950s. As we take
the lift up to the Workers’ College on the top floor of this building, I am aware of
the noise drifting up from the floor below from the sewing machines of a group of
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retrenched garment workers, now organised by their union into a workers’ coop-
erative. In a rather tightly spaced set of offices and seminar rooms, there is a lively
bustle as about 50–60 participants make their way to their morning classes. I pass
a well-stocked and smartly displayed resource centre and promise the librarian I
will return and spend some time in it.12
The Workers’ College offers four, non-formal diplomas in Labour Studies,
Labour Economics, Political and Social Development, and Gender and Labour
Studies respectively. The College’s program is aimed at activists in labour and
community organisations. The College sees advantage in combining labour
and community activists in one program so that they can explore the link
between work and the broader social and political environment (Moodley,
Shah, & waBofelo, 2016). Its stated goals are multiple: it aims simultaneously
to build the intellectual and organisational capacities of activists working for
social transformation; to facilitate their self-affirmation and dignity; and to
provide an access route into higher education. The latter acknowledges activ-
ists’ desire for further learning opportunities, as well as their expressed need
for recognition and accreditation.
I observe one of the classes of the Diploma in Political and Social Devel-
opment. Participants are drawn from COSATU and other independent unions;
civic and community organisations, and unemployed workers’ organisa-
tions. The class begins with the facilitator (himself, an accomplished poet;
see waBofelo, 2011, 2013) reciting a ‘rap’, entitled: “Bourgeois economy, day-
light robbery”. A participatory discussion ensues: Who comprises the current
working class under capitalism? How has capitalism evolved today? Is it still
possible to build egalitarian and collective values in the current context? The
facilitator argues that the current education mainstream continues to ‘colo-
nise’ the minds of young people – “Your self is removed from you” he says –
and poses the question to participants: how can the education mainstream be
‘infiltrated’, challenged and transformed?
The College has clearly tried to take into account the increasingly diverse
interests of the poor and working classes, and its programmes are an attempt
to forge solidarity between employed and unionised workers and other mem-
bers of working class communities. It recognises that capitalism – particularly
late capitalism – is grounded in multiple oppressions, and its curricula take up
a range of issues which have propelled into action not only labour movement
activists, but also those from community organisations and social movements.
Issues covered include those of gender violence and homophobia, unemploy-
ment and the need for a ‘solidarity economy’, inadequate access to housing
and basic services, ethnic discrimination and xenophobia, access to land and
problems of environmental degradation.
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42 chapter 2
A discussion amongst the staff of the College at the end of my visit revealed
a more detailed picture of the College’s goals. A key purpose of the Workers’
College programmes is “developing critical and informed activists in civil
society” (Tillman, 2012, p. 4), and the notion of activism is (in its own words)
the ‘golden thread’ that holds together the different curricula. Facilitators are
themselves selected not only on the basis of their advanced, formal learning,
but also on the basis of their experience of activism. I am told that the Worker’s
College facilitator is “an activist first before he’s (sic) an educator”.
It will be shown in the following chapter that the College curriculum also
has a strong theoretical component, and this dovetails with its explicit aim of
exposing activists “to the systemic, institutional and structural issues respon-
sible for their suffering, and therefore … to conceptual and ideological entities
such as capitalism, socialism, racism, sexism and democracy”. It views these as
important in order to build understanding not only of social structure but also
of agency, so that the students learn how they can act as agents in their organi-
sations, which in turn, further ‘heightens their consciousness’.
Also of importance is that participants learn to think critically and reflex-
ively, and to ‘turn the lens on themselves’. An emphasis on the ‘personal as
political’ reflects the influence of feminist thinking and more recent social
movements on the Workers’ College’s sense of its purpose. It is viewed as
important in strengthening an activist identity: ‘If you can’t transform yourself
you cannot transform broader society’. The College’s goals also include a theme
of ‘healing’: it aims to restore to participants a sense of their own humanity and
help them to overcome feelings of ‘internalised subordination’ on account of
their educational backgrounds and perceived lack of cultural capital.
Alongside promoting collectivist values and socialist perspectives, the
Workers College emphasises the importance of working with diversity. Accord-
ing to one of the facilitators, it recognises that there are “different forms of
trade unions, those that want to bring about social change and those that con-
fine their work to addressing ‘bread and butter issues’ within the work place,
working within the system”. It makes concerted efforts to make everyone feel
respected and accepted irrespective of their political affiliation, sexual orien-
tation, age, position in their organisation, or status in society.
Facilitators argued that the Workers’ College is itself an ‘experiment’: an
experiment in combining the roles of educational institution and activist
organisation; an experiment in taking a principled, political position but com-
bining this with encouraging the expression of ‘dissident’ views; and an experi-
ment in forging new forms of educational practice and attempting to develop
a ‘home-grown’ theory of critical pedagogy. But staff were also circumspect
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about the power of education to bring about significant social change. As one
staff member put it:
Workers College is a little square in a big circle; students go back into the
real world. Workers’ College can either be a little island of difference, or
its principles must be taken out beyond the College. We mustn’t expect
that the Workers’ College can resolve these (society’s) contradictions on
our own, but we can start ….
6 Conclusion
Following the methodological principles of CHAT, this chapter has argued that
the key to understanding the particular logic underpinning different sites of
workers’ educational practice, is to uncover and analyse its purpose or ‘object’.
It has shown that that there are significant continuities in the purposes of radi-
cal workers’ education in South Africa, evident not only in organised educa-
tion programs but also in ‘everyday’ interactions within the trade union as well
as in instances of mass action. The ‘radical impulse’ of this strand of workers’
education offers an alternative vision of a transformed future and leads to an
approach to workers’ education that is strongly aligned politically and ideo-
logically. There has frequently been contestation over the precise nature of the
alternative future to be achieved, and these contestations have in turn been
influenced by broader political struggles and conflicts both within and outside
of the workers’ movement.
In the last two decades, the contradictory impulses within workers’ educa-
tion have intensified under the pressures of globalisation and the influence of
new political ideologies of competitive individualism. This is evidence of the
power of global capital to reconfigure its hegemonic hold over society through
what Gramsci might have termed a ‘passive revolution’ (Simon, 1982, p. 25)
where social reforms are introduced ‘from above’ in order to contain popular
struggles. In South Africa, the transition to democracy has involved the main-
tenance of the power of an elite that is no longer defined in racially exclusive
ways. It continues to govern and to benefit economically, while sustaining a
popular belief that upward mobility is possible and can be widely enjoyed, if
only workers would uplift their levels of skill and education.
I have argued that the tensions and contradictions in workers’ education
may be viewed as holding the potential for change. The chapter has pointed
to ‘experiments’ under way – such as that of the Workers College – that seek
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44 chapter 2
to use these contradictions productively to develop new, innovative practices

in workers’ education. These new practices prioritise the bringing together of
diverse elements of the working class and the poor – unionised and un-union-
ised, employed, unemployed and self-employed – and attempt to take seri-
ously the learning aspirations of individuals, while continuing to foreground
the needs and concerns of the collective.
Notes
1 The Sun Shall Rise for the Workers is the title of a biography of the trade union activ-
ist, Mandlenkosi Makhoba, a ‘popular’ booklet published as part of Ravan Press’
Worker Series in 1984.
2 Chapter 7 will focus on some examples of workers’ education which has opted for
formal accreditation.
3 I borrow this term from Cooper and Ralphs (2016), where we describe Recognition
of Prior Learning (RPL) as ‘specialised pedagogy’ because of its distinctive features.
4 See Chapter 4 for further discussion on ‘really useful knowledge’.
5 An exception to this is Michael Newman’s ‘Third Contract’ (1993).
6 A point which will be explored further in Chapter 5.
7 A trade union organiser in the 1970s and 1980s, later to become a deputy minister in
the new, ANC government post-1994.
8 The federation that pre-dated the establishment of COSATU.
9 The empirical examples that follow are all drawn from this source.
10 Ss = shop-steward; square brackets denote collective responses.
11 She was referring to a 1990 strike of Cape Town municipal workers, and numerous
work stoppages in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
12 Unless otherwise indicated, much of the detailed descriptions and quotes that fol-
low are drawn from my notes of that visit.
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CHAPTER 3
‘Healing the Breach’ between Intellectual and

Manual Labour: The Epistemology of Workers’
Education
Jean Barr, in her book Liberating Knowledge, argues that feminist adult educa-
tion needs to aim at ‘healing the breach’ between different forms of knowledge:
… to transcend the divide between ways of knowing and forms of knowl-

edge which in our culture are separated off from one another – knowl-
edge ‘from above’ and knowledge ‘from below’; cerebral and emotional;
literal and imaginative; scientific and literary…. (Barr, 1999, p. 33)
This chapter explores some of the key epistemological features of workers’

education. In particular, it focuses on its overriding concern – shared with
radical education more generally – to bridge the divide between different ways
of knowing, or different forms of knowledge. With some notable exceptions,
(Johnson, 1979b; Eyerman & Jameson, 1991; Livingstone & Sawchuk, 2003, and
theorists of feminist pedagogy such as Weiler, 1996; Michelson, 2015), questions
about ‘knowledge’ have seldom featured very strongly in studies of radical edu-
cation. Considerable attention has been given to its purposes (the ‘why’) and
to methodologies (the ‘how’), but little attention has been given to its content
(the ‘what’) of such education. ‘Experience’ has been viewed as a significant
resource upon which to draw, not as a form of knowledge in itself but rather
as a means or a tool for acquiring critical consciousness, leaving the precise
content of such consciousness unclear.
In recent years, there has been extensive theorisation of academic, discipli-
nary and professional knowledge (see for example, Bernstein, 2000; Trowler,
2001; Maton, 2013; Young & Muller, 2014, 2016), but knowledge outside of the
formal system has tended to be ignored, or often described (whether intended
or not) in pejorative terms relative to formal knowledge. For example, in Bern-
stein’s sociology of education, codified knowledge is theorised as systematic,
cumulative and logically coherent, while the world of experiential knowledge
and learning outside of formal education is categorised as ‘common-sense’ or
‘everyday’: unsystematic and contradictory rather than codified and logical;
practical rather than theoretical; sensuous rather than conceptual; local rather
than generalisable (Bernstein, 2000, pp. 157–160).
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46 chapter 3
The last few decades have also seen an increasingly influential body of work
aimed at theorising workplace and/or vocational knowledge (Knorr-Cetina,
1999; Barnett, 2006; Guile, 2010; Winch, 2010,), but little comparable theorisa-
tion of the nature of knowledge generated or recruited in non-formal or infor-
mal education contexts such as the workers’ or other social movements has
taken place. Why has this knowledge been so neglected and under-theorised?
The answer must lie, in part at least, in the fact that the knowledge of those
most excluded socially, economically and educationally, has always remained
‘hidden’ or unrecognised. For example, in their book on Hidden Knowledge in
the Information Age, Livingstone and Sawchuk argue that “… one of the most
striking facts of working-class knowledge in capitalist societies appears to be
the multiple barriers to its recognition and legitimate use in dominant insti-
tutional settings” (2004, p. 49). This is particularly true of workers’ knowledge,
but also of (what is seen as) ‘women’s knowledge’, the indigenous knowledge
of colonised people, and others who have occupied spaces on the margins of
society. Furthermore, those on the social and economic margins are not seen
as capable of thinking about knowledge; that is, they are not regarded as hav-
ing an epistemology – a theory of what constitutes knowledge and how such
knowledge is produced.
The following chapter will focus on the content and forms of knowledge
actually drawn on in practice in workers’ education, while this chapter exam-
ines its views on knowledge. The chapter will argue that in order to do justice
to workers’ knowledge and to the knowledge drawn on in workers’ education,
it is first necessary to understand something of the epistemology of workers’
education – its views on how we come to know what we know, as well as its
ontology – its assumptions about the nature of the world of which we seek
knowledge. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies of work-
ers’ education in South Africa, this chapter will show that the workers’ move-
ment may be seen as an ‘epistemological community’ (Nelson, 1993) that
shares views not only on what constitutes ‘really useful knowledge’ for workers
(Johnson, 1979a), but also where this knowledge comes from and how it can be
generated. In other words, there is both a history and current project within
the workers’ movement of thinking about, and theorising, knowledge.
The chapter begins by locating the origins of the obscuring of workers’
knowledge within what Guile (2010) has referred to as the ‘two worlds of
knowledge’, that is, the division between intellectual and manual labour. The
division between intellectual and manual labour represents one of the most
enduring ways in which knowledge is implicated in power relations. This
divide has translated over time into hierarchies of knowledge associated with
the social power hierarchies of class, gender, ‘race’ and coloniality. The task
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‘Healing the Breach’ Between Intellectual and Manual Labour 47
of bridging the divide between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ has been central to criti-
cal theorists from a range of different perspectives, and integral to the ideals
of democratising knowledge. It is also key to understanding a central feature
of the epistemology of workers education: its orientation towards ‘healing
the breach’ between intellectual and manual labour, and between knowledge
‘from above’ and knowledge ‘from below’.
1 Intellectual and Manual Labour and Hierarchies of Knowledge
The separation of ‘mental’ work from ‘manual’ work – the ‘dismemberment’

(Michelson, 1998) of mind from body and intellect from feeling – lies at the
heart of capitalist forms of production. This division of labour is reflected in the
dominant, dualist epistemology of the last 400 years that underpins rational,
scientific thought, and which draws strong boundaries between objective/sub-
jective, abstract/concrete, theory/practice and conceptual/experiential forms
of knowledge (Lave, 1996). These binary categories are central to the logic that
guides the selection of knowledge into curriculum within the formal education
system; they are never simply about differentiating between different forms
of knowledge. They are also, always, about what forms of knowledge ‘matter’,
carry greater prestige, and are more ‘powerful’ (Young, 2007). How have the
origins of these binaries, and the corresponding knowledge hierarchies, been
explained?
Korsgaard (in Walters, 1997) links the division between intellectual and
manual labour, the separation of ‘theory’ from ‘practice’, and the correspond-
ing divisions within the schooling system between academic and practical
subjects, with the end of the pre-industrial craft system and the development
of modern, industrial society. Braverman (1974), too, in his seminal work on
Labour and Monopoly Capitalism argues that it is the rise of capitalism that
sees the separation of ‘conception’ from ‘execution’ within the division of
labour. He distinguishes between the social division of labour which involves
the specialisation of roles or crafts but which maintains the holistic nature
of the task (a specialisation which is as old as human society itself), and the
sub-division of workplace operations which dates from the late 19th century/
early 20th century, and which involves the sub-division of human labour and
its consequent dehumanisation (pp. 72–73). The key result of the separation of
conception from execution is the cheapening of labour, and most importantly,
the concentration of control in the hands of the capitalist owner.
Sohn-Rethel (1978) traces the historical emergence of the division between
intellectual and manual labour to a much earlier period. He sees its origin in
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48 chapter 3
the emergence of commodity production in ancient Greece, and the emer-

gence of exchange value as distinct from use value. Exchange value is the first
abstraction: in commodity exchange, a form of intellectual labour emerges
which is separate from, and independent of, material production, and is linked
to the symbolic forms of writing and mathematics required to regulate com-
modity exchange. In other words, the abstract, conceptual modes of thought
which became basic to Greek philosophy and to modern science arose not out
of production per se, but out of the separation of intellectual from manual
labour and of certain social classes from material production.1
Sohn-Rethel argues that the ruling class of any specific epoch has at its
command specific form of intellectual labour on which it relies. However, “the
mental labour of a particular epoch does require a certain independence to be
of use to the ruling class” (1978, p. 4). This ‘relative autonomy’ means that the
truthfulness of modern scientific knowledge is not compromised by its ori-
gins in capitalist forms of production. It is possible to have a body of scientific
thought which although bearing the marks of its origins in the development
of an exploitative capitalist system, is not invalidated by its usefulness to that
system.
These essentially Marxist accounts of how dualist epistemologies emerged
alongside capitalist forms of production and exploitation, are taken one
step further by radical feminist writers. In the field of adult education, femi-
nist theorists such as Elana Michelson (2015), have critiqued approaches to
learning that view rational, cognitive thought as epistemologically superior
to embodied, interested, experiential knowledge. She argues that a particu-
lar form of mind/body dualism emerges in the course of the Enlightenment
which emphasises the rationality of the male-coded mind at the expense of
the non-rational of the female-coded body (pp. 30–31). As a consequence, the
‘located’ knowledge of women, workers or people of colour is marginalised by
being coded as biased and distorted, and seen as something to be transcended,
rather than as a source of truth/knowledge in its own right (Michelson, 1998,
p. 227).
Jean Lave (1996) offers a further critique of dualist accounts of learning that
assume that “… distance, perspective, and disengagement from immediately
relevant practical concerns are necessary in order for powerful, knowledge-
producing learning to occur” (p. 154). She argues that the binaries under-
pinning ‘idealised, rational science’ are the familiar dichotomous categories
which have their origins in 19th century evolutionist studies of ‘primitive
thought’. These have simply been transposed on to the ‘everyday thinking’ of
lower classes, thereby ascribing pejorative meaning to everyday thought (Lave,
1996, p. 80).
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Lave’s arguments bring in another dimension of the historical divide

between intellectual and manual labour: the debates around the coloniality of
those forms of knowledge that are dominant internationally and the need for
the ‘decolonisation’ of knowledge (see, for example, Mignolo, 2011). As noted in
Chapter 1, the literature on coloniality (the continued dominance of colonial
culture and knowledge systems well into the post-colonial era) and related lit-
erature refers to an international division of intellectual labour under globali-
sation, between those countries in the global south that supply much of the
‘raw data’ of the social sciences, and countries in the global north who ‘process’
this data and produce ‘theory’, thus reproducing the familiar division between
the ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ classes under capitalism (Connell, 2007, 2017).
This section has argued that the absence of an elaborated theory of knowl-
edge gained from ‘experience’ or sites of engagement outside of formal edu-
cation can be accounted for by the historical divide between ‘mental’ and
‘manual’ work. Since the age of Enlightenment, the associated knowledge
hierarchies have come to be embedded in a dominant, scientific epistemology
that tends to render the knowledge of workers, women and other oppressed
groups invisible, and that views knowledge produced in the global south as
parochial. Critical theorists from a range of different positions within the radi-
cal education tradition have argued for a process of ‘reunification’ of the mind
and body – an overcoming of the intellectual/manual cleavages in both their
material forms (sub-divisions and fragmentation of the work process) and in
their conceptual forms (forms of thought). Central to this project is the role
of the workers’ movement; it is, after all, the working classes that have most
keenly experienced their location on the ‘wrong side’ of the boundary between
intellectual and manual labour.
The following section shows that the challenge of overcoming the divide
between intellectual and manual labour, of bridging the divide between
abstract theory and workers’ everyday experiential knowledge, has been inte-
gral to radical political thought, and to radical education historically. Contrary
to critiques that progressive or radical education theory seeks to eradicate all
knowledge boundaries (see for example, Muller, 2000), it will be shown that
traditions of radical education recognise the principle of knowledge differ-
entiation. However this does not necessarily translate into an assumption of
knowledge hierarchies that privilege ‘theory’ over ‘experience’. The history of
Marxist political thought on the development of ‘working class conscious-
ness’, and that of critical education theorists such as Vygotsky and Freire, show
that they accept the differentiation of knowledge into what might broadly be
described as ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (or codified versus experiential knowledge).
At the same time, they assert a complementary relationship between these two
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50 chapter 3
forms of knowledge and argue that there needs to be a dialectical interplay

between them if learning or knowledge development is to take place.
2 Radical Approaches to Knowledge
In debates around the historical traditions of radical education, ‘Leninist

vanguardism’ has often been counterposed to the more humanist, dialogical
approach of Paulo Freire. For example, a talk given in 1986 by Karl von Holdt,
a leading figure in the adult literacy movement in South Africa at the time,
addressed the question of what the relationship of adult education should be
to the liberation struggle. He argued that there are “two political theories of
knowledge/understanding” – those of Freire and Lenin – and they would give
contrasting answers to this question. As von Holdt saw it:
… Freire ‘argued that the intellectual should be a facilitator, helping peo-

ple discover the knowledge they already have. In their daily lives people
already have the means to understand their oppression, and the facilita-
tor’s task is to help them to become conscious of this through discussion’.
In contrast, for Lenin, ‘Party intellectuals had a pure, correct theoretical
knowledge which they had to propagate amongst the masses in order to
‘raise’ their consciousness. It is to all intents and purposes a one way pro-
cess, from intellectuals to the people’. Summing up … in Lenin’s version,
‘the masses know very little’, while in Freire’s version, ‘the masses know
everything’. (as cited in Trimbur, 2009, p. 99)
While there may be some validity in von Holdt’s typologies, I would argue that
they oversimplify and over-dichotomise the differences between the two theo-
rists. In fact, a key feature of the history of radical thought, and of traditions of
workers’ education, has been the ideal of bridging the divide between theoreti-
cal knowledge and workers’ experiential knowledge.
Lenin is not known for his theorising of knowledge or workers’ education,
but he did address questions about the development of working class con-
sciousness. A comprehensive political biography (Harding, 1983) shows that
while Lenin distinguished between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, his views on the
relationship between them evolved over time alongside his own revolution-
ary activity. As a young, radical intellectual, he was part of a movement in the
1880s to reach out to Russian workers by establishing study circles, where intel-
lectuals tutored workers via a “strong diet” of philosophy, economics and his-
tory (Harding, 1983, p. 71). However, following a wave of worker militancy in
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the late 1890s and early 1900s, Lenin evolved his ideas around the development
of political consciousness and on ‘who’ or ‘what’ teaches workers. He began
to place greater importance on the role of political experience and struggle
in developing a revolutionary consciousness. He argued that “… proletarian
consciousness arose not out of theoretical induction and the educational work
of intellectuals and worker-intellectuals: it had its origins, and was refined and
developed, in the course of the very struggle for existence of the working mass”
(as cited in Harding, 1983, p. 112). Following the 1905 revolution, he referred to
‘compressed education through action’:
Experience in the struggle enlightens more rapidly and more profoundly

than years of propaganda under other circumstances … the organising
abilities of the people … are revealed a million times more strongly, fully
and productively in periods of revolutionary whirlwind than in periods of
so-called calm. (Lenin, as cited in Harding, 1983, p. 242)
Although he came to acknowledge the role of workers’ experience as a source

of knowledge, Lenin retained a key role for the radical intelligentsia (and
the party). While the mass of workers would achieve political consciousness
‘sensuously’ through mass action, the radical intelligentsia would come to
consciousness through reflection, study and extrapolation from theory. They
brought to the workers’ movement an understanding of emerging class pat-
terns, a superior knowledge of international history, and an ability to reflect
on and systematise wider collective experience into economic and social pat-
terns, all of which gave them the ability to formulate predictive models, and to
specify future trends (Harding, 1983, p. 242). Thus Lenin’s thinking – to some
extent at least – remained trapped within the binary categories and evolution-
ist thinking characteristic of Enlightenment epistemology.
Gramsci was the first Marxist to take the culture of the popular masses as
a privileged object of study (Johnson, 1979b, p. 209). He too adopted a binary
approach, distinguishing between two, major categories of knowledge. Com-
mon sense is “the uncritical and largely unconscious way in which a person
perceives the world, often confused and contradictory, and compounded of
folklore, myths and popular experience” (Simon, 1982, p. 25). The task of Marx-
ism is to develop good sense – the capacity for critical social analysis. While also
adopting a dualist approach to categorising knowledge, Gramsci viewed the
relationship between these categories as closer and more dialectical in nature
than did Lenin. ‘Good sense’ evolved out of ‘common sense’, out of develop-
ing the “positive nucleus” of common sense into a “more coherent outlook”
(ibid., pp. 25–26). In other words, common sense – while insufficient in itself
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52 chapter 3
– nevertheless contains the seeds of a more systematic, deeper understanding

of the world, and it is the task of Marxist theory (and of the party) to develop it
towards this end. As Gramsci put it:
It is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of

thought into everyone’s life, but of renovating and making critical an
already existing activity. (as cited in Simon, 1982, p. 64)
Holst (1999) has argued that there are close affinities between Lenin’s and
Gramsci’s views on the crucial educational role of the party. While I agree with
this, I would argue that Gramsci held a less hierarchical view than Lenin of
the relationship between workers’ knowledge and intellectuals’ knowledge,
and between the party leadership and the masses (see Cooper, 2007). Gramsci
argued that the working class needed to create its own organic intellectuals
whose knowledge would be superior not only in the intellectual sense, but also
because it would be based on ‘feeling and passion’:
Intellectuals’ error consists in believing that it is possible to know with-

out understanding and especially without feeling and passion … If the
relations between intellectuals and the people-nation, between lead-
ers and led, is the result of organic participation in which feelings and
passion become understanding and thence knowledge … then and then
only is the relation one of representation. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 418, original
emphasis)
In other words, the knowledge of highest value would be achieved through

the dialectical synthesis of the ‘knowledge of the masses’ and ‘knowledge of
the intelligentsia’, and between knowledge of the ‘mind’ and that of the ‘body’.
Closely linked to this was Gramsci’s concept of praxis, the unity of political
theory and practice.
Gramsci’s contemporary in the realm of educational theory was the edu-
cational psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. Although there is no evidence that they
influenced one another’s work, there are some interesting echoes of one
another’s thinking in their work. Like Gramsci, Vygotsky (1978) differentiated
between two kinds of concepts (or processes of concept formation), represent-
ing two different forms of reasoning. Systematised theory or what he called
‘scientific concepts’ are developed through instruction, while ‘spontaneous
concepts’2 develop through experience. However, for Vygotsky, it was not the
difference between these two forms of knowledge that was important as much
as the relationship between the two, that is, the interaction between these two
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forms in the processes of learning (Vygotsky, 1978). Both systematised concepts

and everyday concepts have their own, specific developmental curve, but their
paths of development are related to and constantly influence each other:
Vygotsky argued that the systematic, organised and hierarchical thinking

that he associated with scientific concepts becomes gradually embedded
in everyday referents and thus achieves a general sense in the contex-
tual richness of everyday thought … Similarly he argued that everyday
thought is given structure and order in the context of systematic scien-
tific thought. (Daniels, 2001, p. 53)
Vygotsky viewed the development of systematised concepts as leading the

development of spontaneous concepts in the learning process; however scien-
tific concepts cannot be assimilated in a ready-made or pre-packaged form but
only in interaction with spontaneous concepts. He thus offered a ‘dialectical
alternative’ to the dualist form of thought that have so influenced Western sci-
ence (Young, 2002, p. 23; Daniels, 2001, p. 36).
Paulo Freire’s pedagogy (see Freire, 1970) was inspired not only by Marx-
ism (he was clearly influenced by Gramscian notions of hegemony and praxis,
amongst others – see Mayo, 2005, p. 110) but by a much wider range of reli-
gious and cultural influences. Freire developed his more humanist philosophy
of knowledge and approach to radical pedagogy under the influence of the
civil rights movements in the United States, the movements for colonial inde-
pendence in Africa and Asia, and in the context of the student and women’s
movements that burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s (Woodin, 2007). The adop-
tion of a Freirian approach to political education via adult literacy teaching in
South Africa was first spearheaded by the Black Consciousness Movement (see
Nkhweva, 2002) in the early 1970s. By the 1980s, a range of adult education NGOs
had all been deeply influenced by Freire’s pedagogy (Bird, 1980; Sparg, 1985).3
Epistemologically, Freire foregrounded the role of ‘experience’ far more
strongly than early Marxist thinkers, questioning their insistence on a division
of labour between leaders and led, and between ‘teachers’ and ‘taught’. For
Freire, through a dialectical process of mutual dialogue, facilitators and learn-
ers would change both themselves and society by bringing together theory and
practical experience in a process of praxis. Central to critical pedagogy – and
in contrast with ‘banking’ forms of education common to formal education4 –
was the need to start from the experience of the learner as a basis for acquiring
and creating knowledge. He did not reject the need for theory, but it was to
be recruited as a means of making sense of experience. Through the process
of engaging their experience with theory, participants would reach a stage of
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54 chapter 3
‘conscientisation’, and come to a self-awareness of their shared oppression,

recognising the forces which limited their human capacity as well as those
which might free them.
With different emphases, what was common in the approach of these Marx-
ist and neo-Marxist thinkers was the need for workers’ education (and political
education more generally) to bridge the divide between conception and exe-
cution and between the experiential knowledge of workers and the knowledge
brought from outside their experience. This process would enable the fusing of
the necessary ingredients of political consciousness and the bringing together
of the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ and ‘optimism of the will’. This process of
meaning-making would in turn equip the oppressed and exploited with the
intellectual tools required to bring about radical social change. The follow-
ing section will show that different traditions of workers’ education in South
Africa were influenced by these various strands of radical, political thought,
while bringing their own ‘southern’ inflections with regard to the relative value
of ‘theory’ and ‘experiential knowledge’.
3 Knowledge in South African Workers’ Education
3.1 Early Workers’ Education in South Africa

In South Africa, the need to bridge the divide between intellectual and man-
ual labour had strong resonance, given a context where the majority of black
workers had only minimal access to formal education until at least the second
half of the 20th century. Here, the mental-manual division of labour was pro-
foundly racialised: through much of the 20th century, skilled, artisanal work
had been reserved for white workers (who also enjoyed trade union rights),
while black workers (with no formal trade union rights) made up the mass
of the ‘unskilled’ and semi-skilled workforce5 (see Cooper et al., 2002, p. 113).
From the earliest days of mining and industrialisation, the need to challenge
the racial division of labour and the intellectual/manual divides embedded in
it, were central to attempts to organise black workers and associated workers’
education initiatives.
The international Communist movement had a strong influence on early,
radical adult education initiatives in South Africa. The first half of the 20th
century saw the rise and decline of a range of trade unions and federations of
black workers whose leadership in many cases emerged out of night schools
set up by Communists in the 1920s and other left-wing intellectuals in the
1930s (Bird, 1984; Alexander, 1989). Later on, while a number of liberal-minded
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workers’ education initiatives6 emphasised functional literacy and skills devel-

opment in response to the demands of the growing industrial economy, radical
workers’ education initiatives combined basic education and literacy develop-
ment with political education, putting strong emphasis on challenging racial
capitalism, training working class leadership and recruiting cadres to the
movement. In terms of their methodological approach however, the liberals’
and radicals’ approaches were not very dissimilar. Szucs’ (n.d.) study of non-
formal adult education led by radical, white intellectuals in Durban before and
after World War 2 shows that their methods consisted of reading basic texts,
discussion, debates and lectures. In other words, knowledge of value was seen
as being acquired largely via the study of Marxist theory and history, mediated
by radical intellectuals.
3.2 Workers’ Education in the 1970s & 1980s

After the suppression of the African night school movement in the late 1940s
(see Bird, 1984), and of African political organisations generally in the 1950s
and early 1960s, there was a lull in workers’ education until the revival of the
black trade unions in the 1970s. The intellectual leadership of the new unions
was influenced by a different kind of Marxism to those that ran the earlier
night schools, having been exposed to the thinking of the European ‘New Left’
of the 1960s/1970s, and the renewed interest in Gramscian thought interna-
tionally (Andrews, 2003, p. 86).7
The 1970s and 1980s were years of growing mass struggle against apartheid
in South Africa, accompanied by the growth of union organisation and the
development of workers’ education within the unions. It is important to see
workers’ organisational and education initiatives undertaken by intellectuals
at this time not simply as interventions, but also as responses to workers’ self-
activity and the quest for knowledge to which collective self-activity gave rise.
Grossman argues that it is the experience of mass action that creates a ‘thirst’
amongst worker for new knowledge, and hence the space for education inter-
ventions to be made:
There was immense intellectual turmoil as struggle opened up all issues

to progressive inspection and challenge … Workers searched memory,
each other, history, the world, political texts for ideas and knowledge,
bringing everything into their intellectual embrace. The history of mass
resistance, suppressed and stolen from popular memory, was rediscov-
ered, re-appropriated and re-membered by the millions who had made
parts of it. (Grossman, 1996, as cited in Andrews, 2003, p. 103)8
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56 chapter 3
By the mid-1980s, the labour movement had evolved a more explicit position
on education and a more elaborated position on what forms of knowledge
should be drawn on in workers’ education. COSATU “… advocated a form of
workers’ education that promoted respect for workers’ knowledge and their
experience. It believed educators should facilitate the collective and partici-
patory sharing of knowledge amongst workers” (Andrews, 2003, p. 68). The
labour movement placed strong value on the collective experiences of the
working class as a source of knowledge. This distinguished it from the focus
on individual experience of the humanist, experiential learning theories that
had gained influence educationally in North America and the UK in the 1960s
and 70s (see Knowles, 1987; Kolb, 1984), prioritising instead the collective expe-
riences of the working class as a source of knowledge. Unions were seen not
only as educative spaces but also as ‘laboratories for democracy’, where work-
ers could ‘test out’ new ideas, arrive at new understandings, and develop and
enrich collective practices (Cooper et al., 2002, p. 121).
We can gain some insight into how workers at this time viewed their own
knowledge through biographies and autobiographies of workers produced at that
time (see for example, Tom, 1985; Barrett, 1985; Qabula, 1989). The production of
these books themselves was a statement of belief in the value of workers’ experi-
ences – captured in the form of life-stories – as a source of knowledge. For exam-
ple in a workers’ biography published by FOSATU in 1984, what comes across is
the worker-author’s strong self-confidence in the validity of his own knowledge
and that of the workers whom he clearly viewed as his main readership:
There are many things to tell. But before I begin there are two things you
must know. I tell this story to remind you of your life. I tell you this so
you will remember your struggle and the story of the struggle we fight.
AMANDLA9!
The other thing is this. I am not an educated man … I tell you this so
you will know not only those who are educated can write books.
But if you worked in the foundries and factories you would know
these things. If you lived in the hostels you would be aware. And as you
read you will understand how one day the sun shall rise for the workers.
(Makhoba, 1984, p. 1)
His words reflect a belief that formally ‘uneducated’ workers are knowledge-
able, and that their knowledge is derived from their experiences of life in the
factories, foundries and hostels.
Formal, codified knowledge was also highly valued however, as indicated
in a 1985 evaluation of the booklets of the International Labour, Research and
Information Group (ILRIG):
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What was perhaps more noteworthy was the importance which those
interviewed simultaneously attached to the broader social and politi-
cal education of the trade union members. This impression emerged
particularly strongly through their answers as to why they viewed read-
ing materials on international issues as important for their members.
(Cooper, 1985, p. 8)
A decade later, in addition to organisational training, COSATU’s leadership

education programmes covered topics such as political economy, economic
policy, the international working class, history of the South African struggle,
labour law, health and safety, and gender issues (Andrews, 2003). However, the
stated approach was that such knowledge needed to be brought into a dia-
lectical relationship with workers’ experiential knowledge. For example, in a
speech to a 1987 conference on Popular Education (attended by activists and
representatives of a range of student, teacher, political and community organi-
sations of the Mass Democratic Movement of the time), the COSATU Educa-
tion Secretary argued that in formal education:
… knowledge is structured into curricula and must therefore inevita-

bly be removed from daily experience. The process of abstraction is
important to advance beyond the specific, but when it becomes fetish-
ised into a static body of knowledge, that is known to the teacher but
not the pupil, then it reinforces authoritarian control. (Erwin, 1987/1991,
p. 314)
COSATU’s 1987 education conference explicitly critiqued the capitalist division

of labour and asserted that education “should destroy the division between
mental and manual labour” (Conference Report, cited in Andrews, 2003, p. 84).
Its approach was to:
… always respect the knowledge that people already have. Do not make
the mistake of believing that in education the teacher has the knowledge
and the pupil is blank. In fact both teacher and pupil have knowledge.
We must mix this knowledge through discussion. It is this mixture of knowl-
edge that makes new knowledge and advances our understanding. (Erwin,
1987/1991, p. 297, emphasis added)
A CHAT analysis helps to illuminate the fact that in workers’ education, knowl-
edge acquisition is not simply the ‘object’ of the system, as it is in formal educa-
tion but more significantly, it is seen as a tool of mediation. In other words, in
workers’ education knowledge has traditionally been viewed not primarily as
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58 chapter 3
end in itself but as a means to achieve the economic and political emancipa-
tion of workers. While drawing on knowledge of a more abstract, theoretical
and codified kind, knowledge has not been valued ‘for its own sake’ but as a
tool for building organisation, developing campaigns, and in the longer term, a
means of developing an alternative vision of a future society:
… education cannot and must not be separated from organisation. Only

through this link will education be used to solve the problems that peo-
ple face. It will be a step toward liberation and not a means of instruc-
tion and control … a successful education programme will give us clear
minds and wisdom to build and lead organisation. (COSATU, 1986, cited
in Andrews, p. 83)
Valuing forms of knowledge that are primarily of political and organisational

relevance was in some respects problematic. In practice organised trade union
education only reached a small layer of worker leadership. This meant that
in a context where the majority of black workers had lacked access to basic
schooling let alone further education opportunities, the question of access to
general education opportunities for workers was not directly addressed by the
trade unions.10 As shown in the previous chapter, attempts in the early 1970s to
develop general correspondence courses for workers, and in the late 1970s and
early 1980s to prioritise literacy education for workers, were both eclipsed by
the dominant view within the emerging union movement that workers’ educa-
tion must be tied closely to organisational needs.
The lack of access to basic adult education on the part of the majority of
workers was to make itself felt later, after 1994, in the context of a very differ-
ent political and economic climate. It will be shown in the next section how,
in the post-apartheid period, workers’ lack of a firm foundation in literacy
and numeracy contributed to the weakening of trade unions’ ability to engage
proactively with technological changes in the workplace, as well as restricting
their ability to retain democratic participation in and workers control of the
unions in the post-apartheid era.
4 Views on Knowledge in SAMWU
The history of the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) illus-
trates vividly how the mental/manual division of labour in the municipal
workplace impacted on its early politics. As noted in Chapter 1, this union’s
history as a black trade union was a-typical in South Africa. Whereas African
migrant workers constituted the core of ‘unskilled’ workers in most parts of
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the country, the Western Cape was a ‘coloured labour-preference area’11 where
municipal labour was undertaken primarily by an urbanised, coloured work-
ing class. The CTMWA had been founded in the 1920s, and for much of the next
60 years, a conservative leadership elite drawn predominantly from the more
educated and higher paid, ‘white-collar’ staff in the municipality, controlled
the union.12 As one grassroots activist of the 1980s recalled:
… when I came in, you know, people (wore) ties and suits when they
came to meetings, and you know, I’m not used to those things, attending
meetings with a suit and a tie. I felt out of place … and even the language
which they spoke was a very high English, it wasn’t a level which every-
body could understand. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 141)
In the 1980s, under the influence of growing popular mobilisation and wide-
spread strikes by workers in other sectors, this local government trade union
underwent a process of radical change. Grassroots activists managed to unseat
their elitist and conservative leadership, leading to a process of democratisa-
tion where unskilled and semi-skilled workers carried far greater weight within
the organisation. After the formation of COSATU in 1985, the CTMWA merged
with other unions of black municipal workers to form SAMWU.
By the time I began my research in the union in the early 2000s, these pro-
cesses were reflected in an emerging education philosophy where experiential
knowledge was widely valued and ordinary workers were viewed by the union
as a valuable source of knowledge. Workers were frequently referred to as ‘the
real experts’; for example, one shopfloor leader expressed the view in an inter-
view that:
… people have the answer, if one can understand that, the people actually
have the answer, and it’s a matter of drawing out those answers from the
people. And then adding your own to it, and then putting it into perspec-
tive and summarising it to them – it makes magic. So – you don’t have to
come there with all the answers. If you let them speak, speak, speak, you
know, and – the more they can speak and the less you speak at the outset,
it’s so much better. You can actually see where they’re coming from, what
it is that they’re wanting, what it is that they’re actually expecting … They
have all of the answers, you know. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 175)
Another example of how the union elaborated its views on knowledge was in
the union’s 2002/2003 Political Education Book. It posed a question around
‘tools of analysis’ and proposed answers which set out the respective roles of
‘experience’ and ‘theory’:
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60 chapter 3
What are tools of Analysis?

All of us engage in Analysis when we try to figure out why things happen
the way they do.
There are two elements of Analysis: Experience and Assumptions tested
through experience
The two elements come together to form a theory
A theory is a way of understanding why things happen the way they do.
(as cited in Cooper 2005, pp. 62–63)
Experience, then, was seen as the source of theoretical knowledge: experience

yields assumptions which are then tested – again through experience – and
these two elements (experience and assumptions validated through experi-
ence) come together to form theory.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, workers in the municipal sector experi-
enced the impact of South Africa’s re-entry into the global economy through
privatisation, outsourcing, and the reorganisation of the work process. Work-
ers’ experiences were drawn upon within the union in order to understand
management’s strategies to cut labour costs, and to develop its own strategies
to counter these developments. The quote below related to a research project
on workplace restructuring, carried out by activists within one branch of the
union as a deliberate attempt to tap into workers’ knowledge of changes in
work organisation in municipal depots. While trying to protect workers’ jobs,
the union was also concerned to widen access to basic services on the part of
poor communities and previously disadvantaged areas of the city. The union’s
Cape Town branch decided to embark on a research process which would
identify – from workers’ point of view – how the ‘efficiency and effectiveness’
of service delivery might be improved, while at the same time protecting jobs
and public ownership of these services:
It is workers who have the experience and knowledge of service delivery.

It is workers who work at the front-line. To change how we work and to
work more effectively demands that we struggle for more opportunities
for workers to look at what can be improved. We need managers who
know this. … Managers spend half their day sitting in boardrooms dis-
cussing ‘how must it be done?’ All we are asking is for workers to be given
3 or 4 hours in a month to discuss the same question. (as cited in Cooper,
2005, pp. 169–170)
Unionists also valued knowledge from outside workers’ experiences. This was
evident in the emphasis placed on the need for worker representatives to read
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widely. In part, this reflected a view of a trade unionist as being a well-rounded,

knowledgeable individual. However the need to read widely was also becom-
ing a practical necessity for representatives dealing with a growing number of
complex issues ranging from new government policies to labour law legisla-
tion, economic indicators that might affect wage bargaining, or environmental
research that held implications for workers’ health and safety.
In addition to regarding such conceptual and contextual knowledge as
essential, there was also a tradition that all workers should have access to all
forms of knowledge. For example, worker representatives attending a political
education workshop were expected to grasp a number of high level concepts
irrespective of their prior levels of formal education. The union’s education
programme set out in the Political Education booklet required participants
to develop some understanding of capitalism, neo-liberalism and socialism;
globalisation; the state; reformist politics; the national democratic revolution;
societal contradictions; hegemonic leadership of the working class; and dif-
ferent strands of feminism. Participants were also required to develop their
contextual understanding of topics such as: world history and the history of
revolutionary struggles; the ‘retreat of the Left’ internationally; lessons from
the ‘Australian Accord’ in the 1980s; GATS13; and the nature of the South Afri-
can political economy (Cooper, 2005). It is questionable how easily such con-
cepts and contextual understandings could be developed, given that most
texts were in English while many union members had relatively low levels of
literacy and spoke languages other than English. This issue will be returned to
later in this chapter.
In addition to valuing ‘codified’ knowledge, unionists demonstrated a seri-
ous concern to establish the reliability of the information or knowledge they
were dealing with. The need to ‘get things right’ was critical as a guide to action,
and it created an urgency to obtain strategic information. For example, in one
meeting the Chair emphasised in relation to information that the union had
requested from an outside research group: “… we need it now! Not six months
down the line … Now!” The requirement for valid knowledge clearly stemmed
from workers’ engagement with real life problems, rather than an attachment
to more abstract, scientific principles. However, these demands were equally
as stringent, and conventions of scientific research were frequently drawn
upon in order to check on the validity of information.14
4.1 Experience Versus Expertise?

The methodological approach of Cultural Historical Activity Theory alerts us
to tensions and contradictions inherent in any activity system, and there were
a number of tensions and contradictions becoming evident within the union
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62 chapter 3
by the end of the first post-apartheid decade. One source of contradiction

was the earlier history of a divide between leadership and rank-and-file, that
echoed the intellectual/manual division of labour. This continued to make
itself felt despite the union’s stated commitment to overcoming hierarchies of
knowledge. Divisions and hierarchies between workers were not a new phe-
nomenon historically, internationally or locally, and there are countless exam-
ples of occasions when workers have been able to unite across divisions to
organise and take collective action. But the early 2000s was a period of major
interventions to restructure the organisation of work within local govern-
ment and SAMWU was beginning to suffer significant membership loss. While
‘unskilled’ jobs had been reduced, there had been a simultaneous increase
in the number of union members who had moved into management, ‘white
collar’ or artisanal positions as institutionalised racism was eroded (SAMWU,
2003, p. 44). These changes in workplace organisation echoed broader changes
within the economy from the early 1990s which were impacting on the labour
movement. This impact was marked by power being redistributed to those
with more formal expertise and associated with a steady decline in the move-
ment’s participatory, democratic culture, a growing gap between leadership
and rank-and-file, and an emerging ideology of upward mobility (von Holdt,
2003, pp. 293–294).
In SAMWU, concern with the technical aspects of improving service deliv-
ery was reflected in the increased value placed on those with ‘schooled knowl-
edge’, leading on occasion to a superior and patronising attitude towards those
who were unschooled. I witnessed union officials berating worker representa-
tives for being ignorant or stupid, for ‘not learning properly’ from their train-
ing, or ‘not bothering’ to understand complex documents. In one branch of the
union, members refused to elect a worker who was nominated for the position
of chairperson because he was illiterate. The shop-steward who reported this
to me was of the view that “new shop-stewards don’t want to be chaired by
someone ‘below them’” (Cooper, 2005, pp. 178–179).
The question of workers’ attitudes towards literacy and ‘schooled knowledge’
was explored in my interviews with a selection of full-time shop-stewards. One
tried to explain the difficulties facing workers and the union in a workplace
context which was making greater textual demands on worker representatives:
Labour, trade unions, are in such a dilemma. This is the age we are in …
the high-tech age … it becomes more and more demanding for people to
be able to read and write, although we say we don’t want to make it a pre-
requisite or a criteria when you are elected (as a worker representative) …
But it does afterwards become a need that you … have that literacy level. …
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There’s got to be a skill, or … [an ability] to interpret legal language … You

have to read in black and white … you gotta have a level of understanding
and [ability to interpret] what they are saying to you, otherwise you mess
completely, you know, and the employer knows this, they’ll use language
… that you cannot understand …. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 179)
His colleague countered this with an argument that requiring all shop-stew-
ards to be literate would rob the union of its essential purpose:
But I still think that we take away the nature of trade unions if … the
trade union puts the condition that in order to become a shop-steward
you must be able to read and write. I believe that would be [against] the
nature of the trade union. … To me it’s important that shop-stewards
are elected on the basis that they are committed to the trade union, that
they’re committed to improving workers’ conditions, that they’re com-
mitted to contribute to the working [class] struggle … generally. (ibid.)
Taken together, these two quotes capture the complex and contradictory
social purpose of the trade union outlined in Chapter 2 – an organisation
that is caught between conflict with, and pragmatic accommodation to, the
dominant social order. Parallel to this is the tension between valuing experi-
ential knowledge and the need for more and more specialised expertise. My
research into the Workers’ College a decade later allowed me to explore how an
organisation dedicated to workers’ education was attempting to resolve some
of these contradictions.
5 Views on Knowledge in the Workers’ College
As noted in an earlier chapter, the Workers’ College does not offer formal quali-
fications but has an access agreement with a local university into which Col-
lege ‘graduates’ can gain entry through Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL).
The College articulated a more elaborated and sophisticated epistemology
than SAMWU, aimed not only at bridging the intellectual divide between those
who ‘think’ and those who ‘do’, but also critically challenging the privileged
status of academic knowledge.
For the Workers’ College, recognising and affirming workers’ experiential
knowledge was core. It viewed the recognition of prior, experiential learning
not simply as a means of access into formal education, but as a central part of
its curriculum:
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64 chapter 3
As the College sees it, learning best takes place by connecting learn-
ers’ experiential knowledge with broader theoretical concepts as well
as academic knowledge. This pedagogy is rooted in an adult education
approach, in this case with a specific focus on equipping trade union
and community activists with the practical and theoretical capacities
to strengthen their activism and their organizational practices. (Vally,
waBofelo, & Treat, 2013, p. 514)
My first encounter with the Workers’ College curriculum was through its writ-
ten materials – its course readers and its learner guides. As part of a national
RPL research project (see Cooper & Ralphs, 2016), a colleague and I had been
asked to observe one, week-long block of classes in order to contribute an ‘out-
sider’ perspective to the case study research that the College was undertak-
ing, and my perusal of the text-based teaching materials was in preparation
for this visit. In the light of the College’s views on the value of prior, experien-
tial knowledge, I was perplexed to find the readers based almost entirely on
academic texts that were theoretically dense and conceptually complex. The
exercises outlined in the learner guides seemed only to draw on participants’
experiences in order to explain a number of abstract concepts. Why was there
such a strong emphasis on theory and specialised concepts?
The College’s political philosophy was firmly rooted within critical Marxist
theory. Each of its courses has a strong theoretical component, based on the
assumption that the task of bringing about radical social change is best served
by providing participants with a strong set of conceptual resources. The Col-
lege viewed the conceptual knowledge in its curriculum as essential to ena-
bling trade union and community workers to become better activists in their
sites of practice (Vally et al., 2013, p. 518). Staff argued that elements of criti-
cal social theory, and the specialised language associated with it, are already
circulating within civil society organisations and are not the sole preserve of
the academy. They viewed the building of theoretical and conceptual capacity
as integral to the development of well informed, thoughtful, critical and well-
rounded activists.
The view was that individual experience should not simply be drawn upon
but should also be interrogated through exposure to, and critical engagement
with texts, concepts, theories and debates. In other words, experiential knowl-
edge should be critically assessed and validated through its interaction with
conceptual knowledge. One staff member described it as “taking the learners
from where they are and developing them further”:
We demystify concepts first, by describing them in experience, and

then explore them in a more distanced, measured way … Working with
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learners’ experiential knowledge to arrive at more conceptual under-

standings gives learners a theoretical language of description. When
the facilitator subsequently works backwards from abstract concepts to
learners’ experiential knowledge, this helps them understand and cri-
tique their experiential learning, their assumptions, and their organi-
zational, activist practice: ‘[we are] pulling them out of their context in
order to put them back in again’. (Vally et al., 2013, p. 519)
Another staff member talked of ‘de-conceptualising’ the concept, or exposing

it to concrete reality, and then ‘reconceptualising it’ again:
… the Workers’ College attempts to mediate between the struggle knowl-

edge of activists who come into the diploma programs, and a set of theo-
retical frameworks whose concepts relate to such experiences, directly
or indirectly. It also attempts to facilitate a process for activists to under-
stand their current existence and develop their own independent world-
view in opposition to the dominant knowledge system and culture that
prevails in our globalized society. (Vally et al., 2013, p. 527)
Staff argued that they were not asking participants to ‘dissolve’ their experi-
ences into concepts, but rather to use their experience to review and challenge
concepts, and even come up with new concepts. They emphasised that the
College’s courses did not aim to teach disciplinary knowledge per se but rather
to equip activists to use Marxist methodology as a ‘a way of interrogating the
world’ and to critique established academic discourses.
It is clear that the epistemology of the Workers’ College was in line with
a dialectical approach to conceptual development, with an emphasis on the
complementary roles of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, following Gramsci, Freire and
Vygotsky. At the same time, it was clearly influenced by critical feminist cri-
tiques of dualist epistemologies that separate knowledge of the personal from
knowledge of the political. It placed emphasis on the ‘personal as political’, and
linked to this, on personal reflexivity as an important source of knowledge and
a tool for strengthening activist identity: “If you can’t transform yourself you
cannot transform broader society” (Vally et al., 2013, p. 522). Of key importance
was that participants learn to think critically not only about the world, but
about themselves – to “turn the lens on themselves”. A theme of ‘healing’ was
also prominent: the College aimed to ‘give voice’ to individual and collective
stories of pain and struggle, thereby restoring to participants a sense of their
own humanity.
The Workers’ College had also evolved an approach to the growing demands
for formalisation and accreditation of workers’ education. It did not reject the
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66 chapter 3
need for workers to access formal education opportunities, but it did ‘reject the
values of commodifying education’. It also aimed to explore and where neces-
sary challenge the relationship between the formal knowledge of the academy
and the experiential knowledge born of activism in workers’ and community
organisations. Staff argued that important new knowledge is produced in the
process of social action and social struggles, and it sought to engage critically
with academic curricula and challenge the hierarchies that lead to experi-
ential forms of knowledge being undervalued and unrecognised within the
academy.
6 Emerging Tensions and Contradictions
As noted earlier, knowledge is not only the object of workers education as an

activity system but more significantly, a tool of mediation – a means towards
the goals of workers’ education. Tools of mediation are always embedded in
culture and history, and in workers’ education, knowledge is viewed as being
embedded in class interests. While more codified bodies of knowledge are
viewed as having value, they are not regarded as politically neutral. This gives
rise to a number of significant tensions and contradictions. In the case of the
Workers’ College. As noted above, the College articulated a critique of the elit-
ism of the academy and aimed to build an ‘alternative knowledge base’ born
of experience which can enrich and transform the formal ‘knowledge archive’.
However, this goal sat in tension with its commitment to secure access for its
graduates into higher education, and the necessity of providing participants
with formal, academic literacy skills that this necessarily requires (this is dis-
cussed further in Chapter 7).
Deepening this contradiction is the fact that ‘experience’ itself is not a given
but is itself a construction. Experiential Learning theorists have been critiqued
for treating the notion of ‘experience’ unproblematically, suggesting that
through reflection the learner can uncover the ‘true’ meaning of his/her expe-
rience. Critical, feminist and post-structuralist theorists such as Wildemeersch
(1992), Usher (1992), Michelson (1998) and Brookfield (1998) have all argued in
different ways that ‘experience’, like knowledge, is always located historically,
socially and materially where it both reflects and reproduces social relations
and social practices. Adult education literature on post-modernism (Usher,
1992; Usher, Bryant, & Johnston, 1997; Usher & Edwards, 1995) has focused
attention on the increasing dislocation of experience in the era of globalisa-
tion, where people have become multiply-located in spaces mapped by class,
race, gender, sexuality, age, culture, religion and language.
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The longstanding notion that workers’ experientially-derived knowl-

edge can ‘test’ theory, or produce its own generalisations, is predicated on
the assumption that such knowledge has some validity because it is rooted
in the shared experiences of workers. However, since the 1980s internation-
ally, and since the 1990s in South Africa, global capital’s neoliberal strategies
have increasingly fractured the shared nature of workers’ experience. Sawchuk
(2007) has described how late capitalism has destroyed many of the condi-
tions through which workers’ traditional knowledge was created in function-
ing, working class communities, and led to new levels of economic isolation
and social fragmentation:
Comparatively, and beyond the temptations of nostalgia, the fact is that

the capacity for producing rich forms of everyday knowledge were pre-
sent more abundantly in the great working class communities of old,
associated with the ‘golden era’ of Fordism (1940–1970). (p. 201)
In South Africa, a widening gap is emerging between the material conditions

and lived experiences of full-time workers and those who are outsourced
or casualised, between unionized and un-unionised workers, and between
employed, unemployed and self-employed. This has seriously undermined
working class collectivity and, in turn, the ability of unionised workers to gen-
erate knowledge that has some relevance to the vast, reserve armies of labour.
Alongside this is an increasing trend – visible from the mid-1990s when
organised labour became the ‘social partner’ of the ANC in government – to
turn to experts from outside of the union, and a declining confidence in ordi-
nary workers’ capacity to be ‘the real experts’. The need for increased levels
of expert knowledge is a feature of the shift from industrial to post-industrial
society, with new technologies of work that are increasingly knowledge inten-
sive, and the emergence of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ more generally
(Guile, 2010, pp. 9–20). For trade unionists to participate in the industrial rela-
tions system of contemporary capitalism, it is necessary for them to develop
greater specialisms themselves. For example, representatives need to engage
in complex legal processes, understand the science of health and safety or
the environment, critically ‘read’ local and international economic trends, or
engage with government policies within the corridors of power. Hence the
SAMWU shop-steward’s earlier reference to the ‘dilemma’ that unions face in
the ‘high tech age’. Changes in technology as well as the increased specialisa-
tion of knowledge also demand higher levels of general education in the form
of foundational knowledge and the range of literacies needed to carry out even
the routine duties of worker representatives in the workplace.
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68 chapter 3
In South Africa, as in other severely unequal societies, the legacy of apart-

heid education continues to mean that members of the trade unions will not
have the literacy or numeracy requirements to perform these roles. The low
levels of general education amongst workers and increasing need for specialist
roles inevitably widens the social and intellectual division of labour within the
unions themselves and threatens to undermine the union movement’s long-
standing traditions of grassroots democracy and workers’ control.15
7 Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to show that there is coherence and considerable
continuity in both the implicit and explicit epistemology of workers’ education
internationally, over a long period of time. The chapter began by noting the
relative absence of theorising in regard to knowledge generated or shared in
non-formal and informal collective, social learning contexts, including work-
ers’ education. There is also a lack of recognition that there exists a distinct
epistemology underpinning workers’ educational practices. As Visvanathan
(2001, p. 4) has argued, ordinary people do not only produce new knowledge;
they also produce new epistemologies, that is, “new rules or methods for mak-
ing of knowledge”.
I argue that a key feature that distinguishes radical workers’ education
from some other traditions of popular education is the value it places on codi-
fied knowledge, including critical theory, knowledge of history, and scientific
knowledge itself. At the same time, the value of these more abstract, systema-
tised bodies of knowledge is not seen as fully realised until they are linked
to workers’ experiences and to organisational needs. Workers’ experiences are
seen as a key source of knowledge in their own right, and capable of yielding
generalisations of their own, of acting as a means of validating ‘theory’, and of
proving the usefulness or otherwise of concepts.
Another central feature that lies at the heart of this epistemology is the ideal
of ‘healing the breach’ between intellectual and manual labour – between
conception and execution, between theory and experiential knowledge. This
division has its origins in the development of capitalism, but also bears the
marks of patriarchy and the legacies of colonialism. The ideal of overcoming
this divide is reflected in the history of radical thought and educational theo-
ries that view both theory and experiential knowledge as essential to learning
with each playing a complementary role. A review of historical perspectives on
knowledge within the South African labour movement shows that these epis-
temological assumptions have guided approaches to workers’ education over a
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lengthy period of time and continue to do so. In the words of one, longstanding
South African worker educator:
My view of experiential learning and its relationship to theory is that

theory is a codification of experiences over time. So there isn’t some-
thing called ‘abstract theory’. It may look abstract but it is a codification
of actions, activities, interactions, that takes people from observing and
testing and now becomes codified as theory. For me it’s important to
understand that. Even in the making up of theory there is the input of
experience. (Sikwebu, in press)
At the same time, a number of tensions and contradictions within these

approaches to knowledge have been identified. One such tension revolves
around how to meet the need for unions and other working class organisations
to increase their levels of specialisation and expert knowledge while retaining
participatory democracy and workers control over their organisations. Work-
ers education is not in a space of “idealized opposition to hegemony, outside
of the space of hegemony” (Soudien, 2002, p. 10). While it aims to challenge
and subvert dominant power relations, it remains nevertheless entangled in
the relations of power associated with our contemporary knowledge hierar-
chies. The tensions and contradictions permeating workers’ education cannot
be wished away, but at the same time, they hold within them the possibility of
something new emerging.
Notes
1 There have been critiques of Sohn-Rethel for an overly mechanistic view of the
relationship between mode of production and mode of thought (Jappe, 2013); and
for ignoring the question of reproduction, and the sexual division of labour (Rose,
1983).
2 There is an interesting echo in Vygotsky’s use of this term, and Lenin and Gramsci’s
notions of the ‘limits of spontaneity’ in terms of the development of working class
consciousness (see Holst, 1999, p. 413).
3 My earliest experiences as a practitioner in the adult literacy movement in South
Africa was strongly influenced by Freirian pedagogy.
4 And some traditions of political education common within the Communist move-
ment (see Samoff, 1991).
5 Black workers had begun to move into semi-skilled positions from the 1960s
onwards.
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70 chapter 3
6 See for example the South African Institute for Race Relations’ literacy work, and
Operation Upgrade (also in Bird, 1984).
7 The emergence of ‘New Left’ thinking is seen as a response to the crisis of social
democracy on the one hand, and Stalinism of the Communist Left, on the other.
See Holst (1999) for a critique of the way in which Gramsci was interpreted in some
of the social movement literature that emerged from this new wave of neo-Marxist
thinking.
8 Braverman (1974), Johnson (1979) and MacIntyre (1980) each detail the long and
rich history of how workers, and members of the working class more generally, have
demonstrated a ‘thirst’ for knowledge of their world and beyond, seeking ‘enlight-
enment’ mainly through non-accredited forms such as lectures, study groups, and
self-study.
9 Power!
10 There were efforts by NGOs however, to address more basic educational needs.
These NGOs included Learn and Teach In Johannesburg, Using Spoken and Written
English (USWE) in Johnnesburg and Cape Town, the Adult Learning Project in Cape
Town and Port Elizabeth, and Umtapo Centre in Durban. See www.sahistory.org.za
and www.populareducation.co.za for further information.
11 Under apartheid, those workers classified as ‘coloured’ did not have to carry passes,
and in the Western Cape where ‘coloured’ communities were concentrated, they
had preferential access to jobs in some sectors of the economy.
12 See Rudin (1996) for a comprehensive early history of the union and its anteced-
ents.
13 General Agreement on Trade in Services – a treaty of the WTO which came into
force in 1995.
14 For example, when Coetzee’s (2003) research report on the union’s organised
education programme was delivered to provincial education forum, participants
probed the representivity of her sampling methods and the language in which she
conducted interviews with shop-stewards.
15 The decline of democracy within the labour movement has been aggravated by
a range of other organisational and social factors such as increased bureaucrati-
sation, corruption and deliberate closing down of spaces for democratic debate,
elaborated further in Chapter 7.
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CHAPTER 4
What Is ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ in Workers’

Education?
Mechanics Institutes (are) not intended to teach the most useful knowl-
edge but to teach only as might be profitable to the unproductive ….
Johnson (1979a, p. 85)
∵
The idea of ‘really useful knowledge’ developed among radical working class
organisations in England in the 19th century. At the time, the British industrial
bourgeoisie set up ‘Useful Knowledge Societies’ to teach workers the basic sci-
ence needed to participate in new technologies of production. The working
class Chartist movement1 responded by calling for ‘Really Useful Knowledge’,
‘the knowledge we need to get ourselves out of our present troubles’. The Char-
tists were not opposed to ‘useful knowledge’ in the form of technical knowl-
edge or workplace skills, but their position was that workers’ education should
not be restricted to that (Boughton, 2007).
The question is posed: what is ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ for workers? Where
is it drawn from or how is it produced? While the previous chapter focused
on the epistemology underpinning workers’ education practices, this chapter
focuses on the forms of knowledge that are shared in workers’ education. It was
noted in the previous chapter that while there has been extensive theorisation
of formal, codified knowledge as well as a growing body of research literature
on different forms of workplace knowledge, there have been few attempts to
conceptualise or theorise the forms of knowledge in use in social action or
social movement contexts. How might we conceptualise the form and content
of this ‘counter-hegemonic’ knowledge?2 Does it have a unique structure or
specific logic of its own? Does it have its own systematicity or coherence, and
if so, what forms do these assume?
Like the epistemology of workers’ education, while there are distinctive
features of the forms of knowledge in use, the question of how such forms
of knowledge are produced or shared in workers education requires historical
and empirical grounding. This chapter draws on a number of detailed descrip-
tive accounts of workers’ education ‘in action’, based on case study research
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72 chapter 4
in the South African context. The knowledge practices described have been
shaped by local, social and material realities, and clearly cannot be general-
ised to workers’ education in all other contexts. Nevertheless, I will argue that
Gramsci’s theorisation of the role of organic intellectuals in forging a relation-
ship between ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’, illuminates and provides a
means for more inclusive ‘analytical generalisations’ to be made about knowl-
edge produced and shared within radical workers’ education more generally.
It should be noted that the question of ‘what is really useful knowledge?’
is not peculiar to workers’ education but has been debated widely in the field
of education studies, particularly at this juncture in the development of the
world economy and society. The issue of ‘knowledge’ is a key one under glo-
balisation and is related to current debates around the ‘Fourth Industrial
Revolution’ (Schwab, 2016), and the emergence of the so-called ‘knowledge
society’, ‘knowledge economy’ and new stratum of ‘knowledge workers’ (Guile,
2010; Livingstone & Guile, 2012). These debates have been accompanied by
increased interest in the question of knowledge production outside of tradi-
tional sites of the academy (see Gibbons et al., 1994; Knorr-Cetina, 1999). What
is ‘really useful knowledge’ in workers’ education is also not solely a theoreti-
cal or conceptual question; it is deeply implicated in a much broader debate
around the ‘politics of knowledge’, and the question of how we recognise and
value – or fail to recognise and value – diverse forms of knowledge. Since South
Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, there has been an ongoing debate
about what knowledge should form the basis of the formal curriculum in the
post-apartheid education system. Until recently this debate has focused pri-
marily on schooling but in the last few years, with the upsurge of university
student struggles, the focus has increasingly shifted to the question of how to
‘decolonise curriculum’ in higher education (Connell, 2017). The question in
this chapter of how to conceptualise the forms of knowledge in use in workers’
education therefore has broader relevance to broader sociological and educa-
tional debates.
The chapter begins by briefly sketching the contours of these sometimes-
acrimonious debates around what knowledge should form the basis of the for-
mal curriculum in order to illustrate the charged and deeply politicised nature
of these debates in the post-colonial context of South Africa. It will then pro-
vide some answers to the question of what forms of knowledge constitute the
‘curriculum’ in workers’ education and will argue that an understanding of this
might contribute to and enrich the debate around what knowledge is of most
value to society, and what should or should not be included in a ‘decolonised’
curriculum.
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What Is ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ in Workers’ Education? 73
1 The South African ‘Knowledge Wars’
At the dawn of a democratic, non-racial South Africa, education policy mak-

ers needed to configure a new, national curriculum that, on the one hand,
would be capable of addressing the inequalities of apartheid, and on the other,
would enable the country to re-enter a globalised, competitive international
economy. Young (2007, p. 8) describes the initial processes of addressing these
challenges in this way:
… there was an understandable attempt to establish a new and different

system free from the legacy of apartheid. Not only were words changed –
students became learners and teachers became educators – but the most
directly punitive elements of the previous system, a narrowly prescribed
curriculum and an authoritarian inspection system – were rejected as
in principle inescapably racist. At the same time the question for policy
makers and researchers was ‘what kind of new system was needed that
could provide real opportunities for the many and not just the few?’ An
integrated system that did away with the 18 racially-based departments
and which did not divide and distinguish types of learners but would give
credit to all the previously unrecognised learning and skills within the
African majority, seemed an obvious and progressive step. So too (at least
for some) did an outcome-based curriculum that, it was hoped, would
enable teachers to be free to facilitate learning among their students.
In other words, the traditions of ‘People’s Education’ developed during the

anti-apartheid struggle (see Cooper & Luckett, 2017) were to influence educa-
tion policy-makers in the 1990s in forging a new system. In doing so, South
Africa belatedly adopted many of the principles underpinning the critical,
neo-Marxist, New Sociology of Education theories that had emerged else-
where in the 1970s (see for example, Young, 1971; Apple, 1975; Whitty & Young,
1976; Karabel & Halsey, 1977). As Young (2007) notes, this was accompanied by
suspicion towards subject specialisms, and doubts about the value of discipli-
nary knowledge that was not shown to be directly relevant to practice. These
new policies were strongly influenced by the organised trade union movement
and its priorities of redress for those historically most excluded from access to
formal education, and recognition of knowledge gained through experiential
learning.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the adoption of an outcomes-based edu-
cation (OBE) system, with a learner centred, problem-solving approach and
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74 chapter 4
hostility towards prescribed curriculum, had provoked a critical response from

an increasingly influential group of sociologists of education (including Young,
2002; Muller, 2000; Ensor, 2003; Gamble, 2006), influenced by the social real-
ist (SR) thinking of the British sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein
(Bernstein, 1996). They argued that OBE failed to respect the principle of knowl-
edge differentiation and thus undermined the distinction between ‘everyday’
understandings and the ‘powerful knowledge’ required as a basis for the for-
mal curriculum.3 This distinction and the need for a differentiated approach to
knowledge was important if curriculum was to meet the demands of increased
specialisation of knowledge in the context of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Young &
Muller, 2014). In ‘Selling out Education’ Allais (2014) took these arguments
into a broader critique of the global political economy, arguing that National
Qualifications Frameworks internationally short-changed learners by fore-
grounding ‘work ready’, instrumental competences and skills at the expense of
foundational knowledge.
More recently, the debate has turned full circle with a number of rejoin-
ders and critiques of the social realist (SR) position. Michelson questioned
the social realists’ dualist approach to knowledge by asking “what work the
emphasis on boundaries is doing” (Michelson, 2004, p. 7) in the context of
a South Africa that had only recently emerged from a racially divided past.
She argued that sociologists of knowledge should be “seeking commonalities
… (between) different cultures of knowledge” (ibid., p. 14)4 instead. Edwards
(2014) argued that in the SR critiques of constructivism, they failed to distin-
guish between the critical versions and more relativist versions. Zipin, Fatar,
and Brennan (2015) argued that SR’s grounds for knowledge selection into cur-
riculum overplays the cognitive (epistemological) purposes of education in
ways that marginalise ethical (axiological) purposes. They criticise the view
that the inclusion of everyday experiential knowledge into curriculum imparts
“contaminating deficits” (p. 20), and pose the question: “Is interrelation, rather
than stark binary separation (between everyday and formal knowledge) so ter-
rible for learning purposes?” (p. 21).
Both Edwards (2014) and Zipin et al. (2015) arrive at an argument that what
is needed is a transactional view of knowledge, and in line with Vygotsky’s epis-
temological stance, one which asserts the dialectical interplay between ‘formal’
and ‘informal’ knowledge, rather than a binary relationship. “This dialectical
thinking sees the ‘profane’ plane of life-world knowledge as the very epistemo-
logical fabric necessary for scientific concepts to gain and sustain meaning”
(Zipin et al., 2015, p. 24). Drawing attention to Nancy Fraser’s (2009) work on
the need for robust knowledge for social justice in globalising contexts, Zipin
et al. (2015, p. 24) argue that ‘useful knowledge’ is not inevitably instrumentalist
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in nature, and that valuing knowledge in relation to its life-world based use-
values ensures that we take account of ethical judgements about societal need
(p. 24).
This brief synopsis of what was a complex debate is intended to highlight
the politically charged nature of the question of what is ‘the most useful
knowledge’ in the context of South Africa, a country which is emerging from
a past where the knowledge of the majority of people was marginalised and
devalued, while at the same time entering a global ‘knowledge economy’ heav-
ily based on technological innovation. How can the knowledge practices of
workers’ education contribute to the debate about what is ‘really useful knowl-
edge’ in today’s world?
In the following section, I return to research conducted in the early 2000s in
the Cape Town branch of the local government trade union, SAMWU, and draw
on this to explore some of the forms of knowledge that comprise ‘really useful
knowledge’ within the trade union context, as an illustrative case of workers’
education in the global South. In doing so, I argue that an understanding of
the different forms of knowledge in use in workers’ education can inform our
understandings of what knowledge is of most worth in the 21st century.
2 Knowledge Use in SAMWU
Education and learning can be regarded as taking place in a range of sites

within the union, in addition to its most visible forms in organised training
programmes. This section will draw on examples of education and learning
events and the forms of knowledge drawn on across three sub-sites in SAMWU:
– The union’s organised education programmes, in particular, those targeted
at newly-elected shop-stewards and aimed at introducing them to the
union’s constitution and their roles and responsibilities as workplace rep-
resentatives.
– Meetings of shop-steward committees where reports on issues such priva-
tisation, local government restructuring and wage-negotiations were deliv-
ered and debated.
– A three-week national strike of municipal workers in July 2002 over wages,
which began with a march by thousands of workers through the centre of
the city of Cape Town.5
Examples drawn on will show that workers’ education within the trade union
context draws on a wide range of knowledge forms. In addition, the nature of
knowledge that is recruited is so complexly layered and hybridised that it is not
fruitful to conceptualise this knowledge in dualist terms. However, it will also
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76 chapter 4
be shown that an analytic distinction between different forms of knowledge

has some value as it allows us to identify which different forms of knowledge
tend to predominate in what sites within the organisation. This in turn may be
seen as an indicator of the balance of power relations within different sites of
learning within the union.
2.1 Knowledge Use in Education Workshops

To some extent it is possible to talk of a ‘workers’ education curriculum’ in
the context of this union. At the time of my research on SAMWU, a number
of established union programmes had existed for some years, coordinated by
a team of full-time education staff at head-office and regional levels. In some
cases, the curriculum of these programmes – for example, those of shop-stew-
ard training, collective bargaining, political education and local government
restructuring – had been codified in the form of booklets and manuals. In addi-
tion to these programmes, the union delivered a range of ‘special issue’ courses
at an introductory and an advanced level which spanned both theory and
skills development in areas such as health safety and environment, political
economy, educator skills, labour law, workplace education and training, gen-
der studies, union organisational management and development and union
finances, none of which had a set ‘curriculum’ (Cooper, 2005, pp. 102, 104).6
Some of the union’s programmes had a strong theoretical or conceptual
focus. For example, the union’s ‘Political Education’ handbook, aimed at the
union’s general membership, contained a chapter dealing with ‘The devel-
opment of capitalism in South Africa’. As noted in Chapter 3, this included a
section on ‘Tools of Social Analysis’ which explored the relationship between
experience and theory and which introduced two ‘basic views of the world’ –
Liberal and Marxist (Cooper, 2005, p. 115). One of the basic shop-steward train-
ing manuals also theorised the role of education under capitalism; it argued
that formal education systems:
… provided better education to the wealthy and second class education

to the working class. It schooled people to accept that capitalist inequal-
ity is natural and the only way to order society … Education is also about
social control and socialisation. The major purpose of formal education
systems has never been to develop critical thought. (as cited in Cooper,
2005, p. 113)
Despite this foregrounding of theory, SAMWU’s training materials encouraged

a learner-centred, activity-based approach. In workshops themselves, educa-
tors engaged significantly with participants’ ‘every-day’ experiences of their
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workplaces and their living conditions within poor communities. Most often
however, these experiences were used as their starting point to explain pre-
determined, broader contextual or conceptual points. Frequently, this took
the form of a successive ‘layering’ of experiential and conceptual knowledge,
where the ‘anecdotal’ was repeatedly recontextualised and renamed via the
language of abstract concepts. In other words, ‘experience’ was used to scaffold
a dialectical movement from the particular example to broader concepts, and
to make conceptual connections between different issues.
One example (already pointed to in Chapter 2) drawn from an introductory
shop-steward training workshop illustrates this. The full-time union educator
was dealing with the issue of ‘What is the union?’, and drew on new shop-stew-
ards’ experiences to introduce them to some specialised political vocabulary
and concepts:
Educator: Why does management have power? Why do workers need

protection …? It is management and employers against the
workers. So why do we need a union?
Participant 1: So that workers can also have a voice …
Educator: Why is it so difficult for workers to have their say?
Participant 2: Management has money – he can do anything; he can pay peo-
ple; he can chase (dismiss) you …
Participant 3: He is his own boss …
Educator: He owns the means of production – the machines, electricity,
buildings, and the workers – he takes what you produce – and
goes and sells it at a profit. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 132)
In many cases, education programmes drew on elements of formal knowledge

systems with their specialised conceptual languages or where the ordering of
concepts is hierarchical, for example, economics or labour law. Unlike formal
education however, these were not taught as a hierarchical set of principles or
interrelated concepts but rather elements were ‘borrowed’ in order to make
pragmatic connections to real life issues that workers were grappling with.
For example, in the introductory shop-steward training workshop, new shop-
stewards needed to grasp elements of social theory as well as key principles
of labour law in order to understand the nature of the shop-steward’s role.
Another workshop aimed at preparing workers’ representatives for a round of
collective bargaining with employers by building a picture of the wider context
within which wage negotiations would be taking place. Here, worker repre-
sentatives were provided with information around national and international
politics, the international economy, labour and constitutional law, as well
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78 chapter 4
as being presented with a lengthy research report relating to market indica-

tors, macro-economic policy, inflation and social policy. A further example is
a workshop where participants were exposed to history, political theory, and
current developments in the national and global political economy in order to
facilitate their participation in what was a heated political debate at that time
within the broader labour movement on the meaning of ‘ultra-leftism’.
Union workshops often drew in outside experts, but as noted earlier, the ‘epis-
temological authority’ of such experts in areas such as economics or labour law
never rested solely on their subject expertise (although this was important). It
also rested on their understanding of the trade union context, and more impor-
tantly, on their sharing the appropriate ideological disposition demanded of
those working within this community of practice. Having the ‘right’ ideological
disposition was as important a component of ‘really useful knowledge’ as was
its validity and the relevance of the knowledge that was shared.
2.2 Knowledge Use in Routine Organisational Activity

As in most trade unions, learning within this union takes place across a range of
routine forms of organisational involvement where members come together to
receive reports, exchange information, strategise and take collective decisions.
My research covered a selection of meetings which straddled all levels of the
constitutional structures characteristic of this and most other South African
unions.
In contrast to union workshops, in meetings it was workers’ experiences
that were the more important knowledge resources drawn upon. Whereas in
workshops, experience acted as a form of scaffolding to explain new concepts,
in meetings, experience was often drawn on to arrive at new understandings
and conclusions. As in workshops, there was dialectical movement between
different forms of knowledge, but with stronger emphasis on making connec-
tions between different participants’ experiences in order to generate new
understandings. ‘Experience’ was recontextualised via a number of strategies
including sharing and comparing; reflecting critically on those experiences in
the light of information brought from outside of workers’ immediate experi-
ence; and making connections in order to see ‘the bigger picture’.
Rather than relying on those with formal expert knowledge, meetings were
places where the more experienced worker leaders carried significant ‘episte-
mological authority’. For example, older workers brought valuable experience
from other periods in history, while some workers brought much-needed infor-
mation from other structures and forums in which they sat as union represent-
atives. Loyiso (not his real name), a shop-steward who played a leading role
in the branch, had an unusually rich set of involvements in multiple forums.
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He represented his branch in higher (provincial and national) structures of

the union, had attended a course in adult education at a local university, and
was involved in numerous community forums. He was a qualified plumber,
and the union’s representative on a national tri-partite policy body engaged in
developing new water policy for South Africa. He had attended local and inter-
national conferences where he had met environmental activists from around
the world and engaged in international advocacy around water issues.
Loyiso chaired the meeting described earlier in Chapter 2. He opened the
meeting with a report on the restructuring of local government, explicitly
recapping and giving background context and detail. He drew links between
a wide range of issues: restructuring, corporatisation and privatisation, equity
issues, questions of service delivery, and retrenchments. He introduced the
union’s plans to conduct a research project on how to “turn service delivery
around” to benefit previously unserviced, poor areas, and explained that this
research project was linked to a number of university-based research units.
As the meeting became more and more heated with workers debating how
to respond to a proposal for a national strike, Loyiso made crucial interven-
tions: he helped participants to define the problem, he encouraged them to
interrogate and analyse their experiences critically, he summarised opposing
positions at various points in the debate and posed real questions to which no-
one as yet had the answer. He facilitated a movement towards greater depth
of understanding and more generalised conclusions, continuously directing
members to think strategically in arriving at their decisions (see Cooper, 2005,
pp. 148–150). In other words, this shop-steward drew on his broader under-
standing of the local and international context and on reservoirs of special-
ist knowledge to recontextualise workers’ experiences and help them to make
sense of ‘the broader picture’.
2.3 Knowledge in Mass Action

Chapter 6 will go into some detail around how and why SAMWU’s major,
national strike in July 2002 can be regarded as an ‘educational event’. It will
show how the strike not only constituted a significant learning experience for
those workers who took part, but also played a role in educating the broader
public on workers’ grievances, aspirations and visions of the future. For our
purposes here, it is important to note that although the strike was the most
‘everyday’ or informal of the educational sites observed in the union, we
should not conflate ‘site’ with ‘form of knowledge’ in use. Much of the knowl-
edge drawn on in the strike was action-oriented, strategic, instrumental and
contextually specific, but at the same time it was also abstract, conceptual and
generalising in orientation.
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80 chapter 4
On the first day of the strike, an estimated nine thousand SAMWU workers
marched on the local government offices in the centre of Cape Town. An air
of festivity surrounded the march, and the heightened emotions of thousands
of toyi-toying7 workers communicated a sense of confidence and their abso-
lute conviction that justice was on their side. Moving with this huge body of
workers, I was struck by its almost festive character which reminded me of
the annual carnival that takes place through the streets of Cape Town each
new year (with its origins in 18th and early 19th century slavery), led by colour-
ful, working class troupes. Many marchers carried posters, some clearly mass-
produced by the union’s head office, while others were homemade. They bore
slogans such as:
Phantsi (down with) managers and councillors eating themselves fat while
the workers starve!
Down with Gear,8 Starvation wages
To Hell! It’s War!
Privatisation equals Retrenchments equals Poverty
Forward to R2200 minimum wage
Rate payers note: while workers struggle to stay alive, top managers get
R62000!
Seen as ‘knowledge’ being widely disseminated, these slogans were deeply con-
textualised in the experiences of the strikers, but they also operated at a high
level of generality and abstraction, making links between the state’s economic
policies, the emergence of a new, black elite, widespread poverty, and ‘class
war’. The union’s strike pamphlet also made links between workers’ wages, the
government’s macro-economic policy, the ‘apartheid wage gap’ and privatisa-
tion, while the speeches on the march linked workers’ struggles to history, a
class analysis and the goal of socialism. This mass action was a time of ‘theoris-
ing the world’ at a very broad level and presented opportunities not only for
a critique of the current order, but also to articulate a vision of what might be
possible in the future.
What then can we conclude about what constitutes ‘really useful knowl-
edge’ in the context of workers’ education, and by inference, the nature of
knowledge more generally within social action or social movement contexts?
I will argue that running through the descriptions presented above are a num-
ber of key themes. These are most usefully illuminated by Gramsci’s notions of
‘good sense’ emerging out of ‘common sense’, and his conceptualisation of the
role of organic intellectuals in building an alternative hegemony and a political
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movement capable of bringing about radical change. The following section

draws extensively on Kate Crehan’s (2016) account of Gramsci’s thought.
3 Gramsci on Organic Intellectuals and Knowledge Production
Crehan points to the significance of Gramsci’s use of the term, ‘subalternity’

which he used in addition to the concept of class. In the last 30 years this con-
cept has been used by many analysts, particularly by those in the global south.
It offers a term that is broadly inclusive, “encompassing all those who are
oppressed rather than oppressing, ruled rather than ruling” (2016, p. 15), and in
doing so, offers a way of capturing the complex nature of those social groups
that continue to suffer exploitation and oppression in post-colonial societies.9
Gramsci’s theorisation of the development of a counter-hegemonic movement
was therefore intended to cover a far broader spectrum of political movements
than simply the labour movement, but his framework also provides a useful
way of conceptualising the knowledge practices within the trade union con-
text described above.
As noted in the previous chapter, Gramsci’s theorisation of knowledge –
with his distinction between ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ embracing a
number of oppositions (coherent/incoherent; reason/feeling) – echoes that
of the dualist thinkers critiqued earlier in the chapter. As Crehan notes, one
could be forgiven for seeing Gramsci’s “frequent disparagement of subaltern
commonsense” as somewhat patronising (Crehan, 2016, p. 15): for Gramsci,
subalterns live in a “commonsense world rooted in the narratives of those who
dominate them” (ibid., p. 61) and this common sense is “ambiguous, contradic-
tory and multiform” (Crehan, ibid.). However, she argues that it is important to
remember that:
the Italian Marxist’s goal was never simply to grasp the subaltern view,
to see the world through subaltern eyes: his goal was social transforma-
tion. And this required not only the mapping of common sense and the
identification of the good sense he saw as embedded within it, but its
translation (within the context of the political party) into effective politi-
cal narratives capable of mobilizing large masses. (ibid., p. 13)
In other words, popular knowledge – while being “confused and chaotic, laden
with superstition and governed by emotion rather than reason” – nevertheless
contains ‘nuggets of good sense’ and is “the ultimate source of genuinely new
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82 chapter 4
narratives with the power to inspire revolutionary change” (ibid., p. 62). An

example of this may be seen in the SAMWU workshop elaborated above where
the educator engaged in a continuous movement from the particular example
to broader concepts, making conceptual connections between different issues.
How does this ‘ambiguous, contradictory, incoherent’ common sense evolve
into good sense? For Gramsci, organic intellectuals (like Loyiso and other
experienced shop stewards in the SAWMU meetings described above) play the
key role in this transformative process. They are the “midwives who help to
bring forth a shared philosophy and culture gestated in the womb of subaltern
experience” (Crehan, 2016, p. 76). Their task is to ‘map’ the contours of com-
monsense, identify the good sense embedded within it, and “generate the kind
of radically alternative narrative necessary to supplant the existing hegemony”
(Crehan, 2016, p. 29). Crehan emphasises that in defining these organic intel-
lectuals, Gramsci’s starting point was not a set of individuals but the “process
of a given class’s production of knowledge” (p. 32, emphasis added):
Organic intellectuals are not a particular kind of intellectual. They are

the form in which the knowledge generated out of the lived experience of
a social group with the potential to become hegemonic achieves coher-
ence and authority. (Crehan, 2016, pp. 29–30)
In other words, the process whereby organic intellectuals transform lived

experience into a coherent narrative that makes sense of the world from the
vantage point of the working class or other subaltern groups, is not solely an
educative process but also a process within which new knowledge is produced.
“The concept of organic intellectuals is at the heart of the notebooks’ theoriza-
tion of knowledge production” (ibid., p. 28).
For Gramsci, the only way in which the ‘embryonic beginnings of new
political narratives’ can be developed into an effective revolutionary narra-
tive is through a dialogical process of engagement between subalterns and
their organic intellectuals. Here the ‘knowledge’ of the intellectuals is brought
together with the ‘feeling’ of the popular element to achieve “an organic cohe-
sion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge”
(p. 37). Crehan stresses however that while Gramsci avoided romanticising
common sense, what remains at the basis of his epistemological claims is the
bedrock of working class experience as the source of new knowledge:
Organic intellectuals elaborate this implicit philosophy, but they do not

originate it … In other words, the reason why intellectuals need to pay seri-
ous attention to common sense is not simply because effective political
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narratives need to resonate with existing common sense, although that,

too, is important, but because only when the philosophy of the intel-
lectuals has genuinely emerged from subaltern experience is it possible
for subalterns and their intellectuals to come together as a cultural and
social unity. Only then do they become a historical bloc with the power
to bring about social transformation. (p. 76)
It is this dialectical approach to the relationship between common sense and

good sense (an approach in keeping with that of CHAT) that rescues Gram-
sci from some of the problematic aspects of dualism and in the end, estab-
lishes experiential knowledge as a crucial ingredient in the production of new
knowledge.
How might these conceptual tools of Gramsci illuminate the processes of
knowledge use and knowledge production in the trade union education events
and learning processes described earlier in the chapter? The following section
illustrates how Gramsci’s concepts provide valuable heuristic tools for inter-
preting the knowledge practices embedded in these events.
4 Knowledge Differentiation in Workers’ Education
It is clear from the earlier descriptions of education and learning in SAMWU

that there are many different forms of knowledge recruited in workers’ edu-
cation. Workers’ experiential knowledge was a key collective resource. Some
strands of this – what Gramsci would have called, common sense – may have
been unsystematised, incoherent or contradictory, but it is clear that this expe-
riential knowledge also contained ‘nuggets’ of good sense. Grassroots worker
leaders who may be regarded as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense
played ‘systematising’ and ‘cohering’ roles, attempting to ‘rebraid’ (Crehan,
2016) particular strands of common sense into a new political narrative.
If workers’ experiential knowledge was a key resource, so too did worker
educators draw on the radical, critical theory that circulates in left wing politi-
cal and social movements, as well as some elements of disciplinary knowledge
codified into higher education curriculum (economics, political theory, labour
law and so on). As noted earlier, the union’s ‘curriculum’ does not follow the
conceptual logic that curricula tend to do in the formal education context
(Muller, 2008). Segments of codified, academic knowledge only become ‘really
useful knowledge’ in the union education context when selected concepts help
to make sense of workers’ experiences, where they help to analyse the broader
context in order to build an understanding of the ‘bigger picture’, or where
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84 chapter 4
they act as a guide to strategic action. In Gramsci’s terms however, these can-
not remain fragmentary in form and will need to coalesce into a new, coherent
political narrative that offers a powerful counterweight and alternative to the
dominant discourse.
As noted earlier, it is important not to conflate site of knowledge with form
of knowledge; although the case study of workers’ education within the union
comprises a site outside of the formal education system, it does not follow that
this is a site of experiential knowledge only, or that elements of formal, codified
knowledge cannot be found here. Harris (2004, p. 115) describes this phenom-
enon as ‘vertical discourse circulating in the everyday’. Writing about a South
African research project on RPL and drawing on Bernstein’s (2000) notions of
vertical and horizontal discourse,10 she found that some RPL applicants had a
head start in acquiring academic discourse because of their history of politi-
cal activism during the 1980s struggles against apartheid. She argued that in
such ‘struggle contexts’ “… vertical discourse was the possession not only of the
intellectual-academic elite but also of the intellectual-political elite” (Harris,
2004, pp. 74–75).
This section has argued that knowledge in the non-formal education set-
ting of the trade union is far from undifferentiated, and a distinctive feature
of knowledge in this context is its hybridity. Knowledge recruited in radical
workers’ education is multi-faceted, comprising a range of complex articula-
tions of different forms of knowledge. Workers’ experiential knowledge itself
ranges from the concrete to the abstract, from the local to the general, and
from the rational to the emotional. During the strike, workers engaged in theo-
rising their world even when they did not ‘name’ concepts or deploy special-
ised language.
This does not invalidate the need for a way of distinguishing analytically
between different forms of knowledge in use in workers’ education. One rea-
son for doing so is that it makes it possible to identify how different constel-
lations of knowledge reflect shifting power relations across different sites
within the organisation. It will be shown in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6
that conceptual or contextual knowledge predominated over experiential
knowledge in union workshops, while contextual and experiential knowledge
were equally fore-grounded in union meetings (where an understanding of
the context was used to plan action). In the strike however, it was ‘action’ that
predominated, with ‘knowledge’ being embedded in that action. During the
strike – where ordinary workers exercised their agency most strongly – the
languaged discourse of union workshops and meetings gave way to the more
universal ‘language of the body’, a form which was concrete as well as abstract,
specific to immediate context as well as generalisable. The question of how
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power relations – in these cases, indicated by different levels of workers’ par-

ticipation and agency – shift across place and time brings us to the issue of the
‘politics of knowledge’, an issue that has become increasingly important in the
recent history of the labour movement and which will be returned to later in
this chapter, and later in the book.
There is clearly a need for a more nuanced conceptual vocabulary than
dualist approaches offer, in order to do justice to the complexity of knowl-
edge produced and shared in workers’ education. Theorists of vocational or
professional education offer some interesting conceptual tools for examining
the complex articulations of different forms of knowledge in craft or work-
place contexts, and these may act as a starting point for the theorisation of
knowledge in workers’ education as well as in other social movement contexts.
For example, Winch (2010) argues that the knowledge unpinning expertise in
workplace or professional contexts always involves both ‘knowing how’ (skills)
as well as ‘knowing that’ (different forms of propositional, systematic knowl-
edge), and he identifies five different components of ‘knowledge how’ ‘nested’
into one another (pp. 52–57). He emphasises that expertise is always normative
in nature and includes moral dimensions linked to particular institutions and
cultures. Livingstone and Watts (2018) argue that professional, non-managerial
employees are today in class positions analogous to skilled workers in the early
20th century, and thus Winch’s framework could be of increasing relevance to
understanding their knowledge bases. Gamble (2009) has developed a heuris-
tic tool for analysing the range of possible ways in which theory and practice
may be combined in vocational or professional curricula, with each of these
categories of knowledge having principled and procedural dimensions, and
with principled knowledge further assuming both tacit and discursive forms.
The need will remain however to develop a more dynamic and less syn-
chronic conceptual framework or language which does not simply categorise
or classify knowledge, but which is also able to capture the dynamic nature of
knowledge in social movement contexts. In developing this, the focus must
necessarily include the role of organic intellectuals in ‘braiding’ together cer-
tain strands of common sense in order to develop good sense.
5 Organic Intellectuals: ‘Braiding’ New Knowledge
There was a range of actors that took to the stage of the workers’ education
events described earlier in this chapter, who could be seen as playing the role
of organic intellectuals in Gramsci’s terms, or “whose role is the production
and distribution of knowledge” (Crehan, 2016, p. 19). In meetings, it was often
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86 chapter 4
grassroots worker leaders – in some cases, elected representatives, but in other

cases not – who acted as boundary workers. These drew on their experiences
of involvement in a range of communities of practice within and outside of
the union, as well as experiences of both formal study and informal self-study.
Chapter 6 will show in more detail how during the strike, it was the mass of
ordinary workers who played this role.
In education workshops, the role of organic intellectuals was often played
by senior union officials, specialist research groups or invited individuals with
particular kinds of expertise. Some of these intellectuals came from well-
educated, white, middle-class, backgrounds – factors that could be seen as
excluding them from the role of organic intellectual. These white intellectuals
(including this writer) were clearly constrained in their role as organic intel-
lectuals not only by the significant gaps in their own experience of working
class life on account of their class origins and their historical access to racially-
privileged life chances. They were also constrained by the significant language
divides that (in most cases) existed between themselves and black workers.
(This issue will be further elaborated on in Chapters 5 and 6). However, it was
noted earlier that Gramsci defined organic intellectuals not by their class loca-
tion or origin but by their political and ideological function. It can be argued
that in the case study under consideration, this stratum of intellectuals was
able – to some extent at least – to play the role of organic intellectuals because
of their function of bringing coherence to the experiential knowledge of
workers, and their moral commitment to the values and goals of the workers’
movement.
One of the most distinctive features of the knowledge practices in the
union context was the way in which those who played the role of worker edu-
cators sought to weave together selected strands of workers’ ‘common sense’
into ‘good sense’ via a dialectical movement between these different forms of
knowledge. This is what I imagine Crehan (2016) means when she talks of the
‘braiding’ together of different strands of knowledge by organic intellectuals.
In most workshops, concepts were introduced and their meaning teased out
by relating them to the concrete experiences of participants. However, abstract
concepts were not simply imported from ‘outside’ of workers’ experiences but
were also generated from within through an organic process of making ‘con-
nections between objects not obviously connected’ (Young, 2002, p. 15).
This braiding together of different forms of knowledge may be seen as a
process of making new knowledge. This is supported by a number of theorists.
Hasan (2002) argues that the kind of recontextualisation of experience that
has been demonstrated in these instances of workers’ education – the relo-
cation of the ‘anecdotal’ within the ‘general’ and the making of conceptual
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connections between different issues – should be seen as a particular form

of new knowledge production. Studies of social movements, for example that
of Holford (1995, p. 101), have also pointed to the important role that social
movements play in generating new knowledge. Eyerman and Jamison (1991,
p. 165) have argued that “social movement activists develop new ideas that are
fundamental to broader processes of human creativity”, and that a crucial way
in which this new knowledge is produced is by ‘recombining or connecting
previously separate types of knowledge with each other’ (Eyerman & Jamison,
1991, p. 59). The process of braiding or weaving together different kinds of
knowledge is suggestive of the kind of ‘dialectical gap-closing’ activity that
Engeström (2002) talks of that characterises collaborative problem-solving
learning within activity systems, and that always has the potential for a ‘break-
through into learning activity’ in the sense of ‘going beyond the given’ and cre-
ating a vision of a different future.
6 Tensions and Contradictions in the Knowledge Practices of

Workers’ Education
Earlier chapters have pointed to the increasing significance of knowledge as

a site of struggle in the ‘information age’. There was evidence in my research
on SAMWU that the union was fully aware of this. One document reviewing
the union’s education programmes argued that there was a general problem
of ‘low capacity’ amongst some shop-stewards and staff in relation to the high
knowledge demands increasingly being placed on the union:
The nature of the trade unions’ activity has changed. In a democracy

many of the struggles depend on political and socio-economic lobbying
around government policy and legislation. In the workplace the promo-
tion of public service delivery, and opposition to privatisation requires
detailed knowledge about services. They also require capacities to facili-
tate participation rather than demagogy. It involves engagement with
management on technical terrain. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 103)
The union saw the question of access to information and knowledge as a site of
struggle. For example, its shop-steward training manual argued:
We live in the information age. Control over information and the manip-
ulation of knowledge has become a central tool in the hands of those
who hold power in the economy and society. Knowledge and information
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88 chapter 4
about ‘markets’ and ‘economic indicators’ on a global scale give multi-

national companies new power …. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 122)
At the same time, as seen from quotes towards the end of the previous chapter,
unionists felt in a weakened position to fight this struggle. Trade unions are
increasingly caught between their long-standing traditions of workers democ-
racy, at the heart of which is the recognition and valuing of the experiential
knowledge that workers bring on the one hand, and on the other, growing
demands for knowledge specialisation and for the professionalisation of those
who have historically played the role of organic intellectuals in the working
class movement. There are increasing pressures that have led to the increased
formalisation of trade union education, and in some cases, partnerships with
universities to provide ‘advanced’ professional training for trade unionists in
specialised areas.
The question needs to be posed: if the distance between organic intellectu-
als and ordinary union members widens, as it seems to have done in the post-
apartheid era (see Buhlungu & Tshoaedi, 2012; Bezuidenhout & Tshoaedi, 2017;
Webster, 2018b), what implications does this have for the ‘organicity’ of these
intellectuals (in Gramscian terms), for their ability to recognise and draw on
the experiential knowledge of workers and thus act as ‘midwives who help to
bring forth a shared philosophy and culture gestated in the womb of subaltern
experience’?
At the heart of this problem lies a further, more organic11 contradiction in
workers’ education. Crehan emphasises that Gramsci’s focus was always on the
social relations within which knowledge is produced, rather than on individual
knowledge producers (ibid., p. 41). She argues that for Gramsci, “Marxism is a
philosophy still struggling to be born … Yet to be coherently articulated” (2016,
p. 39) and that workers’ education is “a new hegemony in gestation” (ibid.,
p. xiii). Workers’ education needs to generate the kind of radical alternative
necessary to supplant the existing hegemony. At the same time however, as
noted in the previous chapter, workers education and its processes of knowl-
edge production take place in a space subjected to the material and social
realities of capitalism. A key challenge that workers’ education faces therefore
is how to create a new hegemony when the material/social conditions for the
realisation of that hegemony do not yet exist? This is perhaps the reason why
trade unions in general, and workers’ education initiatives within the labour
movement particularly, are engaged in a ‘dance’ of resistance and accom-
modation. They are caught between challenging and subverting dominant
power relations on the one hand, and pragmatic accommodation to dominant
social relations on the other. This is reflected in the ambivalences expressed
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in identifying what knowledge is of most value to the workers’ movement in

the current era – a theme that is taken up in further detail in Chapter 7 of this
book.
7 Conclusion
This chapter has focused on what is ‘useful knowledge’ in workers’ education,

and how it is generated and shared. It argued that this question is of broader
relevance in a context where knowledge plays a central role in the global econ-
omy, and where there is considerable contestation, as illustrated in the South
African debate, over what kinds of knowledge are most needed, and for what
purpose. Drawing on Gramsci’s conceptual tools to illuminate educational
moments within a trade union context, it was shown that forms of knowledge
in use within workers’ education do have some distinctive features.
Knowledge in workers’ education is differentiated in ways that defy binary
categories, and one of its distinctive features is its hybridity. The significance
of this hybridity should be seen in the context of the key purpose of union
pedagogy, which is to challenge the centres of hegemonic power in society.
The concept of hybridity has featured strongly in the literature on colonial-
ism, postcolonialism and global identities, where it is seen as a form of ‘strate-
gic borrowing’ – an attempt to ‘control the controllers’. For example, in Homi
Bhabha’s analyses of identity construction and subject formation under coloni-
alism, hybridity is seen as a subversive and transgressive ‘third space’ between
the traditional and the colonial (Rutherford, 1990). It operates as a ‘strategic
reversal of the process of domination’ in that it “reverses the effects of the colo-
nialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant
discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (Young, 1990, p. 148).
Another key feature is the ways in which these hybrid forms of knowledge
are produced through a process of successive layering of different forms of
knowledge – conceptual, contextual and experiential – in a series of dialecti-
cal movements, to form complex constellations of knowledge. This dialectical
movement may be best understood in the light of Vygotsky’s argument that it
is the interaction between ‘scientific’ and ‘everyday’ knowledge that lies at the
heart of learning, where the relative strengths of both ‘scientific’ and ‘every-
day’ concepts can be combined, and their respective weaknesses compensated
for (Daniels, 2001, p. 53).12 Closely related to this is the distinctive role played
by organic intellectuals – a role assumed by a range of players from within
and from outside of the trade union organisation – in engaging with workers’
experiential knowledge, recruiting nuggets of ‘good sense’ from this ‘common
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90 chapter 4
sense’, and rebraiding these strands in an attempt to produce a new political

narrative that can offer an alternative to the status quo. Importantly, this pro-
cess is also one in which new knowledge is produced, where a vision of an
alternative future and the means of getting there begin to emerge.
The chapter identified some key challenges facing workers’ education in
retaining these unique features in the current context, where the ‘knowledge
economy’ and ‘information society’ put a premium on increased specialisation
of trade unionist and educators’ roles. Furthermore, the capacity of workers
education to act as a source of new knowledge and to produce visions of radi-
cal societal alternatives is constrained by its unavoidable implication in capi-
talist material and social relations.
Nevertheless, this chapter has shown that in David Alexander’s terms
(Alexander, 1994), knowledge practices in workers’ education offer a ‘language
of hope and possibility’, and that an understanding of knowledge practices
associated with radical traditions of workers’ education can contribute some-
thing important to current debates on what knowledge is of most value in the
21st century.
Notes
1 Chartism was a British working class movement, which emerged in the early 19th
century with the aim of winning rights and influence for the working classes. Chart-
ism got its name from the formal petition, or People’s Charter, that listed the six
main aims of the movement.
2 Or a nascent ‘alternative hegemony’. Holst (1999) points out that Gramsci himself
never coined the term ‘counter-hegemony’.
3 See Young and Muller (2013) for an elaboration of what they understand by the
notion of ‘powerful knowledge’.
4 This elicited a critical response from Michael Young in a subsequent issue of the
journal (see Young, 2005).
5 Some parts of this section of the chapter have previously been published in Cooper
(2006).
6 It also published a quarterly newspaper, Workers News, printed in three languages,
and aimed at ‘mass education’ of the unions’ general membership.
7 A militant dance mimicking that performed by guerrilla soldiers during the strug-
gle against apartheid, which in turn drew on older, pre-colonial forms of military
‘performance art’.
8 In 1996 the ANC government under President Mbeki adopted GEAR (Growth,
Employment and Redistribution), a macro-economic policy promoting privatisa-
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tion and the expansion of many non-standard forms of employment, both of which
have contributed to the weakening and undermining of trade unions.
9 Crehan states: “It is precisely subalternity’s lack of specificity as a general term that
makes it a useful concept for those interested in analysing inequality but resistant
to the rigidities of simplistic, overly economistic versions of Marxism” (2016, p. 16).
10 In this schema, ‘vertical discourse’ represents formal, codified knowledge) while
‘horizontal discourse’ represents common sense or ‘everyday’ knowledge (Bernstein,
1996, pp. 170–171).
11 Crehan (2016, p. 20) points to Gramsci’s distinction between conjunctural tensions/
contradictions that are contingent on context and those that are organic in the
sense of being structurally embedded in the nature of social relations under capi-
talism.
12 Vygotsky argued that “… the weakness of the everyday concept lies in its incapacity
for abstraction …” while “… the weakness of the scientific concept lies in its verbal-
ism, in its insufficient saturation with the concrete …” (as cited in Daniels, 2001, p. 53).
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CHAPTER 5
The Pedagogy of Workers’ Education:

Conscientisation or Indoctrination?
1 Introduction
It is 2012 and a colleague and I are on a research visit to the Workers’ College in
Durban. We are observing the classes of the College’s four diplomas, in order to see
its education ‘in action’. The first class focuses on Gender and Labour Studies; it
starts with participants viewing a video clip on ‘Freedom Park’, an ironic name for
a poverty-stricken, informal settlement outside of the town of Rustenberg. This is
close to the Marikana mine where earlier that year, South African police had shot
dead 34 striking miners and wounded 74 more. Of the 20000 residents of Freedom
Park, a large proportion are women. Following the video, the facilitator asks partic-
ipants how they felt about the documentary, followed by more specific contextual
questions. Drawing on inputs from the class, she links their responses back to what
they learnt about different forms of oppression in a previous lesson: sexual oppres-
sion, oppression of migrant workers, gender oppression. One participant raises
her concerns about the impending legalisation of sex work. This leads to a heated
debate on the pros and cons of such legislation, with students frankly expressing
their prejudices. The facilitator unpacks the logic of their different arguments and
offers her own opinion, stressing it is merely one amongst other perspectives.
Next door, a second class is focusing on Political and Social Development. The
facilitator is far more directive. He consistently exerts control over what is dis-
cussed and in what order and keeps a tight hold on time. He checks that partici-
pants have correctly understood concepts by asking them to give examples from
their own experience, and then summarises their responses using specialised con-
ceptual language. He then sets a group task to draw a mind map showing how
all the different topics and concepts covered in the past week – political economy,
post-colonialism, imperialism, modernisation – fit together in a coherent way. He
continuously emphasises the importance of critical thinking, and that as activ-
ists, participants must learn to make coherent arguments rather than espouse
empty rhetoric.
These are clearly two different styles of pedagogy, and yet both are com-
fortably located within an institution committed to radical, inclusive workers’
education. How do we account for both within a model of workers’ education
practice?
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The Pedagogy of Workers’ Education 93
This book is concerned with unravelling the ‘logic’ of radical workers’ educa-
tion. Earlier chapters have shown that this logic is driven, first, by the distinct
purposes of this strand of workers’ education, and secondly, by its epistemol-
ogy – its theories of knowledge. They have noted some of the key features of
workers’ education: its strong ideological purpose or object (even though it is
often a contested one), its efforts to bridge the intellectual/manual divide, and
the hybrid forms of knowledge that it draws upon. Given these features, how
is such knowledge passed on, who or what ‘teaches’ workers, and where does
significant learning take place? What lies at the heart of its pedagogy and how
do its education methods compare with other traditions of critical or radical
pedagogy?
This chapter is the first of two that identify some of the central features
of workers’ education practices in the South African context. It focuses on
non-formal but organised education programmes while the following chapter
focuses on informal learning through day-to-day organisational involvement
and mass action.
There is an intriguing conundrum that lies at the heart of non-formal but
structured education programmes. Despite worker education’s commitment
to democratic traditions and its valuing of workers’ experiential knowledge,
as a form of pedagogic practice it is often didactic and almost always politi-
cally and ideologically directive in character. This sets it apart from some of
the more humanist traditions of adult education (Kolb, 1984; Mezirow, 1990),
as well as from some interpretations of Popular Education.
The strongly normative character of workers’ education (and the ‘radical
tradition’ of adult education more generally) has been a key theme in the writ-
ings of Marxists and neo-Marxists. As noted earlier, it is captured most often
via the concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony. Raymond Williams
argued that under capitalism, most of society’s modes of cultural production
are directly or indirectly under capitalist control:
… the essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained

not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always,
by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture. (as
cited in Morgan, 1996, p. 71)
A forceful counter move is therefore required to challenge the cultural and ide-
ological hegemony of the ruling class. This was theorised by Gramsci when he
argued that ruling class hegemony has to be countered by the development of
a critical understanding amongst the working classes “through a massive effort
of political education of a genuinely popular kind, through its own schools,
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94 CHAPTER 5
publishing, broadcasting, film and through the development of study circles

and independent learning” (as cited in Morgan, 1996, p. 66). The interpretation
of the tasks of political education as deliberate, counter-hegemonic work has
been a key assumption underpinning many strands of radical pedagogy. Even
Freire, who backgrounded the role of the educator by defining it as facilitative
rather than didactic, nevertheless acknowledged that educators have a ‘dia-
logical duty’ to teach rather than merely to facilitate (Freire & Macedo, 1995).
Freedman (2007) has argued that this gives rise to a ‘central paradox’ in criti-
cal pedagogy: “Critical pedagogy sets teachers up to promote a specific method
of socio-political analysis that – like all such methods – discredits the views of
certain people a priori. In other words, the Freirean curriculum is inherently
politically biased” (p. 453). He poses the question: “how is it possible to teach
for social justice without engaging in indoctrination?” (p. 445). Liam Kane
(2001) echoes this when he points out that although popular education seeks
to ‘problematise’ rather than present solutions, “it is an illusion to think that
questions are inherently more ideologically independent than statements …”
(Kane, 2001, p. 161).
For our purposes here, the question may be posed: how can the tendency
towards an ideologically directive pedagogy be reconciled with worker edu-
cation’s participatory and democratic traditions? Does workers’ education
inevitably descend into a process of indoctrination rather than engaging in
conscientisation?
The chapter begins by proposing some conceptual tools that can illuminate
the ideologically directive nature of pedagogy in workers’ education. In the
sections that follow, it explores the complex and varied ways in which this
ideologically-driven form of education has expressed itself in South African
workers’ education programmes historically, focusing on the education work
of union federations and labour service organisations (LSOs) in the 1970s and
1980s. The chapter shows that both a more facilitative, learner-centred, ‘consci-
entising’ pedagogy as well as a more didactic, ideologically directive pedagogy
have been features of radical workers’ education historically. The predomi-
nance of one or the other is not simply the outcome of the choice of individual
educators, but is determined by a range of historical, political and organisa-
tional factors. Their coexistence within workers’ education creates a tension
that cannot easily be resolved but needs to be ‘held’ via what may be seen as a
certain ‘balancing act’.
The chapter returns to the case study of the local government trade union,
SAMWU to illustrate how the articulation of these two modes of pedagogy is
enacted. Drawing on Bernstein’s (2000) notions of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ peda-
gogy, it shows how union pedagogy is a ‘mixed pallet’: a combination of an
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espoused commitment to, and partial enactment of a learner-centred peda-

gogy where the educator purportedly plays a non-directive role, and a more
dominant form of pedagogy where the educator overtly intervenes to direct
learners to key understandings. It returns to the troubling questions raised ear-
lier by Freedman and Kane as to how radical pedagogy can reconcile its inevita-
ble political bias with its simultaneous commitment to promoting democracy
and open political debate. It shows how the effects of an ideologically-directive
pedagogy – one which could easily descend into indoctrination – are mitigated
by a number of other important pedagogic features that if present in workers’
education, can enhance its democratic, participatory character.
2 ‘Visible’ and ‘Invisible’ Pedagogy
As noted in Chapter 4, Basil Bernstein’s work has been highly influential in

South Africa in recent debates around schooling, professional and vocational
education, and higher education. However, with some exceptions1 Bernstein’s
theoretical framework has not been drawn on to conceptualise non-formal
education and in particular, radical adult education or social movement learn-
ing. While his concepts are richly elaborated in relation to knowledge and
pedagogy within the formal education system, the domain of the ‘everyday’ is
relatively neglected and unelaborated. As noted in Chapter 3, his critics argue
that Bernstein’s work is part of a tradition that devalues ‘everyday’ or experi-
ential forms of knowledge (Lave, 1998; Michelson, 2004). While agreeing with
these critiques, this chapter will show that there are conceptual resources in
Bernstein’s work that help to make sense of the forms of pedagogy that pre-
dominate in workers’ education. While much CHAT research has yielded rich
insights into the variables that promote or inhibit learning (see Daniels, 2008,
chapter 6; Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011, chapter 5), it does not offer con-
ceptual tools that help to identify different modes of pedagogy or show what
their sociological significance is. The chapter argues that some of Bernstein’s
concepts may complement the CHAT analytical framework that forms the
basis of this book.2
Bernstein (2000, pp. 109–110) identifies two main categories of pedagogy
and argues that what distinguishes them are the different ways in which they
express patterns of power. In visible pedagogy, power is expressed in an overt,
hierarchical relationship between educator and learner where the educator is
unequivocally the source of epistemological authority and maintains control
over the curriculum. However, power is not only exercised through overtly
hierarchical teacher-learner relations. In fact no educational relationship can
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96 CHAPTER 5
exist outside of power relations of one sort or another. For Bernstein, power
is also exercised in invisible pedagogy – often associated with experiential
learning and some Freirian traditions of Popular Education – where learners
appear to be driving the curriculum and in control of their own learning. Here,
hierarchical relationships are not absent but are rather implicit or covert. In
other words, while in visible pedagogy, the relationship of authority of the edu-
cator over learner is overt, in invisible pedagogy ‘power is masked or hidden’
(Bernstein, 2000) by the facilitative style of the educator and by the egalitarian
norms of the pedagogy.3
It will be shown below via an exploration of a number of historical case
studies of workers’ education in South Africa that these two models of peda-
gogy offer a useful way of conceptualising radical pedagogy, and of illuminat-
ing traditions of workers’ education in South Africa in pedagogic terms.
3 Non-Formal Workers’ Education Programmes under Apartheid
It was shown earlier that in the 1970s, with the resurgence of the black trade
union movement, there was intense political contestation over what the
focus and priorities of worker education should be. Later, in the early 1980s,
there was contestation between ‘general unionism’ and ‘industrial unionism’
(Baskin, 1991), while in the late 1980s, there was conflict over which political
organisation – and, indeed, which class – would lead the transition to democ-
racy (Grossman, 1995).
As noted in Chapter 2, Welton (1991) has argued that this kind of contesta-
tion between different political groupings over which ideological orientations,
political analyses and strategic choices would lead ‘the struggle’ has been a
constant factor shaping workers’ education across time and space. I argue
that this explains – at least in part – the fact that throughout the period under
apartheid, ideologically directive forms of pedagogy with their didactic meth-
ods, overt authority of the educator, and explicit criteria for what should be
learnt, was the dominant form of much workers’ education practice.4 The fol-
lowing pages will add detailed content to these assertions, but they will also
show that important political and ideological messages were imparted not
only through visible pedagogy, but also through a range of less ‘visible’, but
equally politically/ideologically directive pedagogy.
3.1 FOSATU Intellectuals and Visible Pedagogy

The formation of the trade union federation, FOSATU, in 1979 which brought
together many of the new unions established in the 1970s, enabled the
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establishment of a more centralised trade union education programme. Much

of FOSATU’s education remained tied to immediate organisational issues and
aimed at developing the organising and negotiating skills of a layer of shop-
floor leaders. However, the emphasis of its ‘advanced courses’ was increasingly
on broader education and included topics such as political history and capital-
ism, monopoly capitalism and planned economies, understanding the South
African economy, trade unions and politics, socialism, and international trade
union solidarity.5
The teaching of history – of South African working class history, and the
history of workers’ movements elsewhere in the world – was a core element
in many of the education programmes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and
a key vehicle for the transmission of political ideology. It was partly aimed at
countering the teaching of school history; according to the FOSATU National
Education Officer:
… capitalist education has the purpose of disorganising workers even

before they enter the workplace. Youth enters the mines and factories
ignorant of the struggle of the working class, or the power of organisation
and the real meaning of democracy. (Erwin, 1987/1991, p. 297)
However, the emphasis on workers’ gaining a basic understanding of the his-

tory of organisations and struggles was also part of a struggle for ideological
influence within the labour movement at this time. It coincided with the
adoption by a grouping of university-based, ‘revisionist’ historians of a class
analysis of South African apartheid.6 They argued that apartheid was func-
tional to capitalism, in contrast to liberal historians who viewed apartheid as
inimical to capitalist accumulation in South Africa (Byrne, 2012, p. 137). Byrne
(2012) details how FOSATU leadership in the late 1970s and early 1980s drew
left wing, revisionist historians into their political education programmes with
the intention of providing a systematic, class-based, Marxist account of how
economy and society functioned in South Africa. She argues that this was part
of a “dedicated struggle for control of the means of ideological and cultural
reproduction” (Byrne, 2012, p. 253), In the late 1970s, FOSATU’s advanced lead-
ership programmes were aimed at countering the political philosophy of the
Black Consciousness Movement, and in the early 1980s at building policy con-
sensus in the face of the emergence of ‘community unions’ with their growing
political alignment to the ANC (Ginsberg, 1997, p. 100). FOSATU’s programmes
drew on historical accounts in order to critique earlier attempts to organise
black workers by the Industrial and Commercial workers union (ICU) in the
1920s, and ANC-aligned South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) in
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98 CHAPTER 5
the 1950s. The intention was to impart lessons from history about the dangers
of populism, viewed as “the type of unionism which emphasised national-
ism over class, (relying) heavily on mobilisation rather than organisation”
(Ginsberg, 1997, p. 86).
A number of scholars have argued that approaches to workers’ education
at this time reflected the race and class background of the intellectuals who
played leading educational roles in the emerging trade union movement. For
example, Seftel’s study of trade union education in the 1970s argues that educa-
tion programmes at the time were overly theoretical, abstract and ‘top-down’
in approach, with ‘an overemphasis on ‘ideas’ and an under-emphasis on
‘method’ (Seftel, 1983, p. 91), reflecting the class origins of the white intellectual
leadership. Ginsberg’s (1997) study of the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union/
National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (MAWU/NUMSA) on the Wit-
watersrand in the 1970s and 1980s also illustrates the ideologically directive
nature of much workers’ education practice throughout this period. He argues
that the didactic approaches to education on the part of FOSATU leadership –
who were largely, but not exclusively from white, middle-class backgrounds –
may be accounted for by both their educational and class backgrounds as well
the nature of political contestation at the time.
Ginsberg distinguishes between what he calls the ‘professional’ intellectuals
who played key organising and educational roles in the early years of build-
ing an independent trade union movement, and ‘organic’, worker intellectuals.
I draw on a slightly different typology in order to capture the roles of differ-
ent groups of intellectuals who played an educational role within the workers’
movement. I reserve the term ‘professional’ intellectuals for those university-
based intellectuals who did work on occasion for the union movement. The
term ‘organiser intellectuals’ on the other hand will be used to refer to those
well-educated intellectuals (often but not always white and middle-class) who
were employed directly by the unions as organisers. The term ‘organic intellec-
tuals’ is used in a manner close to that of C. Wright Mills’ (1971) ‘union-made
intellectuals’; in other words, to refer to workers leaders who played key ideo-
logical roles.7 In the early years of rebuilding the union movement in South
Africa, these organic, worker intellectuals were predominantly migrant work-
ers with low levels of schooled literacy, but who assumed key leadership roles
in the labour movement.
It has been argued that the didactic approaches of organiser intellectuals in
FOSATU was not only a reflection of their educational and class backgrounds,
but also a function of the ideological contestation at the time. How can the
political orientation of this group of intellectuals at the time be understood?
Byrne challenges the labelling of FOSATU’s intellectual leaders by some of
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their political opponents as ‘workerist’, where they were portrayed as eschew-

ing ‘politics’ and focused exclusively on factory-floor issues. She argues that
the ideological influences on FOSATU’S politics were varied and eclectic. The
union federation had been established in a period marked by a widespread
upsurge of mass working class militancy internationally, culminating in the
so-called Paris and Prague ‘Springs’. These movements brought together Marx-
ist-Leninist currents highly critical of the Soviet Union and within them, “the
long-frozen certainties of the Left started to break up, exemplified by the emer-
gence of the ‘New Left’” (ibid., p. 97). Gramsci was an important political influ-
ence, particularly his notion of hegemony and his emphasis on the importance
of ideological struggle and the role of factory councils (ibid., p. 128). Syndical-
ist and anarchist traditions of worker control, worker democracy and work-
ing class self-activity and self-emancipation were also influential while other
political influences included student and black Civil Rights Movements in the
USA, and anti-imperialist and ‘Third World’ sentiments.
Byrne argues that FOSATU’s leadership viewed trade unions as a political
expression of workers’ rights and power. Their approach to education was
closely tied to building factory organisation and was in line with their view
of organisation as a catalyst for the development of political consciousness
(Byrne, 2012, p. 175).8 She argues that this grouping was in the process of found-
ing a new politics, potentially a new ‘political narrative’ in Gramsci’s terms:
The particular brand of Marxism that influenced the Tuacc9 and Fosatu
union leadership in the 1970s and 1980s was something quite different to
the SACP brand. It was largely free of the trappings of party-building, it
was shaped by Western Marxism and radical social history, and it oper-
ated as part of an eclectic New Left that had many libertarian, even anar-
chist and syndicalist tendencies. (Byrne, 2012, pp. 100–101)
The discussion above suggests that the ideologically-directive pedagogy which

predominated in FOSATU in the 1970s and early 1980s can be accounted for
in a number of ways: by the educationally-privileged background of the pre-
dominantly white, organiser intellectuals in its leadership; by growing politi-
cal contestation during this period between what were to become known as
‘workerists’ and ‘populists’; and by the eclectic, left wing ideology of leading
educators who promoted a ‘new left’, socialist agenda for a post-apartheid
South Africa.
At the core of FOSATU leadership’s socio-political analysis was the assertion
that apartheid capitalism could only be challenged via workers’ power, and
that workers’ power in turn could only be built from the ‘bottom up’ through
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100 CHAPTER 5
workers’ control and democracy. It will be argued below that in the very pro-
cess of realising this goal, the organiser intellectuals ignited the development
of a new layer of organic, worker intellectuals who would ultimately challenge
their hegemony within the union movement.
3.2 Organic Worker Intellectuals as Self-Didacts

FOSATU’s education was based on a strategy of training a cadre of class con-
scious worker leaders who could pass on their expertise and knowledge to
a broader working class constituency (Byrne, 2012, p. 274).10 In this process,
FOSATU’s education programmes gave birth to a new generation of organic
worker intellectuals who would lead workers’ struggles in the future. They
were equipped with the intellectual tools and self-confidence to begin con-
testing the world view of the organiser intellectuals, and by the early 1980s, this
new layer of organic, worker intellectuals had “emerged as a new actor in the
union” (Ginsberg, 1997, p. 111).
This grouping of organic intellectuals was different from the earlier worker
intellectuals who tended to be older, migrant workers. The new grouping was
comprised of younger, better educated township residents who were more
exposed to the politics of Black Consciousness in the 1970s, more likely to
have participated in the 1976 student uprisings and who were drawn to the
revival of national democratic politics of the 1980s (see Friedman, 1987, p. 288).
They increasingly challenged the political and strategic analyses that had pre-
dominated in FOSATU’s trade union education programmes up to the early
1980s, especially the antipathy towards what was seen as populist, community
politics.
The early 1980s was a period of increasing worker self-activity from below
with mass mobilising campaigns and engagement by area-based, FOSATU
shop steward councils with student, youth and community-based organisa-
tions (Friedman, 1987, p. 437). It was in this context that South African work-
ers reinvented long-standing traditions of workers’ self-study in the struggle
for socially useful knowledge and ideas. One form which this took was that of
‘siyalala’s’ (or sleep–in seminars), a practice which originated in strikes where
workers occupied a workplace for a number of nights and days. As Ginsberg
has described:
Perhaps the most innovative development in the shop steward coun-

cils’ education programme was the “siyalala”, an education forum which
took place from evening on a Friday until early the following morning
… (It) developed into a critical space for intensive political education
… The siyalala’s were symbolically important “safe spaces” in which
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deeply-felt subjects could be debated and intensive learning could take

place. (Ginsberg, 1997, pp. 109–110)
The siyalala’s were often linked to instances of workers taking mass action. For
example, in 1987, workers belonging to the Chemical Workers Industrial Union
decided to take control of their factory. They were in dispute with management
over the racist attitudes of one of their personnel managers, whom they saw as
“intransigent, anti-workers, anti-everything” (CWIU, 1994, p. 68). They organ-
ised a sleep-in as a way of blocking the use of scab labour. A worker reported
how their spirits were high: “The whole night we were discussing … it just gave
that spirit of unity, you could see we were all together in this …” (ibid.).
In response to workers’ evident thirst for new knowledge, this period also
saw the mushrooming of a range of union media, particularly trade union
newspapers, aimed at a worker readership. FOSATU’s Worker News and the
Council of Unions of South Africa’s (CUSA’s) Iswelethu ran articles on labour
history, global events, unions elsewhere in the world and general political
issues, and provided news not available from mainstream press.11 These were
eagerly appropriated by workers, seeking to extend their knowledge and
understanding of the world about them.
3.3 The Urban Training Project and ‘Invisible Pedagogy’

Not all organiser intellectuals involved in workers’ education at the time were
white, and not all engaged in what Bernstein (2000) would have described as
‘visible pedagogy’. Apparently less directive and more learner-centred, invisi-
ble forms of pedagogy had long been part of the traditions of radical education
within South African workers’ movement. However, despite their orientation
towards a more learner-centred, experiential approach methodologically,
these initiatives nevertheless remained ideologically positioned and sought to
promote a particular political strategy and vision of the future.
In the early 1970s, the ideas and methodologies of Paulo Freire had been
introduced into the Black Consciousness movement via the radical Univer-
sity Christian Movement mainly through literacy projects12 (see Nekhwevha,
2002, p. 130; Naidoo, 2015). These ideas and methodologies soon found their
way into the emerging black trade union movement via the Urban Training
Project (UTP).
UTP played the same role for a grouping of more Black Consciousness-
aligned trade unions that were later to form CUSA as did the IAS and IIE in
supporting the emergence of the early FOSATU unions. UTP however drew in
comparatively a larger proportion of organic intellectuals with roots in the
black working class (Lowry, 1999). The UTP consciously adopted a Freirian
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102 CHAPTER 5
form of popular education that could be described as a form of invisible peda-

gogy. According to one of its leading educators:
We used the same approach as Young Christian Workers … We would try

to build on workers’ everyday experience and encourage them to discuss
what they could do to change that. The seminars definitely brought the
unions new members. (as cited in Friedman, 1987, p. 98)
UTP drew on experiential learning methods such as role plays, simulation

games and group discussions that intentionally drew on workers’ experience,
and it popularised the role of the trade union through publications such as
Workers’ Calendars that would reach the widest layer of workers. It recognised
and strove to apply what it called “generally accepted Worker/Adult Education
Principles”, including:
– Education should be active and not passive;
– Education should actively use the experiences of course participants to
highlight the significance of events affecting them;
– Education should be based on the needs of those receiving it thus respect-
ing their self-determination;
– Education should equip those receiving it to help themselves (Vally,
Bofelo, & Treat, 2013, p. 474).
These principles were manifested through a method used by Young Christian
Workers (YCW) and adopted by UTP called the “See, Judge and Act” method,
reminiscent of Freire’s method of “conscientização” [conscientisation] (ibid.,
p. 474).
It is notable that the UTP, which deployed a more participatory, learner-
centred approach to education, located itself ideologically within a more
reformist trade union tradition, placing emphasis on the “interdependence
of management and labour and the importance of sound and constructive
relations between the two” (Seftel, 1983, p. 42). This shows that one cannot
simply ‘read off’ an ideological orientation from the methodologies used, and
that there is no simple or automatic correspondence between ‘progressive
methodology’ and ‘radical politics’. Nor is there any necessary correspondence
between the pedagogic style adopted, and the cultural/class background of the
educators involved.
3.4 Labour Service Organisations and the Workers’ Movement

As noted earlier, alongside the growth of the workers’ movement in the mid- to
late-1970s and early 1980s, there emerged a range of non-governmental, adult
literacy initiatives for workers, with many drawing on a Freirian methodological
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approach. Increasing numbers of intellectuals outside of the labour move-

ment also responded to unionised workers’ expressed needs for information
and research, and it was during this period that a number of labour service
organisations (LSO’s) were established. For example, the WITS History Work-
shop and the Labour History Group produced a series of popular publications
that traced the history of working class communities and trade union strug-
gles in South Africa. Other groups such as the International Labour Research
& Information Group (ILRIG), Trade Union Research Project (TURP) and the
Labour and Economic Research Committee (LERC) were established to make
available a range of research and information to organised workers (see Cooper
et al., 2002, pp. 118–119).
Many of these organisations were staffed by political activists who shared a
similar background to the organiser intellectuals within the labour movement
in that they were young, left-wing, well-educated, and predominantly from
white, middle-class backgrounds. While the organiser intellectuals in FOSATU
seemed to have no qualms about assuming leadership roles in the unions,13
the LSO intellectuals who were outsiders to the labour movement, could not
legitimately make direct, political interventions. As an ILRIG staff member
commented at the time:
The ILRIG materials attempt to stimulate discussion rather than ‘giving

the line’. This implies that the information provided aims to broaden the
knowledge-base of the readers, hence ‘empowering’ them through pro-
viding new information, new perspectives. (as cited in Schuster, 1989,
p. 71)
Many of these LSO-based intellectuals constructed education and research

roles that were essentially supportive in nature and intended to strengthen the
development of workers’ organisation and democracy.
Many LSO’s espoused a learner-centred, participatory approach to educa-
tion,14 and some projects explored creative ways to translate this pedagogy
into textual forms. This learner-centred approach did not make their work any
less political in nature however, as will be illustrated by a brief look at one such
organisation, LACOM, the Labour Sub-Committee of the South African Coun-
cil for Higher Education (SACHED).15
In a recent interview,16 a group of ex-LACOM educators17 recalled how
they adhered to the principle of accountability of LSOs to membership-
based organisations such as unions: “… events were not planned by us sitting
in the LACOM office. I mean whatever educational activity was organised, it
was planned together (with the unions)”. They recalled how they strove for a
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104 CHAPTER 5
culture of openness, debate, critique, transparency and non-sectarianism, and

adopted a popular education approach that built on participants’ experiential
knowledge:
And the methodology was also such that, you know, people really built on
people’s experiences and then tried to link the theory to peoples’ experi-
ence … Everyone was seen as both learner and teacher and there was a
shared understanding that important learning takes place in struggle and
in daily activities.
At the same time, their methods were “not just purely experiential and let
things flow” but connected to “a vision of socialist society – an alternative soci-
ety to the capital(ist) society”. Educators in LACOM “really wanted to build the
working class – (that is), not only … the union movement”. Some of their work
focused on political economy and history, but much of it was on ‘basic skills’
(such as bookkeeping skills, ‘how to use a phone’, ‘how to use a calculator’).
These skills were viewed not simply as technical but also political in nature –
“… (we provided) organisational skills like bookkeeping and report writing,
but in a political way …” – and as supporting the building of democratic and
accountable working class organisations.
LSO activists were keenly aware of their political vulnerability and avoided
openly contesting the politics of union leaders:
… but there were gatekeepers … yeah, lots of gatekeepers. You either

worked with the union movement or didn’t … If some of the leaders in
the unions didn’t quite like your politics … (or) your ideology … then you
weren’t the chosen organization that they worked with … On that thing
we should not be naive, I mean there were gatekeepers. But it didn’t stop
us finding ways of stimulating people to really reflect critically on the
context.
One way to get around the ‘gatekeepers’ and reach a wide layer of workers
was through the production of popular education materials that could be dis-
tributed and shared amongst workers. As part of a larger study of SACHED’s
publications, Trimbur (2009) argues that such popular texts pose interesting
political and ethical questions about how “people are represented, in the dou-
ble sense of being figured as a political force and of being spoken on behalf of”
(p. 88).
LACOM was one of the first LSOs to adopt the rhetorical technique of the
“embedded narrator”.18 For example, in its history of South Africa workers’
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struggles, Freedom from Below (1989), a cartoon figure, Thami, speaks directly
to readers, serving as a point of identification of the intended worker read-
ership, and acting as a guide as well as providing commentary from a work-
ers’ perspective. He poses questions and provides answers to: what are trade
unions, and why should workers join trade unions? Trimbur argues that “… the
figure of Thami is meant to enable the rhetorical formation of an audience
with its own class interests, a collective ‘we’ in search of knowledge”. However,
he is critical of the way it was deployed in this instance:
While Thami’s initial uncertainly about joining the union and his ques-
tions are offered as a matter of credibility, he quickly becomes a rather
monological figure, delivering colloquial versions of Durban LACOM’s
workerist history that simply recapitulate the account in the text and
thereby reduce the multimodal potentialities of an embedded narrator
… to offer a counterpoint or space to think about history. (Trimbur, 2009,
p. 96)
Trimbur’s case study of popular literacy and print cultures in South Africa in
the 1980s brings us back to the complex question of the role of the radical edu-
cator. For Trimbur, this role involves not simply a choice for individuals with
expertise to either facilitate popular expression or propagate ‘correct’ political
ideas:
To pose the question in this way makes it seem to hinge on personal

predilection – about how, say, an individual teacher acts toward learn-
ers – when the problem of expertise is, in a more fundamental sense,
a structural one, rooted in the monopolies of expertise in a racialized
class society that served to reproduce ignorance and dependency, on the
one hand, and privileged access to knowledge and social authority, on
the other … There is a certain balancing act at work that cannot simply
be comprehended as simply facilitation or propagandizing …. (Trimbur,
1990, p. 100)
This section has shown that while ‘visible’ pedagogy predominated in work-
ers’ education historically, ‘invisible’ forms of pedagogy have also flourished
as one important strand of workers’ education in South Africa. This was true
not only within workers’ organisations but in the forms of pedagogy adopted
by a wide range of LSOs that sought, during the 1970s and 1980s, to nurture
the growth of workers’ organisations in such a way as to strengthen workers’
democracy and control. However, because of the close articulation of these
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106 CHAPTER 5
popular education projects with the workers’ movement, they were actors on
a terrain that remained politically and ideologically contested, and therefore
their pedagogic interventions could not be anything other than ideologically
partisan to some extent. Creative methodologies and textual genres were
invented in attempts (in Trimbur’s words above) to ‘rearticulate expertise to
popular aspirations’, in order to give workers agency and voice. Nevertheless
the inevitable power hierarchies between educator and learner remained in
place, albeit hidden.
The ideologically-aligned character of workers’ education practices –
whether ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ – historically served to achieve two things. It
enabled workers’ education to act as a tool in the struggle between different,
contending political currents for political/ideological leadership of the work-
ers’ movement. In addition, it served as a vehicle to cement amongst organ-
ised workers a distinct, black working class identity in their collective struggle
against capital. Trimbur (2009) argues persuasively that the more progressive
workers’ education initiatives during the 1970s and 1980s did not conceive of
their work as “simply liberating the people from ignorance”; “unleashing a
spontaneous revolutionary will on the part of the people” or as “having van-
guard cadre correct their false consciousness” (p. 102). What worker educators
recognised was that “the unity that is required for liberation cannot be the
presumed starting point”. The ravages of apartheid had included the crea-
tion of ‘racially’-based identities which – along with other factors such as lan-
guage or skill differentials – acted to divide workers and pit them against one
another. In Trimbur’s view, “the people are more like a molecular process of
bonding and division than a unified entity. The unity of the people, rather,
is a political horizon, and rhetorical negotiation provides a means to reach
it” (p. 103). Workers’ education programmes and projects invented a range
of pedagogic strategies in order to realise this ‘political horizon’ of worker
unity, but in order to achieve this, they tended towards more didactic forms of
pedagogy.
The second half of this chapter returns to the case study of SAMWU in the
early 2000s, at a time when this public sector union was struggling to find effec-
tive strategies to counter the effects of the neo-liberal policies of privatisation
and sub-contracting that had been brought in under the ANC in government
in the late 1990s. It looks at continuities and discontinuities in the features of
workers’ education in the post-apartheid period. It examines how, in differ-
ent ways, trade union education has continued to reproduce both visible and
invisible modes of pedagogy, seeking to forge workers’ unity in new ways and
in the context of growing diversity within the working class. While ideologi-
cally directive, it will be shown how different strategies are drawn upon in an
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attempt to acknowledge the multiple, cultural identities of workers and build a

more inclusive, working class identity. This section will also show how the task
of achieving what Trimbur describes as ‘molecular bonding’ between diverse
strata and segments of the working class has become increasingly more com-
plex and challenging.
4 samwu’s Pedagogy: A ‘Mixed Pedagogic Pallet’
The 1990s and early 2000s was a time when the labour movement needed to
expand and diversify its knowledge, capabilities and expertise. The transi-
tion to democracy required trade unions – many of whom had traditionally
operated defensively – to play an increasingly proactive role in a wide range
of policy forums which demanded a range of specialised knowledge and
expertise. Economic policy debates focused on macro-economic issues such
as labour markets and industrial restructuring. New initiatives around partici-
pative management and new labour legislation required unionists to engage
in an unprecedented range of management and bargaining issues. The area
of education and training policy alone required unions to retool intellectually
on a wide range of issues which had not previously fallen within their areas of
concern or expertise, including Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET),
the relationship between training and job grading, and issues relating to the
development of a national qualifications system.
Ironically, this was a period when many unions actually lost intellectual
capacity. This was a result of a number of factors, not least of which was the
exodus of key leadership – often those with the most experience and exper-
tise – out of the union movement into government. Affirmative action poli-
cies also moved many experienced worker leaders from the shop floor into
management (see Cooper & Qotole, 1996, pp. 12–14). According to one labour
observer at the time:
… no sooner is the potential contribution of promising shop stewards

improved, often with great effort and at great cost to their unions than
they are … targeted by management and lured out of the unions into bet-
ter paid positions as labour liaison, personnel management, community
service officers and the like – which utilise their inside knowledge and
skills developed by the trade unions in the service of new industrial rela-
tions strategies. The result for the trade unions is that they find them-
selves ‘constantly running just to stay in the same place’. The trade unions
are not only the best ‘schools of the working class’, they seem to be the
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108 CHAPTER 5
‘best sources of trained personnel for everyone else in South Africa!’

according to one union leader. (Keet, 1992, p. 34)
It is therefore significant that in the early 2000s, SAMWU still retained an unu-
sually well organised and elaborate system of education programmes, sup-
ported by a range of education materials and by full-time educational staff at
national, provincial and local level (Cooper, 2005, p. 102). As noted earlier, it
ran Foundation Shop-Steward Training (FSST) on a consistent basis as well as
a range of special issue courses. It placed strong emphasis on political edu-
cation and increasing priority was given to staff training in this period. This
section of the chapter draws on observations of three of the union’s planned
and structured education programmes, as part of the research conducted at
the time. Each was directed at a different target audience and with a different
educational focus: a Foundation Shop-steward Training (FSST) programme,
a political education programme for branch-level leadership, and a national,
organiser training programme focusing on wage talks and planning for an
imminent strike.
Earlier research on SAMWU’s Cape Town branch had found that educators
described their education practices as fitting “within Freirian principles of
problem-posing education, where teachers and learners are ‘critical co-inves-
tigators’” (Coetzee, 2002, p. 24). This participatory, learner-centred approach
to pedagogy was enacted in a number of the education events that I observed,
particularly in the extensive use made of small group work involving problem-
solving exercises centred around scenarios crafted from real life events. The
design of the union’s written materials supporting its programmes reflected a
learner-centred approach that foregrounded group work and learning activi-
ties. For example, the FSST training manual’s notes for facilitators included
a section entitled ‘Adult Education’, which contained a wide variety of ‘ice-
breakers’ and ‘energisers’, an extract on ‘How Adults Learn’ and the ‘Experien-
tial Learning Cycle’. Suggestions for methods included role-plays, simulation
games, case studies, ‘sculpturing’ and buzz groups. A section dealing with ‘The
Learning Climate’ emphasised that the facilitator should avoid letting partici-
pants ‘sit in straight rows’ as this would have a negative effect on participation
and provided guidelines for promoting participation in groups. Another sec-
tion on ‘facilitation skills’ promoted a radical humanist approach to education
which emphasised that the facilitator should ‘encourage democracy and be
non-directive’, be as ‘invisible’ as possible, and ‘ensure an equal power relation-
ship between all the participants and the facilitator’ (as cited in Cooper, 2005,
pp. 116–117).
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Despite this stated commitment to participatory forms of pedagogy, the

union’s education programmes were far from non-directive. Power was
‘masked’ by the programme’s many learner-centred activities, but these activi-
ties functioned to communicate strongly the values, principles and ideology
of the union as a community of practice. Many of the activities in the FSST
programme drew on or connected with learners’ experiences – in fact, they
frequently took learners’ experiences as their starting point – but they had pre-
determined outcomes and the learning criteria were explicit. For example, par-
ticipants were asked to form small groups to discuss ‘Why does management
have power?”. Here, the instructions to the facilitator read: “You will get a range
of responses. Through an input you need to consolidate these responses so
that some of these key points emerge …” (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 118). The
notes then went on to outline some of the key points covered on the first day of
the FSST workshop. Elsewhere, in an activity on how shop-stewards represent
workers’ interests in the workplace, the facilitator was advised:
There are a number of key points that need to be made during this ses-
sion. You can make some of the points through an input, and you can
make some of them through activities. The best would be to use a combi-
nation of inputs, activities, and summarising key points after the activi-
ties, to make sure the important points are made. (ibid.)
Observations of education events in the union showed that the more predomi-
nant form of pedagogy in practice was far from invisible or non-directive, and
took the form of traditional, didactic styles of teaching (visible pedagogy), usu-
ally involving the delivery of inputs followed by questions. Didactic forms of
pedagogy might have conservative origins but in the educational events of this
union, they were clearly radical in intent. For example, in the FSST workshop,
the facilitator urged workers to take control of their organisation:
The union is not that building over there … It is you and the workers …
What we want is a union where workers are involved in the decision-
making …
Another facilitator emphasised:
Don’t open your books. I want to talk to you about workers’ control. The
union official doesn’t have power. You must tell me what to do … You
have to take control of the situation, both at the (union) office and at the
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110 CHAPTER 5
workplace. Power is not in the trade union office … (it lies in your) ability
to take responsibility for union affairs …. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 120)
As shown in Chapter 2, the ideological directedness of the FSST programme

was evident in the FSST workshop not only in the union educator’s explicit
critique of ‘classes under capitalism’, but also in the questions for group dis-
cussion on the first morning of the workshop: “What are the problems facing
workers? Why does management have power? Why should workers join the
union?”. The political education programme explicitly promoted a particular
worldview which challenged the class-based structure of society based on une-
qual distribution of wealth and power.
It became clear that the union’s form of pedagogy was a ‘mixed pallet’
(Bernstein, 2000): a combination of an espoused commitment to, and partial
enactment of invisible pedagogy (learner-centred, participatory in orienta-
tion, where the educator purportedly played a non-directive role), and a more
dominant mode of visible pedagogy in terms of both workshop materials and
educational practices (where the educator visibly intervenes to direct learners
to key understandings). Education events frequently involved the transmis-
sion of large amounts of information, but more importantly, they were aimed
at imparting key values and constructing particular roles and identities.19 The
identity-construction role of union education was strongest in the shop-stew-
ard training programme. Here, one of the key tasks of the union educator was
to reconstruct the identity of the new shop-steward from that of ‘worker’ to
‘union activist’ – someone who would challenge management’s power as well
as the principles of the capitalist workplace. This involved inducting partici-
pants into the values and principles of the union as well as into a combative
shop-steward role that would demand new power relations on the shop floor
and more broadly. Whether overtly didactic or more facilitative, the union’s
pedagogy was essentially a class-based, identity-building, ideological project.
The values transmitted through union pedagogy emphasised the interests
of the collective, based on the assumption that it is only through uniting and
acting in combination that workers are able to realise their collective power.
Hence a strong emphasis on exploring and identifying the common experi-
ences and problems of workers, which provide the raw material around which
their collective identity can be built. In all these workshops, it was stressed that
this collective identity extends beyond the union, potentially including work-
ers in rival unions as well as beyond the workplace to include other members
of the working class, employed or unemployed, and both locally and globally.
This broader, working class identity was viewed as being based not only on
commonality but also on difference:
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For us in the trade union movement … we have comrades from different

political perspectives … The single feature uniting us is that we’re workers
… we all have the common feature of being workers and we must create
the space in our union for people of different political perspectives …. (as
cited in Cooper, 2005, p. 121)
Once again, this points to attempts to achieve a ‘balancing act’ between defin-
ing a particular ideological orientation on the one hand and constructing a
spirit of broad inclusivity on the other.
As already noted, there was a tension between the union’s stated commit-
ment to ‘popular education methodology’ on the one hand, and its actual ped-
agogic practices on the other. However, the union’s strong ideological message
was not simply imposed in a ‘top-down’ manner. There existed a commitment
to reciprocal learning between educators and learners, and the role of educa-
tor was clearly a fluid one, with worker leaders often stepping into this role.
Furthermore, significant attempts were made by educators to reach the expe-
riences of workers and to integrate their experiences into the union’s political
ideology. One way of doing this was through the use of participatory, learning
activities. However, an equally significant way was through the deployment of
a range of culturally-embedded, symbolic tools of mediation, drawn from the
culture and life-world of the participants. Their use enabled ordinary union
members to contribute to the form and content of the pedagogic message. The
issue of tools of mediation will be elaborated in some detail in the following
chapter. However, the next subsection focuses briefly on the tools of mediation
which acted to ‘soften’ and democratise the ideologically-directive nature of
the union’s structured education programmes.
4.1 Tools of Mediation as Moderating Directive Pedagogy

While Bernstein’s conceptual language is useful for distinguishing between dif-
ferent forms of trade union pedagogy, the Vygotskian/CHAT concept of tools of
mediation is indispensable for understanding how these particular pedagogic
forms are put to use. Tools of mediation describe the role of both people as
well as artefacts that assist learners to appropriate knowledge, and may take
the form of artefacts, language or activity (Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 52–55). Tools of
mediation are always culturally embedded and sedimented with history, and
during mediation, the learner not only internalises cultural tools and rules but
also engages in ‘creative externalization’ (Hasan, 2002).
SAMWU’s pedagogy was characterised by the use of a very rich variety of
symbolic tools of mediation that assisted and promoted processes of learn-
ing.20 Forms of written text played an important role in all three education
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112 CHAPTER 5
events observed and were notably more prevalent and denser in nature in the
two leadership-oriented workshops. This was despite the union’s acknowl-
edgement in one of its organisational reviews that there was a general absence
of a ‘reading culture’ amongst its members:
There is a definite problem of shop-stewards who can read, failing to read

and to educate themselves. This is a vital component of leadership devel-
opment, communication, and the building of an informed democratic
organisation. Without a ‘culture of reading’ our formal courses are not
consolidated. The attempts to cultivate a culture of reading groups or
political policy discussion forums have not succeeded but must be con-
tinued. (as cited in Cooper, 2005, pp. 124–125)
The prevalence of written text co-existed with a communicative culture which

was deeply oral and performative in character, and which included various
speech genres, the use of ‘embodied’ performance and the mediating roles of
emotion and humour. In the FSST education programme, a noticeable tool
of mediation was code-switching.21 A Western Cape, working-class dialect of
Afrikaans was often used for the particular, the vivid example and the mobi-
lisation of personal and emotional resources, while English was used for the
more formal, the more distanced and the more abstract. For example, one
facilitator (himself a former shop-steward) spoke in English when explain-
ing a more abstract legal point but switched to Afrikaans when dealing with
how the shop-steward should fight a particular case. Code-switching is a wide-
spread phenomenon in South Africa and is regarded as originating in attempts
to circumvent or transcend the institutionalised, ethnic barriers of apartheid
(Slabbert & Finlayson, 2002, p. 237). It is seen as a form of accommodation
and symbolises the values of democracy, equality, mutual understanding and
respect (ibid., p. 254). In the union context, it signals the importance with
which equality and respect amongst workers is regarded, and helps to build an
inclusive, working-class identity.
Presenters and facilitators frequently infused their inputs with a sardonic
humour that was embedded in the local, working class language and culture
of this region, and which was often used to define and denigrate ‘the bosses’.
Code-switching and humour helped educators to reach into the experiences of
the worker-participants in order to build a collective identity that could strad-
dle ethnic, language and cultural divides, and conscript participants to the
union’s values and world view. The ubiquitous use of humour also appeared
to play an important role in moderating the tensions and power plays that
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often permeated union education events between educators and participants,

between different cultural/language groups and between men and women.
The use of culturally embedded tools of communication did not only work
one way: worker-participants also made widespread use of code-switching
and humour as well as story-telling and anecdotes drawn from their own expe-
rience in order to deepen their understanding of the union’s principles and
digest the meaning of their shop-steward roles.
Performance – embodied and impassioned forms of enacting stories and
anecdotes – also played a crucial role in inducting new shop-stewards into
their roles. For example, in the FSST workshop, an organiser strutted up and
down, giving life to the ‘belligerent shop-steward’ role, while a second organ-
iser role-played the language, the mood, the tone, the gestures of the ‘good
shop-steward’. These embodied modes of communication were also used by
workshop participants who were not formally viewed as playing a mediating
role, but who did so nevertheless. For example, an isiXhosa translator in the
FSST workshop often engaged in an animated way, using his hands dramati-
cally and emphasising points by gesticulating forcefully with his fore-finger
(Cooper, 2005, p. 129).
These embodied forms of pedagogy served not only to model the role and
shape the identity of the shop-steward, but also to communicate the union’s
rules of practice and reinforce a pedagogic message that is ideologically parti-
san and subversive of established authority. More importantly for the purposes
of this chapter, they help to provide some answer to the question: how can the
tendency towards an ideologically directive pedagogy be reconciled with worker
education’s participatory and democratic traditions? The use of these cultur-
ally-embedded tools of mediation not only allowed educators to draw on the
experiences and memories of workers to better impart the union’s pedagogic
messages, but also enabled a more dialogical form of pedagogy where workers
could exercise agency in shaping the content of the pedagogic messages, thus
providing a counterweight to and enriching the union’s ‘official’ ideology.
5 Conclusion: Holding the Tension – A Complex ‘Balancing Act’
This chapter has shown that historically, two contrasting models of peda-
gogy have been enacted within the South African labour movement. A mode
of visible pedagogy with its overt ideological messages being transmitted via
quite conventional, didactic methods such as lectures followed by discussion,
has predominated. But alongside it, a mode of invisible pedagogy – ‘invisible’
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114 CHAPTER 5
because although it draws on more experiential, participatory and learner-

centred methods, it nevertheless imparts a strong ideological message – has
had a continuous presence.
It is not easy to categorise discrete instances of workers’ education as either
visible or invisible pedagogy. These categories are not simple binaries but
exist along a continuum. Furthermore, the case study of SAMWU’s pedagogy
illustrates that its pedagogic practices are a ‘mixed pallet’ where an invisible
mode is inserted into – or interleafed with – a more dominant mode of visible
pedagogy and is not easily separated from it. Within this ‘mixed pallet’, a range
of actors play the role of intellectuals, including ‘professional’, ‘organiser’ and
‘organic’ intellectuals. Choudry (2015) has noted that there is commonly a dia-
lectical interaction between different groupings of intellectuals in the process
of knowledge building and sharing. As the South African workers’ movement
grew in the 1970s and 1980s however, there was a noticeable shift in intellectual
leadership from ‘organiser intellectuals’ to ‘organic intellectuals’.
Both visible and invisible modes of pedagogy are indispensable to the
achievement of the labour movement’s educational goals. The invisible mode
is in tune with the historical ideals of worker democracy and workers’ control,
and it sits comfortably within an epistemology which places priority on work-
ers’ experiences as a means of making critical meaning of the world. How-
ever, the ‘soft humanism’ of this mode cannot adequately transmit the strong
ideological messages which workers’ education needs to transmit in order to
build unity within the working class and among broader popular forces, and
an effective counter-hegemony. Hence its co-existence with visible forms of
pedagogy – a pedagogic form which is accentuated during times of stronger
political contestation within the workers’ movement. The politically direc-
tive nature of visible pedagogy, and its potential to slide into indoctrination
is not easily compatible with the ‘bottom-up’, democratic ideals of workers’
education – that is, with the very purpose of workers’ education. However, its
tendency towards what Freire (1970) has called ‘banking education’ is signifi-
cantly moderated by the use of culturally embedded tools of mediation, which
provide a vehicle for the expression from ‘below’ of workers’ aspirations and
visions of the future.
The co-existence of these two modes gives rise to an inescapable tension in
workers’ education, and this presents one of the more significant challenges
facing worker educators. The challenge arises from the fact that this tension
cannot be resolved but can only be ‘held’ via what Trimbur has described as
‘a certain balancing act’. ‘Holding’ this tension is not simply a function of a
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highly skilled facilitator. A key condition for holding this tension lies outside
of worker pedagogy itself and is embedded in the nature of workers’ organisa-
tion as an activity system. By way of conclusion, this chapter will illustrate this
point by drawing on Mike Newman’s notion of ‘The Third Contract” in trade
union education.
As noted in Chapter 1, the ‘Third Contract’ (Newman, 1993) in trade union
education comes into being because the worker participants in education
events are not only ‘learners’; they also constitute part of the general mem-
bership of the union that elects representatives that determine union educa-
tion policy, and to whom the educator is accountable. Newman (1993) makes
the point that the third contract represents one of the key lines of democracy
within the union, and that if this line of accountability and workers’ control is
‘broken’, this has serious consequences not only for the organisation in general,
but for workers’ education in particular. More specifically in the light of the
discussion above, if this Third Contract is weakened or broken, it makes the
‘holding of the tension’ between the two modes of pedagogy impossible and
renders it more likely that education will slide into a form of propaganda or
indoctrination.
The consequences of what happens when this Third Contract ‘snaps’ will
be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7 of this book. However, events within
SAMWU which came to a head two decades into South Africa’s democracy, pro-
vide a poignant illustration. In 2009, a new layer of leadership was elected to
high office within the union. In the following years, in retaliation for numer-
ous allegations of corruption against them, the new leadership embarked on
widespread expulsions of dissenting worker leaders and staff. Factional fight-
ing led to the fragmentation of the union and the establishment of two rival
unions. This was not an isolated phenomenon; the period witnessed similar
developments in a number of other COSATU affiliates, as well as the splitting
of the federation itself. Worker education has inevitably been the victim of
this organisational fragmentation and its tasks of building worker unity in the
future have been made significantly more difficult.
The ‘balancing act’ between an ideologically directed pedagogy and a more
dialogical, problematising pedagogy can therefore only be held in a context
where there is a robust internal democracy with the workers’ organisation,
where members – through representative structures as well as cultural activ-
ity and organisational engagement more broadly (illustrated in the following
chapter) – retain the ability to express their own voice and exercise agency in
key decision-making structures.
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116 CHAPTER 5
Notes
1 See for example, Swope (1992) who researched the pedagogy of Christian base com-
munities in Chile.
2 Daniels (2012) (see Chapter 3) has proposed a way of integrating some of Bernstein’s
concepts with CHAT, and I have also attempted to do so in earlier work (Cooper,
2005, pp. 251–256).
3 There is no suggestion that this is done in a conspiratorial way; the argument is
rather that power relations are inevitably structured into all human relationships,
including educational ones.
4 This is supported by a number of sources; see Friedman (1987, pp. 91–92 and 185);
Cooper and Qotole (1996, p. 56); Ginsberg (1997, chapter 6); and Andrews (2003,
pp. 99–100).
5 The energy invested in these courses was considerable. For example, by 1984, there
were 10 residential national courses catering for 200 people, weekend seminars
regionally at least once a month involving 20–100 people, and regional training of
400–500 shop-stewards per year, in addition to regular parallel courses run by each
affiliate (Byrne, 2012, p. 253).
6 They followed in the footsteps of key writings by Wolpe (1972) and Legassick (1974).
7 Webster (1992) cites C. Wright Mills’ identification of four types of intellectuals
involved in the American labour movement: (1) Professionally trained intellectu-
als (e.g. lawyers, economists) who were sometimes employed by unions; (2) ‘party’
intellectuals who followed the ‘line’ of the party’; (3) free-lance research intellectu-
als with no foothold in the labour movement; and (4) union made intellectuals who
were crucially “the link between ideas and action” (Mills, as cited in Webster, 1992,
p. 88). I argue that these roles are slightly differently constructed in the South
African context where the race/class nature of educational privilege has played a
significant role.
8 Erwin (2017), a leading figure in FOSATU at the time, argues that the emphasis on
building worker leadership at a factory floor level was a form of ‘guerrilla unionism’,
a tactical move in an era of widespread repression. The stress on ‘training, study
and debate’ amongst worker leaders would ensure that workers’ organisation could
survive in the face of widespread detentions and banning of union and other politi-
cal leaders. He argues also that behind this “was a strategic intent to build a lasting
working class organisation as opposed to a purely trade union organisation” (Erwin,
2017, p. 238).
9 Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council – the predecessor to FOSATU.
10 It is perhaps worth noting that Gramsci did not see any contradiction between a
process of developing grassroots intellectuals and the need for a vanguard leader-
ship (Holst, 1999).
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11 FOSATU News had a far larger circulation than many smaller commercial newspa-
pers (Friedman, 1987, p. 503, notes).
12 These included the National Literacy Cooperation (NLC), Learn & Teach, English
Language/Literacy Project (ELP), Eastern Cape Adult Literacy Project (ECALP) and
the Adult Literacy Project (ALP) in Cape Town.
13 One leading FOSATU educator commented: “… the intellectual comes in as a per-
manent part. We are not there to facilitate anything. The intellectual is in a leader-
ship position. He (sic) plays that part whatever it might be” (as cited in Maree, 1986,
p. 331).
14 The work of some of these organisations has been documented in a series of inter-
views, as part of a recent research project on Popular Education in South Africa.
The 3 year research project was entitled ’Traditions of Popular Education in South
Africa’ and sponsored by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sci-
ences (NIHSS); some links are available on the Popular Education Programme’s
website: http://www.populareducation.co.za/
15 SACHED was an NGO that offered black South African students access to tertiary
education.
16 All quotes in this sub-section are taken from a focus group interview with ex-LACOM
staff, conducted on 08/10/2014 in Cape Town, and available on the Popular Educa-
tion Program website.
17 The majority of whom were black African or Coloured intellectuals.
18 This technique was borrowed by other SACHED books (see Christie, 1988), as well
as by ILRIG; see for example, its book on the revolution and workers’ control in
Mozambique.
19 Coetzee’s evaluation of the Cape Metro branch FSST programme found that the pro-
gramme was in fact not very successful in communicating ‘content’ (e.g. the details
of the union’s structure and constitution) but was far more successful in imparting
to shop-stewards an “understanding of their role” (Coetzee, 2002, pp. 10–12).
20 This subsection draws on Cooper (2006).
21 Slabbert and Finlayson (2002, p. 235) define code-switching as “Switching lan-
guages or linguistic varieties within the same conversation”. The majority of union
members in this branch were Afrikaans-speaking.
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CHAPTER 6
Informal Learning: Workers’ Education as Praxis
… education can take place anywhere, at any time and involves people of
all ages … Any meeting, any strike, any wage negotiation, and any lunch
break can be used as places where education takes place.
speech at cosatu’s first education conference (as cited in Baskin, 1991,
p. 244)
…
The strength of Gramsci’s notion of education lies in the culture of praxis.
Education is established in action rather than in theory … [I]f the culture
of praxis is the final goal of Gramsci’s political project, a culture of acting
not as a prerogative of the elite, but of all the people, is the task to which
education must contribute.
Pagano (2017, p. 58)
∵
While the previous chapter focused on organised worker education pro-
grammes, it is commonly understood that workers’ learning extends well
beyond the walls of seminar rooms or education workshops. In his work on the
history of Canadian workers’ education, Welton argues that there are “notori-
ous difficulties in delineating the boundaries of worker education” (1991, p. 25)
and that workers’ education needs to be seen as a dimension of workers’ cul-
ture and politics. Sawchuk (2001, p. 364), too, urges that we adopt ‘an expansive
view of learning in the labour movement’.
Workers’ education takes place within and across a rich variety of sites
linked to organising, mobilising and social action, including: recruiting new
members, meetings and congresses, participating in wage bargaining or policy
forums, running campaigns, protest marches and strike action. Historically,
in South Africa under apartheid, in the absence of state recognition of black
trade unions, routine organising was never ‘routine’. It was a constant, bitter
struggle to win even small, tangible gains and so organising, mobilising and
social action were by far the more significant sites of learning for the mass of
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Informal Learning 119
black workers for much of the 20th century. It is this informal learning in social
practice that is the focus of this chapter.
The question of informal learning in social practice is one that has occupied
centre stage for the last two decades in two fields of research: that of workplace
learning, and that of learning in social movements. In the context of recent
debates around the knowledge economy (Guile, 2010; Livingston & Guile,
2012) and lifelong learning (Jarvis, 2007; Preece, 2009), there has been a steady
growth of interest in theorising learning at work as ‘learning in social practice’
(Wenger, 1998; Barnett, 2001; Guile & Griffiths, 2001; Billet, 2004; Engeström,
2004, 2008). At the same time there has been a growing body of work theo-
rising learning in social action and social movements (Newman, 1999; Foley,
1999; Crowther, Martin, & Shaw, 1999; Holst, 2002; Mayo, 2005; Hall, Clover, &
Crowther, 2013). I argue that we need to conceptualise learning within the
workers’ movement as straddling both these sites of learning – the workplace
and the terrain of social movements – and that an understanding of workers’
education not only has something to draw from these two fields of research,
but also has something to contribute to both these fields of scholarship.
The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on learning
within the processes of the routine organising activities of a trade union. It
begins with an overview of the origins in radical social theory of notions of
learning through organisation and social action and shows how some of these
principles found expression in the historical praxis of the trade union move-
ment in South Africa. Then, drawing on selected analytical frameworks used to
theorise learning at work, notably CHAT and some additional conceptual tools
from Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated learning theory, this section argues that
historically, unions can be seen as ‘learning organisations’ of a special kind.
Drawing once again on SAMWU at the end of the first decade of democracy
in South Africa, it explores the features that have contributed to making this
organisational environment conducive to learning, in other words, an ‘expan-
sive’ learning environment (Fuller & Unwin, 2004).
The second part of the chapter focuses on the important role that work-
ing class culture plays in informal learning within the workers’ movement.
It returns to the period of the 1980s and points to the rich array of cultural
resources that have historically been drawn on in the process of mediating
knowledge within the South African workers’ movement. The third part of the
chapter considers the role of workers’ mass action as a tool of mediation and
as a site of new knowledge making.
Although trade union organising, cultural activism and mass action have
been separated out for consideration in this chapter, these sites of interac-
tion/collective action within the workers’ movement should be regarded as a
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120 chapter 6
continuum. The chapter shows how workers’ culture – as a key tool of media-
tion in the Activity Theory sense – is threaded through these different sites
of social action, acting as a ‘glue’ that binds together processes of informal
learning and teaching, and stamping them with a unique, local texture. It also
seeks to show that while labour movements might be regarded as examples of
‘old’ social movements (Spencer, 1995), their relevance to and impact on recent
social struggles – certainly in ‘southern’ contexts such as that of South Africa –
and their importance as sites of learning as well as knowledge-making, remain
significant.
1 Learning through Organisational Praxis
The lineage of critical thinking about learning embedded in organising and

social action has lengthy roots in radical social theory. Gramsci, for example,
conceptualised hegemony as operating at the multiple levels of ideology, cul-
ture, politics and the economy. In line with the socio-material view of learn-
ing characteristic of CHAT, his concept of hegemony transformed the concept
of ideology from one concerned only with ideas, to one concerned also with
practice and the lived process of political domination (Eagleton, 1991, pp.
112–115). While CHAT points to the importance of the ‘rules’ or ideologies of
activity systems, it does not fully offer a conceptual means to analyse how the
‘rules’ or ideologies of one activity system exercise power over or dominate
others.
For Gramsci, evidence of struggles to build counter-hegemony should be
sought not only in workers’ ideas, but also in their practices. Fundamental to
the creation of proletarian hegemony were ‘organs of people’s power’, organi-
sations created by and for the working class (Holst, 1999, p. 415). For Gramsci, it
was the factory councils created during the revolutionary upsurge in northern
Italy in 1920 rather the activities of the more reformist Italian trade unions at
that time that represented ‘praxis’ (Entwhistle, 1979, pp. 160–165), the fusion
between theory and practice required for the development of proletarian
hegemony. In their daily participation in the factory councils, workers learnt
through their own experience about democracy and workers’ control of pro-
duction. For Gramsci, these worker-controlled organs offered the potential to
break down the hegemony of the bourgeoisie over workers’ minds, to empower
them to ‘think’ themselves into historical autonomy, and to learn how to exer-
cise power (Williams, 1975).
Gramsci’s focus on education through praxis is echoed in much of the work
of Paulo Freire (see Allman & Mayo, 1997; Mayo, 1999; Coben, 2013), and in the
work of Foley (1999, 2001) and Newman (1994, 1999). Both Foley and Newman
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focus on ‘learning in social action’ more broadly and have an interest in “…

incidental learning which occurs as people live, work and engage in social
action; informal education and learning in which people teach and learn from
each other naturally and socially in workplaces, families, community organisa-
tions and social action” (Foley, 1999, pp. 6–7). Learning in such sites is largely
informal and often incidental: it is tacit, embedded in action and is often not
recognised as learning. A central contention of Foley’s work is that
in order to understand informal and incidental learning in social action

and sites we need to develop analyses which take account of specific
social contexts, and which treat all aspects of adult learning as socially
constructed and problematic. This requires both a broader notion of con-
text and more detailed, specific analyses than are usually found in adult
education theory. (1999, pp. 47–48)
Gramsci’s notion of education through praxis – the development of working

class consciousness through political and industrial experience – is illustrated
well by the experiences of organising and building trade unions in South Africa
in the 1970s and 1980s.
1.1 Learning as ‘Praxis’ in the Early South African Trade Unions

Learning through praxis was highly significant within the South African work-
ers’ movement historically. Given workers’ exclusion from access to education
under apartheid, the trade union movement in South Africa, with its several
million members, constituted one of the most significant ‘adult learning
institutions’ historically. The previous chapter showed how, over time, trade
unions invested considerable resources in organised education programs for
their members. But arguably the more pervasive and significant processes
of learning within the union movement were those associated with workers’
broader involvement in their organisation where knowledge was shared and
new understandings were sought and produced. Through the slow, painstak-
ing task of recruiting new members and building unions ‘factory-by-factory’,
worker activists and leaders played a crucial educational role in taking the
message of trade unionism into the factories, mines and other workplaces. Key
learnings were distilled from their experiences of organising, meeting, taking
collective decisions and engaging in collective action. They learnt that the only
way to make their labour visible was to withdraw it; they learnt that although
they enjoyed no formal trade union rights, they could still win gains and con-
cessions on the shop-floor; and they learnt that the union was not the ‘office’
but resided in the collective power that came about through united action of
union members (Cooper et al., 2002).
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122 chapter 6
Trade unions in the 1980s were described as ‘laboratories for democracy’

(Friedman, 1987, p. 499), pointing to their continuing role not only as sites of
learning, but also as sites of knowledge production. From the early years of
the labour movement, through workers’ day-to-day experiences of organising
and running meetings, new understandings and ways of practicing worker
democracy and control emerged. In the process of running increasingly large
and complex organisations, elected worker leaders – often with very little for-
mal education – experimented with new forms of collective leadership based
on strong, shop-floor organisation. Over time, the labour movement’s princi-
ples and practices of workers’ control and participatory democracy became
embodied in the physical and symbolic environment and day-to-day rituals of
the trade union as an activity system. It is therefore possible to view the his-
torical experience of black workers in South Africa as ‘intelligence sedimented
in organisation’ (Scribner, 1997, p. 313). As workers participate in trade union
organisational activities, they learn from and appropriate the knowledge of
previous generations of workers (Cooper, 2006).
1.2 Learning in Communities of Practice

It is not only radical theorists such as Gramsci, Freire or Foley that have been
interested in theorising organisational learning. A less political but influen-
tial framework for understanding organisational learning is presented in the
work of the Situated Learning theorists, Lave and Wenger (Lave, 1998; Lave &
Wenger, 1991). They locate their work within the same post-Vygotskian tradi-
tion as that of CHAT, and share with it an emphasis on “practice, praxis, activity,
and the development of human knowing through participation in an ongoing
social world” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 50). CHAT studies of learning have either
tended to be located within formal education and focused on structured peda-
gogy (see, for example, Chapter 3 in Daniels, 2001, and Chapter 5 of Fenwick,
Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011), or following Engeström, have focused on ‘forma-
tive interventions’ in the workplace context involving their re-design as learn-
ing environments (Engeström, 2008). Lave and Wenger’s work contributes to
post-Vygotskian research literature via its focus on organisations or institu-
tional settings where learning is not the primary purpose, where there is often
no visible ‘teaching’, and where knowledge is often acquired unconsciously
through the everyday participation in ‘communities of practice’.
The notion of ‘learning in communities of practice’ captures both the col-
lective and shared dimensions of learning and knowledge construction, as well
as the central role of identity-construction in these processes – both important
in trade union learning. We all participate in multiple communities of prac-
tice at once and for this reason, the concepts of boundaries (connections that
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create bridges across communities of practice), and boundary practices (where

people introduce elements of one practice into another) become central ele-
ments in this conceptual framework. This theoretical perspective illuminates
the fluidity and instability of the educator role, and points to the “richly diverse
field of essential actors” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 93) who – by virtue of being
knowledge brokers in some sense or another – may step into the role of educa-
tor at different times.
Situated Learning theory has been subjected to a number of critiques, chief
amongst them being their neglect of power relations. Although Lave and
Wenger do acknowledge the dynamics of power that are likely to arise within
a community of practice, they do not provide a means for analysing how
broader, historical and structural relations of power at a societal level (based on
race, class, gender, language or culture) might reverberate within the dynam-
ics of any community of practice (see Fox, 2000; Hassan, 2002; Hodkinson &
Hodkinson, 2003). Nevertheless, some of the conceptual tools that this theoret-
ical perspective offers complements those of CHAT and have proved useful in
analysing learning in workers’ organisations (see for example, Ball, 2003) and
will also be used here to illuminate some of the learning processes observed in
the case of SAMWU.
The most common form of ‘primary practice’ engaged in by union members
is ‘meetings’. My research on SAMWU in the early 2000s revealed a range of
meetings in which workers participated and took collective decisions. These
included general meetings of union members in their municipal work depots,
meetings of shop-stewards who represented workers in a particular sector
(such as electricity, water or waste management), and meetings of shop-stew-
ards who represented their constituencies at the branch or regional levels of
the union. Worker representatives also participated in meetings with manage-
ment and in bargaining forums with employer groupings. The following sub-
section focuses on these sites within SAMWU as an example of organisational
learning, seeking to unpack their detailed mechanisms of learning.1
1.3 Meetings as Sites of Learning

Meetings represent sites where learning “is not reified as an extraneous goal”
(Wenger, 1998, p. 76). The primary purpose of union meetings is to take col-
lective decisions rather than to carry out education, while meetings with
management usually have a strategic purpose. Nevertheless, meetings are edu-
cational in at least two ways. Union meetings facilitate information-sharing
between members and help to develop common perspectives, while meetings
with management contribute to the renewal of leadership capacity at a grass-
roots level, in a context where worker leaders are frequently siphoned off into
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124 chapter 6
positions of greater responsibility within the union or promoted to positions

in management or even in government.
In meetings of the union’s representative structures2 learning amongst new
worker representatives takes place largely through what Lave and Wenger
(1991) describe as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ where workers learn
by simply being present, listening and observing, with ‘old-timers’ modelling
the roles and values that ‘newcomers’ are expected to acquire. For example,
one shop-steward recalled how, when he first joined the union, he learnt from
observing the General Secretary in meetings:
[he] never taught me … but I used to watch him very closely, you know …
His style, and the manner in which he speaks, and the manner in which
he treats people, and all of those things …
‘Participation’ also takes more active forms. One shop-steward who had been
involved in the union’s Women’s Forum emphasised the value of what she
learnt from participating in meetings of this structure:
We really learnt a lot there. And we did a lot of things … The women
in the Women’s Forum developed to the extent that they could open up
their mouths and challenge the men … For me, in terms of not getting
formal training within the union, a lot of my training I got through the
Forum.
When asked what she had learnt from her involvement in meetings of this
structure, she described how it taught her not only practical skills, but also
general, analytical skills as well as broader dispositions:
Public speaking … The ability to read and analyse documents … The abil-
ity to be able to develop policy … Debate, develop positions … Chairing
meetings … Also the practical skills … learning to listen to others … It
taught me that you’ve got to do your research, you’ve got to prepare, then
you’ll be able to speak to people at whatever level … whatever qualifica-
tion you have … And then the ability to guide others and give direction.
So quite a lot of things …
While much learning seems to take place invisibly or unconsciously through

observation or participation, there are also more explicit forms of peda-
gogy – peer mentoring or ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff, 2008) – that can take
place within communities of practice, and that were visibly going on in the
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day-to-day life of SAMWU. As noted above, some shop-stewards had expe-

rienced more senior union leaders acting as their mentors, but often it was
ordinary workers and shop-stewards who played reciprocal peer-mentoring
roles for one another. For example, one shop-steward (a qualified librarian)
recalled:
I was a shop-steward … didn’t go for formal training for a long time. But
the minute I was elected I was told: alright, you’re going to learn on the
job. And I was taught by the cleaner – the shop-steward … I had to do
cases, and he was there with me. He had to give me information and I
would wonder: how does he know what I want? But he used to come with
exactly what I wanted. Every time I picked up the phone … he’d come
with exactly what I wanted.
In many meetings, a process resembling the classical cycle or spiral of expe-

riential learning was enacted: experiences were shared and compared, and
participants worked inductively to reach common understandings, broader
principles and strategies for action. One key dimension of this experien-
tial learning cycle was the re-contextualisation of ‘local’ experiences within
a broader context, enabling workers to gain a better understanding of how
different elements of their experience might be connected to one another.
Often, those who promoted understanding of wider and wider layers of con-
text were fully aware of their recontextualising role and the importance of
helping others to ‘grasp the full picture’. For example, a shop-steward in one
meeting repeatedly stressed “the need to put things into perspective”, while
in another meeting, the chairperson emphasised the importance of drawing
inter-connections between workplace restructuring and workplace education
and training issues, and asked: “How in SAMWU do we make workers under-
stand and see the linkages?”
As noted in earlier chapters, some worker representatives played key peda-
gogic roles in this process of re-contextualisation by bringing in knowledge
from other communities of practice. Older workers brought experiences and
lessons from other periods in history, while other ‘boundary workers’ brought
much-needed information from forums outside of the union in which they
were involved. These grassroots, organic intellectuals helped workers to reflect
critically in the light of information from outside their immediate experience –
to make conceptual connections that allowed them to better understand the
‘bigger picture’.
The trade union may therefore be seen as a community of practice where
the process of participation in routine union activities, supported by forms of
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126 chapter 6
mentoring and modelling, induct workers into their trade unionist roles and
identities. Collective spaces offered by the union provide workers with oppor-
tunities to share and compare experiences and develop new understandings.
In this context, boundary workers play key re-contextualising roles by helping
fellow workers to locate their local experiences within a broader context.
1.4 The Trade Union as a ‘Learning Organisation’?3

In contrast to the concept of ‘praxis’ that had its origins in radical political
theory, ideas around the knowledge economy and the learning organisation
have emerged in recent years as part of a concern with how to transform the
traditional, Fordist workplace so that it can compete more successfully in the
globalised economy. Under globalisation, it has been argued, the relationship
between knowledge and production has become central; “(k)nowledge is the
fundamental resource of contemporary production processes and knowledge
competencies are the true source of competitive advantage” (Mulcahy, 2000,
p. 220). In order to gain a ‘full return on knowledge assets’, companies needed
to transform themselves into learning organisations: “… an organisation
which learns continually and has the capacity to transform itself” (Marsick &
Watkins, 1999, p. 206).
Both the notion of the knowledge economy and the learning organisation
have been critically appraised. Guile (2010) engages in an in-depth critique
of the ways in which knowledge has been conceptualised in the literature on
the knowledge economy. He critiques the ‘two worlds’ dualism that underpins
this literature, which has led to a binary rather than a mediated view of the
relationship between theoretical and tacit knowledge and has overlooked
the important role of ‘epistemic cultures’ in the production and application
of scientific knowledge. He argues that in essence, social and management
theorists of the knowledge economy put forward a narrowly conceived argu-
ment grounded in human capital theory and tend to treat knowledge as “an
independent variable that can be used, provided the appropriate technology
is in place, to make rational and objective decisions that will spur economic
growth” (Guile, 2010, p. 45).
The learning organisation literature (Senge, 1990; Davenport & Prusack,
1998; Nootboom, 1999; Nonaka & Nishiguchi, 2001) has also been subjected to
widespread critique, mostly from a more sociological perspective of how it is
likely to exacerbate social inequality and unequal power relations. While the
learning organisation literature claims to meet the needs not only of employ-
ers but also those of workers, “the glossy ‘empowerment’ promises that accom-
pany many high-tech solutions for organisations to be learning enterprises
tend to be like politicians’ promises – unlikely ever to be delivered in full, if
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at all” (Garrick, 1999, p. 129). Mojab and Gorman (2003) have argued that the
learning organisation as described in the literature would benefit only a small,
elite part of the workforce; the majority of workers would gain little benefit and
would be given little opportunity to contribute their knowledge. This model of
the learning organisation seeks to extend capital’s social control of workers by
appropriating their ‘social capital’ to its own ends, thereby “separating workers
from themselves” (Mojab & Gorman, 2001, pp. 235–236). They conclude that
rather than embracing the learning organisation model: “… the educational
legacies of feminism, trade unionism, antiracism, and revolutionary struggle
are better places to seek the learning interests of the workers that make up the
learning organisation” (Mojab & Gorman, 2001, p. 228).
Taking these critiques as its point of departure, this section argues that if we
want to capture a glimpse of what an ‘ideal’ learning organisation might look
like in practice, it would be worth focusing on the trade union as an activity
system and seeking to understand the contextual or cultural conditions that
frame learning in such an organisation. The trade union is an activity system
where people labour collaboratively not for profit maximisation but for a col-
lective, transformational goal. The ‘rules of practice’ of the trade union pro-
mote learning by prioritising social interaction and solidarity between social
equals, thus creating the potential for widespread participation and multi-
voiced interaction. In addition to this, there are two other significant features
of the trade union’s organisational culture which promote inclusion and par-
ticipation, and thus possibilities for learning. The first of these is the widely
distributed nature of the educator role, and the part played by ordinary work-
ers as educators. The second is the significant role that culturally-embedded,
symbolic tools of mediation – oral-performativity in particular – play in medi-
ating knowledge. This can be illustrated by drawing once again on examples of
everyday organisational involvement within SAMWU in the early 2000s.
1.4.1 Educator Roles

A key feature of union pedagogy is the weak division of labour between educa-
tors and learners. In the union’s organised education programs, the educator
role is relatively specialised: the educator role is clearly identified, although
a range of union staff, worker leaders or outside experts may step into this
role. In union meetings, however, there is often no identifiable educator. The
role of educator is far more widely distributed and fluid and is assumed by a
‘richly diverse field of essential actors’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 93) who engage
in various and reciprocal forms of guided participation, modelling and peer
mentoring. Boundary workers who traverse different communities of prac-
tice or activity systems bring important information which helps workers to
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128 chapter 6
re-contextualise and understand the significance of their experiences. In addi-

tion, ordinary workers also share experiences and work collaboratively to con-
struct common understandings.
1.5 Tools of Mediation

A central element of CHAT, and of considerable significance in workers’ edu-
cation, is the Vygotskian concept of tools of mediation. Tools of mediation
are “the means by which the individual acts upon and is acted upon by social,
cultural and historical factors” (Daniels, 2001, p. 14). As noted in the previous
chapter, tools of mediation are always sedimented with history (and with
historical intelligence), as well as being culturally embedded. Learners bring
with them particular learning histories which are individual and unique, but
through sharing a collective history and culture, they also share in common a
familiarity with particular forms of mediation.
In the South African trade union context, a range of symbolic tools of medi-
ation play a key role in facilitating learning. Similarly to education events large
quantities of written documents were almost always handed out in SAMWU
meetings, many of them dense, legal texts, and most often in a language other
than workers’ home language. Not surprisingly and judging from the com-
plaints of worker leaders and union officials, most members did not read most
of the documents they received. Instead, meetings (like workshops) were dom-
inated by a rich array of oral forms of communication, including the distinc-
tive speech genres described in Chapter 5.
Meetings in SAMWU typically involved lengthy verbal reports, but these
were frequently enlivened by story-telling or anecdotes accompanied by
strong body language (gesticulating, pointing, slamming the fist into the hand
for emphasis). Speeches, too, were often performed in a lively and theatrical
manner, while many debates were impassioned and accompanied by strong
body language. For example, a debate around privatisation in one meeting was
concluded with calls to “take to the streets”, “We must do something drastic”,
“They’re trying to destroy the union”, and “this is a matter of life and death!”
Story-telling was an integral part of information-sharing and comparing of
experiences in meetings. Its pedagogic, mediating role was illustrated by the
numerous occasions when control over ‘stories’ was exerted by the chair to
stop shop-stewards from relating experiences which did not seem relevant to
the item under discussion. Rather than being ‘merely’ anecdotal, these forms
of storytelling almost always (implicitly if not explicitly) had a clear analyti-
cal and conceptual component, and their purpose was both to share particu-
lar, local experiences as well as draw broader, analytical conclusions. This
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argument is supported by some of the literature of South African cultural his-

torians. For example, Hofmeyr (1993, p. 56) write of how the ‘performance craft
of oral storytelling’, where elements such as gesture, intonation and rhythm
are central to creating meaning, is deeply embedded in South African cultural
history. Coullie (1999) argues that this form of oral performance should be seen
not only in terms of its entertainment value, but also as a crucial means for dis-
seminating political messages, while Gunner (1999, p. 52) describes this genre
as ‘knottily analytical’.
This analysis of the role of orality as a key mediating tool in the union context
can be enriched by the use of some Bakhtinian concepts. Meetings were often
characterised by a distinct, ‘carnivalesque’ quality. The use of ‘folk humour’
(Bakhtin, 1965/1994, p. 194), together with repetitive use of language and ven-
triloquism (drawing on multiple discourses) allowed workers to celebrate their
collective identity, functioned to parody ‘the bosses’ (a subversive function),
as well as having a sardonic, self-mockery (critical self-reflective) function. An
example of ventriloquism is drawn from one of a series of depot-level meetings
aimed at establishing how workers thought their work could be reorganised
in order to improve service delivery to poor communities. One worker spoke
through the voice of management in order to parody it: “They (management)
treat us like dogs: take your bone and go and lie down! …”. The chair of the
meeting used repetition not only to sum up what participants had said but
also to emphasise their grievances and implacable opposition to management:
So we are saying that we need to re-organise the method of service deliv-

ery; we are saying that we are short staffed; we are saying that there is
‘dead wood’ [referring to accusations of unproductive, white collar staff];
we are saying that we don’t have protective clothing or proper tools; we
are saying that there is no proper training … we are saying that we are
being bullied, we are being forced out of our offices down to the bottom
[of the depot] – from the White House [housing management’s offices]
to the dog’s kennel …! (Cooper, 2005, pp. 160–161)
How should these distinctive forms of language use and performance be under-
stood pedagogically? All tools of mediation embody power relations (Daniels,
2001, p. 80), and thus the forms of mediation used in any pedagogic situation
can act as a kind of barometer of the power relations embedded in that situa-
tion and may reflect shifting power relations across contexts. It is notable that
the use of oral performative modes of communication was far more prevalent
in those sites within the union (such as meetings) that allowed widespread,
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130 chapter 6
grassroots participation, than in structured union education programs. The

rich performative culture drawn upon in the union context does not simply
signal the use of ‘local’, ‘particular’ knowledge. It signals a space for mediat-
ing knowledge where ordinary people can draw on familiar, historical-cultural
resources to give voice to their own experience and knowledge, and where
more dialogical, multi-voiced communication between workers or shop-stew-
ard delegates can take place with workers playing educative roles for one other.
This section of the chapter has shown that a number of key features of this
activity system – its participatory ‘rules of practice’, its weak division of labour
between ‘educator’ and ‘learner’, and its cultural-embedded, largely oral-per-
formative tools of mediation – create affordances for learning, or an ‘expansive
learning environment’ (Fuller & Unwin, 2004). This suggests that rich exam-
ples of innovative learning and working knowledge may be found in organi-
sations which have primarily a social purpose, and which seek to challenge
rather than reproduce dominant social relations. In terms of what constitutes
a ‘learning organisation’, it suggests that opportunities for the dialectical inter-
action of Guile’s ‘two worlds of knowledge’ might best be promoted by organ-
isations such as trade unions. These are organisations which (potentially at
least) value social solidarity, where a ‘thirst’ for new knowledge is born out of
the real experiences and needs of its members, where multiple ‘voices’ are able
to meet and contest, where the educative role of ordinary, grassroots members
of the organisation is valued and nurtured, and where the symbolic and com-
municative culture of the organisation is an expression ‘from below’ of the
cultural history of its members.
A cautionary note is required however. The union is not some sort of pris-
tine site that exists outside of broader societal power relations. It became
evident in my research on this union that broader, societal inequalities were
echoed and reproduced even in a relatively democratic organisation that
SAMWU represented at that time. There were constraints on participation in
the organisation arising from inequalities between workers based on language,
historically constructed ‘race’ categories, different levels of (formal) education,
gender, metropolitan-rural divides, and the hierarchical division of labour
that characterises the capitalist workplace. All these factors acted to promote
greater participation by some and more limited participation or exclusion
of others. Nevertheless, it is clear that the more fully workers participate in
organisational processes, the more this was able to unleash possibilities for
learning and knowledge-making – possibilities that are significantly enhanced
by organisational practices which draw on working class culture as a resource.
The following section shows how working class culture can also operate in its
own right as a powerful educating force.
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2 Workers’ Education and Cultural Praxis
As noted earlier, orality and performance – acting together in the form of ‘oral
performativity’ – are deeply embedded in the historical experiences of black
people in Southern Africa and constitute “the central resources of African cul-
ture” (Gunner, 1999, p. 50). The forms of oral performativity described earlier
as taking place in SAMWU workshops and meetings were specific, local rein-
ventions of a long-standing cultural tradition within the South African labour
movement.
Sitas was one of the first, South African labour sociologists to explore the
interconnection between two areas of working class life, production and
reproduction, and to use culture as concept “to explain the supportive social
networks that form the bedrock on which workers’ collectively resisted their
oppressive work and living conditions” (Webster, 2018a, p. 164). Sitas’ early
study of cultural formations amongst migrant workers housed in hostels (Sitas,
1985) recognised that far from being a barrier to modernisation, workers’ cul-
ture – as a re-invention of ‘traditional’ culture – acted as a crucial affordance
in the building of defensive combinations. It was also a carrier of “public class
knowledge” (public knowledge built from the experience of migrant workers
in hostels; Webster, 2018a, p. 165).
As the South African labour movement developed and consolidated itself
in the late 1970s and 1980s, workers’ culture became not only a support for
defensive organisation, but a powerful resource for the development of work-
ing class identity and the expansion of the labour movements’ ideological
influence. Organising and recruitment within the movement acquired a grow-
ing cultural dimension through the emergence of worker plays, poetry and
choirs which together provided “a storehouse for powerful imaginings and
recreations” (Sitas, 1990, p. 2). These creative practices formed the basis of a
remarkable re-awakening and blossoming of workers’ cultural activities and
led to the increased blurring of boundaries between education, culture and
mobilisation.
Supported by groupings of cultural activists, the period saw the emergence
of a number of worker plays. These acted as a vehicle for worker activists to
give voice to their bitter experiences of the alienation in factory conditions
where racism and arbitrary dismissals were rife. They also celebrated the
emergence of worker self-organisation and action, and numerous plays were
produced by groups of workers on strike with the express purpose of winning
support from other workers and from the wider community (Baskin, 1991,
p. 246). For example, the Dunlop Play developed by striking workers of MAWU,
depicted changes in one worker’s consciousness from the time of his entering
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132 chapter 6
employment, through to the turmoil created by the 1973 strikes and to the rec-
ognition agreement later won by MAWU. This was seen by hundreds of work-
ers and influenced later productions, including The Long March, produced by
striking workers of SARMCOL, a subsidiary of a major British, rubber and tire
multinational company.
Sitas (2016, p. 80) describes these worker theatre initiatives as allowing
workers the cultural space to exercise a sense of community on the basis of
their universally-held ‘shock experience’ of proletarianisation. Von Kotze4
wrote at the time that these plays served not only a practical function of build-
ing solidarity for striking workers, but also helped the performing workers to
regain a sense of self-worth and self-confidence as “men and women with crea-
tive potential” (1984, p. 92). Workers’ plays aimed to build solidarity for striking
workers through entertainment, but they also contained analysis and critique.
As Sitas noted in a recent interview, their pedagogical approach was “… not
[to] arrive at cathartic moments at the end of the performance, but to create,
to scratch people’s brains to make them think about what their situation was”.5
The educative role of other cultural forms such as songs and worker choirs
was also important. Khosi Maseko, the convenor of one workers’ choir,
recounted their wide repertoire: “We sing international songs like ‘Solidarity
Forever’, ‘Ballad of Joe Hill’ … We also compose our own songs, sometimes using
old tunes … One is a greeting song where we sing: ‘Even if I die I will remember
Fosatu’” (South African Labour Bulletin, 1984, pp. 113–114). She described her
own understanding of the educational purpose of these choirs:
We sing for workers; preach unionism in song … Music draws people in

and holds their interest more than speeches … We perform only to work-
ers. A manager at Braitex wanted to make a video of us. The members
rejected this. We are not performing for employers. (SALB, 1984, p. 113)
Von Kotze captured the close relationship between workers’ cultural activities
and union organising at the time:
At any union meeting – and this was the framework of most of the per-
formances of the Dunlop play – songs serve as an introduction as much
as commentary on speeches. The call and response technique inherent
to many of the worker songs – where one singer will introduce the song
and ad lib any number of new verses, while the rest of the gathering falls
in as a chorus – could be easily utilised by a play to achieve audience
participation, and indeed, the Dunlop play closed with such a song. This
song which had a strong rhythmic quality was taken from the play into
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the meeting, connecting the two and thus integrating the play into the
larger context of the gathering. (von Kotze, 1984, p. 110)
A poet in his own right, Sitas (2016) also made a number of detailed studies of
worker poets or izimbongi.6 Of particular note were poets like Alfred Temba
Qabula and Mi S’dumo Hlatswayo who utilised the traditional form of the
praise poem (isibongo) to mobilise support for the union movement.7 Sitas
describes how Qabula, originally a fork-lift driver in a large rubber factory, sur-
vived his working day by composing songs in his head. After he joined MAWU
and got involved in producing songs for worker plays, he embarked on the cre-
ation of his own ‘plays’ in order to perform his compositions.
… he exploded onto mass meetings carrying a briefcase and tattered in

colourful poverty, or better. He began pouring the contents fermenting in
his head for others to enjoy. He performed his compositions and incanta-
tions like a crazed imbongi. His performances took on an epic form, and
the responses were overwhelming. (Sitas, 2016, p. 75)
Both Qabula and Hlatswayo drew on what Sitas called ‘the politics of meta-
phor’ to stir up age-old symbols of resistance. These included “the moving
Black forest of Africa” in Qabula’s Praise Poem to FOSATU, and Hlatswayo’s
“Black Mamba8 Rising” which aimed to stir workers into action. Mi Hlatshwayo
combined the fiery preaching of the African independent churches where “he
got his baptism in words of fire” with a creative, new symbolism that sought
to capture “the common experiences of his class and his people” (Sitas, 2016,
pp. 148–150). His poems showed a ‘mastery of local history’ and attempted to
“deny the popular mythologies that were bandied around as a foundation for
a Zulu independent National State, a Bantustan”. He announced the ‘rolling
ahead’ of the ‘workers’ freedom train’ which would ‘settle accounts with the
oppressor’ and dismantle exploitation. (ibid., pp. 151–152)
These worker poets “… represent[ed] a grassroots response that use[d] well-
rooted forms, organically linked to working class culture and infuse[d] them
with new contents of the factory experience and that of a worker militant’s
beliefs” (Sitas, 2016, p. 77). Alongside the more formally elected leadership of
the trade unions, these cultural workers performed the function of organic
intellectuals as they “captured the spontaneous cultural energies of the masses
and directed them to serve the interests of the working class” and provide new
visions (Ngoasheng, 1989, as cited in Sitas, 2016, p. 189).
Sitas (2016, p. 144) notes that trade union organisers in the 1980s encour-
aged cultural activities for education purposes, using them as “a small
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134 chapter 6
union propaganda machine”. In 1984, the FOSATU National Education

Officer described their importance in terms of building class identity and
counter-hegemony:
I would say that the cultural dimension has come into it [worker educa-
tion] because in FOSATU’s eyes, education is class-based: it is designed to
reinforce the sense of working class identity, to reinforce working class
confidence and counter the kind of anti-worker propaganda that prevails
in general education and the media. (SALB, 1984, p. 116)
By 1987, the newly established federation, COSATU, had begun to establish cul-
tural ‘locals’ across the country, and its national Education Conference passed
a detailed set of resolutions on the importance of ‘Culture’ (COSATU, 1987,
pp. 25–28). These included seeing working class culture as a means to “resur-
face, consolidate and popularise our worker experiences of exploitation and
oppression …”. The resolutions saw culture as having to do with “workers con-
trolling their own cultural power and creativity … for the benefit of our unions,
federation and national democratic struggle”, and with “projecting future
glimpses of a new South Africa” (ibid., p. 26). What these resolutions essen-
tially did was to codify in writing those practices which a vibrant, grassroots-
driven, workers’ cultural movement had already achieved in practice during
the previous few years.
The third and concluding part of this chapter focuses on the educative role
of mass action within the workers’ movement. As noted earlier, there is a con-
tinuum between the ‘everyday’ activities of organisational work and the more
dramatic struggles that take the form of mass action and announce themselves
loudly on the public stage. Mass action includes forms of shop-floor action
such as ‘go-slows’ or work-stoppages; boycotts or stay-aways involving commu-
nity members beyond the workplace; local or national campaigns (for example,
for a minimum wage, or maternity rights), and lastly, full-blown strike action.
3 Workers’ Education and Mass Action
One history of the South African labour movement, entitled ‘Building Tomor-
row Today’, begins with these words:
The 1970s began for South African employers early on the morning of Jan-
uary 9, 1973, when 200 workers at the Coronation Brick and Tile works on
the outskirts of Durban gathered at a football field and demanded a pay
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rise … The next day, scores of employers opened their morning papers to
behold, beneath banner headlines, a photograph of hundreds of African
workers marching down a busy street behind a man with a red flag. The
flag was meant to keep the early morning traffic away, not to proclaim the
strikers’ political sympathies, but the effect was no less dramatic: a new
power was abroad in the factories and few employers were prepared for
its coming. (Friedman, 1987, p. 39)
This description immediately captures the symbolic – and therefore educative –

role of mass action which has a number of dimensions, elaborated in the last
section of the chapter.
The ‘Natal fever’ that accompanied the 1973 strikes marked the rebirth of the
modern, South Africa labour movement. These strikes had a powerful demon-
stration effect on other workers:
The strikes had influenced Durban workers as much as employers – they

gave them a new sense of power. One account describes the mood at
strike meetings as ‘euphoric’ – workers sang and made jokes. Many waved
sticks ‘but they were dancing with the sticks, not threatening with them’.
They had been bottling up their anger for decades – now that they had
finally expressed it, they ‘felt released of a great psychological burden’.
Most also expressed this euphoria by making demands they could not
possibly have expected employers to meet, but they had not seen their
failure to achieve them as a defeat: just after the strikes, seventy percent
told researchers they would do the same again. The unrest, says Harriet
Bolton,9 ‘taught workers that the sky wouldn’t fall on their heads if they
struck. (Friedman, 1987, pp. 58–59)
The immediate years following the strikes were exceptionally difficult how-
ever, as workers and union organisers battled in a hostile climate to estab-
lish and stabilise union organisation – to “shelter the flame” that had been lit
(MacShane, Plaut, & Ward, 1984). However, by the late 1970s even the state had
accepted that black trade unions were here to stay.10 In the early 1980s, there
was a resurgence of worker militancy expressed in “countless confrontations
between capital and labour” (Sitas, 2016, p. 38), including a strike by 10,000
municipal workers’ in Johannesburg – the largest strike ever faced by a single
employer in South Africa to date (Keenan, 1981, cited in Southall, 1986, p. 174).
This period also saw the emergence of militant civic, youth, student and wom-
en’s organisations, and in a number of strikes, workers enjoyed widespread
solidarity action from students and the community at large. In certain areas
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136 chapter 6
of the East Rand11 residentially-based shop-steward councils played a crucial

role in building solidarity between workers and community struggles, while
in the Western Cape strikes by meat-workers and by workers of the Fatti’s and
Moni’s pasta-making company led to widespread community boycotts of these
products (see Friedman, 1987, pp. 187, 206).
COSATU and its companion federation, CUSA, were born in the mid-1980s
in the midst of unprecedented community and student mobilisations, strikes
and popular revolts in many parts of the country. A huge wave of worker mili-
tancy marked the early years of these federations, as expressed in the gigan-
tic strikes of railway workers and miners in 1987. COSATU also initiated two
significant campaigns: the Living Wage Campaign and the campaign against
proposed amendments to the Labour Relations Act (LRA). In 1988 COSATU and
the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU) jointly mounted the biggest
three-day stayaway in South African history, supported by between two and a
half to three million workers (Baskin, 1991, p. 287).
Throughout this period, it was the collective agency of workers that was
most noteworthy as well as their creativity in developing innovative strategies
of how to survive, communicate and conduct struggle under oppressive condi-
tions. These included sleep-ins (siyalala’s) and sit-ins, go-slows, rolling strikes,
and lunch-time demonstrations. Baskin (1991) describes one example of a
‘mass education’ strategy adopted by workers during the anti-LRA campaign
in 1988, where COSATU members took to ‘spreading the message’ on trains and
buses. The effect of these ‘moving meetings’ was powerful, and state’s ability to
repress them was limited:
Few police would be brave and foolhardy enough to attempt arrests in a

crowded, moving third-class train carriage. Meetings would be adjourned
each time the train pulled into a police-guarded station, only to resume
again on departure. Organising on the trains became a common worker
response to repressive laws and restrictions on meetings. This tactic
served the labour bill campaign well. (Baskin, 1991, p. 266)
There is therefore a very long tradition within the South African labour move-
ment of engaging in mass action as an innovative, creative, knowledge-making
activity. At the same time, it is important not to over-romanticise mass action:
the ‘lessons of struggle’ are not always positive or progressive. There is ample
evidence that when workers’ actions were met with brutal oppression (the
three massive strikes mentioned above were all brutally suppressed), or where
their efforts to gain wider support failed, it sometimes took years for those
same workers to regain sufficient confidence to take action again – or even to
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join or re-join a union. Furthermore, processes of learning in mass action – as

with the material and political gains made – were often disjointed and haphaz-
ard, with workers sometimes having to re-learn the same lessons more than
once. And finally, the symbolic violence acted out by workers during a strike
may – and often was – transformed into real violence.
Nevertheless, it is clear that engaging in mass action is a profound learning
experience, and a crucial dimension of the tradition of radical workers’ educa-
tion that is the concern of this book. Given this, it is important that the nature
of such learning, and the detailed processes through which knowledge is dis-
seminated and produced, is better understood. The following section exam-
ines some of the theoretical resources that may be harnessed in order to do so.
3.1 Theorising Social Movement Learning

The impact of globalisation has seen the rise of anti-globalisation movements
and struggles, and alongside this, a growing interest in social movements as
sites of both learning as well as new knowledge production. Social move-
ments may be regarded as specific forms of activity system in which unique
forms of learning take place. Their emergence has given rise to a burgeoning
literature on the role of social movements in adult education. The early lit-
erature included Finger (1989), Welton (1993), Spencer (1995), Holford (1995)
and Crowther, Martin, and Shaw (1999). As noted in Chapter 2, some theorists
distinguish between ‘old social movements’ (such as the labour movement)
whose relevance they argue has declined over time, and ‘new social move-
ments’ which they argue harbour a greater potential to affect social change.
The radical orientation of South African workers’ education evolved within
what has been seen as a form of ‘social movement unionism’ (Lambert &
Webster, 1988), and thus the literature on learning in social movements offers
some useful perspectives on workers’ education and learning in the South
African context.
Martin (1999) argues that social movement activity generates both social
and intellectual capital, the former through people developing social cohesion
and solidarity, and the latter through the production of new knowledge:
… not only do people learn through their engagement with social move-
ments but … these movements actually make and disseminate new
knowledge and understanding through their activity. It is in this sense
that they constitute ‘epistemological communities’ …. (Martin, 1999, p. 12)
Holford goes further and argues that: “The forms of knowledge which exist in
any society are … the products in part of the social movements which have
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138 chapter 6
emerged in, or had an impact on, that society” (Holford, 1995, p. 101). He, in
turn, draws on the work of Eyerman and Jamison (1991) who view the process
whereby a movement is formed and establishes an identity for itself as ‘cogni-
tive praxis’, in which ‘movement intellectuals’ play a crucial role.
There has been a ‘second generation’ of social movement literature in recent
years which makes a further theoretical contribution by presenting a range of
case studies of more contemporary social movements (see for example Holst,
2002; Mayo, 2005; Borg & Mayo, 2007; Choudry & Kapoor, 2010; Hall, Clover,
Crowther, & Scandrett, 2012). Choudry and Kapoor make the case for a study
of social movements that avoids being over-theorised and abstract, and which
talks more about “movements as practice on the ground with tensions and
contradiction, bumping up against the structures and processes of neoliberal
capitalism” (2010, p. 5). Chapters in Hall et al. (2012) achieve this via a series of
rich case studies and extend earlier approaches to social movement learning
by drawing on theories of political ecology, feminist aesthetics, activist arts
and the role of social media in youth movements. This body of literature, too,
stresses the ‘utopian’ dimension of social movement learning. As Hall et al. put
it, the most important role of such learning is:
making hope possible, composting the imagination, building counter-

power from the ground up … creating new knowledge about the world we
want and new pathways to obtain another possible future. (2012, p. xv)
The international literature on social movement learning is complemented by

case studies of South African social movements such as the Treatment Action
Campaign that mobilised for free access to HIV/Aids treatment in the 1990s
and early 2000s (Endresen & von Kotze, 2005), and the movement of shack-
dwellers, Abahlali Basemjondolo (Harley, 2012).
I wish to extend this theorising of learning in social movements by focusing
on the specific role of mass action, a key strategy of social movements. To do
this, I continue to argue that mass action be viewed as an important tool of
mediation in workers’ education, and draw once again on the Russian literary
theorist, Bakhtin, to do so.
Bakhtin argued that it is the human body that constitutes the focal point of
resistance, one that cannot easily be suppressed by rationalised systems and
which is the foundation of subversion. His emphasis on ‘embodied existence’
as an important source of meaning resonates with – and indeed, enriches – the
dialectical approach of CHAT that sees ‘activity’ as the embodiment of thought.
One vehicle through which such corporeal resistance can be expressed is ‘car-
nival’ – a blend of mass action and street theatre. The carnivalesque image
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“brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the
lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid”
(Bakhtin, as cited in Gardiner, 2000, p. 65). With its singular qualities such as
‘grotesque aesthetic’, infringement of boundaries and culture of ambivalence,
carnival is an enactment of ‘the world turned upside down’ (Gardiner, 2000,
p. 61) and underscores the inevitability of change and transformation.
Some CHAT theorists, in particular Stetsenko (2008, 2010), have fore-
grounded the transformative potential of activity systems and their collabora-
tive practices. Stetsenko argues that “collaborative purposeful transformation of
the world is the core of human nature and the principled grounding for learn-
ing and development” (emphasis in the original) and is something to which
all human activities contribute (Stetsenko, 2008, p. 471). The following section
analyses in a more detailed way the educational dimensions of strike action
by municipal workers in Cape Town in 2002 – almost 30 years after the Natal
strikes. In order to do so, it draws on Stetsenko’s notion of ‘collaborative, trans-
formative practices’ and Bakhtinian notions of ‘carnival’ as subversive, and the
significance of corporeal experiencing of the body in the ‘molten lava of events’.
3.2 The SAMWU Strike in Cape Town

In July 2002, SAMWU embarked on a three week, national strike that was to
become the largest strike12 since the democratic elections of 1994. In addition
to wage demands, workers’ support for the strike arose out of feelings of anger
and frustration towards municipal councillors and managers who were per-
ceived as earning exorbitant salaries while being unconcerned about workers’
needs. As the strike progressed through its first week, newspapers described
‘scenes of chaos and violence’ erupting in cities and towns across the country –
“… scenes reminiscent of apartheid era protests” (as cited in Cooper, 2005,
p. 188). There were some reports of strikers attacking non-strikers, and one
worker being shot by a fellow worker. Strikers’ actions included marches, ‘trash-
ing’ (upending garbage bins and strewing garbage on to the streets) and burn-
ing tires in the city streets, occupations of municipal offices, and picketing. In
the Eastern Cape, strikers dumped buckets of human excrement in front of
municipal buildings, and some strikers damaged municipal equipment. Shots
were fired, shops barricaded, some strikers were shot by police and municipal
officials, and marchers were arrested (ibid.).
In Cape Town on the first day of the strike, an estimated nine thousand
SAMWU members marched on the Civic Centre (which houses the city council
offices), where a strong contingent of police had erected barbed wire barriers
around the complex. Here are some excerpts from the notes that I made as I
accompanied the march:
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140 chapter 6
It is day one of the strike in Cape Town. Busloads of workers are beginning
to arrive at a meeting point, ready to march to the Civic Centre. There is a
strong sense of heightened emotion, an air of festivity, and a celebratory
atmosphere. Workers are toyi-toying; one worker wearing white gloves is
playing on a homemade plastic drum, reminiscent of the annual carnival
held each year just after New Year, and there is some open consumption of
alcohol. Workers’ sense of confidence – their absolute certainty that justice
is on their side – is palpable.
The march makes its way to the centre of the city, led by a large truck with
a stage on the back, on which leaders stand and lead the singing or call
instructions through a megaphone. Eventually workers gather outside the
Civic Centre, which they find surrounded by razor wire and a large contin-
gent of police.
Rousing speeches are delivered from the stage on the back of the truck now
parked in front of the Civic Centre. First a speaker from the South Afri-
can Communist Party (SACP) addresses the crowd, followed by a SAMWU
speaker, a COSATU speaker, and finally by the SAMWU General Secretary:
Amandla!13 Viva! Forward to a Living Wage!

The bosses aim to smash our union … The Civic Management who sit
in there earns R1,4million a year. We are asking for a R300 increase …
This strike is not just about wages, but about what’s going to happen to
your job, about what’s going to happen to your services.
We demand a Living Wage!
Viva, SAMWU, Viva!
Speeches are interspersed with pleas to marchers not to ‘intimidate’ the

police, and with calls of ‘Amandla!’ and intermittent singing and toyi-toy-
ing. Some council officials emerge into the barbed wire enclosure to receive
the union’s memorandum but disappear quickly when sounds like gunshot
ring out. Eventually, they return and accept the memorandum, and workers
begin to toyi-toyi and sing their way back to their buses.
The march had an instrumental purpose – the handing over of the memoran-
dum of the strikers’ demands – but far more powerful was its symbolic, and
thus educational, dimension. In performing this symbolic function, there was
a decisive shift from the languaged discourse of workshops and meetings to
‘embodied symbolism’ and use of oral performative tools of mediation, indica-
tive of ‘grassroots creativity’ and ‘grassroots energy’ (Sitas, 1990).
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Firstly, the march played a collective, identity-building role. Many of the rit-
uals during the march – ranging from ‘Amandla’s’ and ‘Viva’s’ to ‘impassioned’
speeches – were key means of identity construction not only for those who
participated, but also for others looking on. The use of these modes of commu-
nication also acted to transform the meaning of the spaces in which the mass
action took place: SAMWU’s march through the city was symbolically a decla-
ration of the city ‘belonging’ to those that have built and who maintained it.
Secondly, the march had embedded in it not only symbolic but also rational
capital. In fact, the symbolic action of workers during the strike served to
impart a form of ‘embodied knowledge’ that was perhaps more analytical and
abstract, and more universal in its intent, than any of the knowledge drawn on
in other union settings. The union’s strike pamphlet made links between work-
ers’ wages, the government’s macro-economic policy, the ‘apartheid wage gap’
and privatisation. Speeches on the march linked workers’ struggles with class
analysis, history and the goal of socialism, while slogans on placards carried by
workers made links between the state’s economic policies, the emergence of a
new, black elite, poverty, and ‘class war’. In a fundamental way, the strike ques-
tioned hegemonic assumptions about the progress achieved in South Africa’s
post-apartheid, non-racial democracy. It was not only about wages, but also
about poor communities’ socio-economic rights to housing, employment and
basic services. The public message of the strike challenged the unequal wage
structure within the municipal sector, but it also critiqued the unequal dis-
tribution of wealth more broadly as well as the ideology of ‘black economic
empowerment’ promoted by government. This mass action seemed to consti-
tute a ‘theorising the world’ at a very broad level.
Thirdly, the march and other occasions of mass action during the strike
brought workers into direct confrontation with the repressive arm of the state,
and thus played a central role in deepening their understanding of the nature
of power relations. As one worker said after the march:
… they’ve got bullets, guns, batons … And our strikers go there with bare
hands … With bare hands. And empty stomach. (as cited in Cooper, 2005,
p. 195)
Finally, the strike illustrates most clearly what Eyerman and Jamison have
described as the symbolic, or expressive significance of social movements (1991,
p. 48). The march – and more broadly, the strike within which it was embed-
ded – was not only a learning experience for workers who took part but also
carried a pedagogic dimension. The ‘carnivalesque’ nature of the march acted
as a means for workers to celebrate their collective power, but it also enabled
them to assume the role of ‘collective educator’, mediating their experiences,
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142 chapter 6
their critique of the current order and their vision for the future outwards to
other workers as well as to the community at large. Workers’ mass action –
as a form of embodied knowledge and a tool of mediation – thus played a
counter-hegemonic, ‘public education’ role. Echoing Bakhtin’s notion of the
‘everyday’ being a source of ‘utopian impulse’ (as cited in Gardiner, 2000, p. 17),
the strike presented an opportunity not only for a critique of the current order,
but also acted as a vehicle for workers to “specify the contours of the desirable”
(Eyerman & Jamison, 1991, p. 82), imagine alternatives and articulate a vision
of ‘what might be possible’.
For example, the widespread ‘trashing’ of the city streets by some of the
marchers aroused much public indignation. However, the upending of gar-
bage bins was not simply an act of vandalism; it was also a deliberate act of
defiance with a symbolic aim. One of the union’s officials commented to me
that this was an historic tactic of refuse workers who went on strike: “Why
should they wait for two weeks for rubbish to become a real problem …?” In
one interview following the strike, a shop-steward emphasised the anger and
combativity of the refuse workers, referring to “their frustration with the com-
munity, [because of] the menial jobs they’re doing” and their resentment of
their status as “dirt cart boys”. Trashing the streets may be seen as intentionally
pedagogic in that workers aimed to communicate – literally as well as meta-
phorically – the enactment of a world ‘turned upside down’, a world where the
work of refuse workers would be more visible, and where the value of their
work would be appreciated by society.
Once again, this section needs to end on a sobering note. The strike acted
as a significant evaluative moment of the union’s organisational strength,
as well as the effectiveness of its organised education programs. Despite the
show of unity and militancy on the march, the strike enjoyed uneven support
from members and this support waned over time. One full-time shop-stew-
ard felt that there was generally less ‘passion’ in this strike than in previous
strikes:
People were more … more committed in the past to strike, even though
(they had) no food in the house then, compared with now where people
are hesitant, or think twice before they go on strike … there’s that change
of mindset ….
She grappled to make sense of this ‘weakening of commitment’, concluding

that the ideology of working class solidarity was being rapidly eroded by an
alternative ideology of competitive individualism:
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It’s definitely the result of the broader context out there. It’s how people’s
value systems have changed since ‘94 and up to now. … along the line
that collectiveness disappeared, and … it’s not only in the union, it’s also
in communities … We used to have that culture of collectivity and that
has disappeared along the line. People become mean individualists …
shop-stewards even have become more individualistic in their approach
to their functions ….
Growing contradictions between the strike as a historic form of struggle (tool

of mediation) on the one hand, and the weakening of solidarity and collectiv-
ity amongst workers (changing rules of practice) on the other, was echoed by a
more fundamental contradiction between two competing ‘objects’: the union’s
goal of transforming capitalist society and that of seeking greater inclusion for
its members within a democratic but capitalist South Africa, with its continu-
ing, gross levels of inequality. These contradictions will be explored more fully
in the following chapter that focuses on the labour movement’s engagement
with workplace training and the formalisation of its own education.
4 Conclusion
Earlier chapters demonstrated the centrality of ideological struggle to workers’

education, leading to a tendency for a politically directive form of pedagogy
to predominate in structured worker education programs. This chapter has
shown that there exists a counterweight to this ideological directedness ‘from
above’ in the form of rich historical traditions of informal learning that take
place within workers’ organisations, and which act as expressions of knowl-
edge ‘from below’.
The chapter drew on CHAT and Situated Learning perspectives to explore
the educative dimensions of workers’ participation in everyday, organisational
activities such as meetings. A widely shared educator role and the use of work-
ing class speech genres and cultural practices create an organisational envi-
ronment that can significantly enhance learning. The chapter showed that
at particular historical moments, workers’ cultural activities in themselves
have been a powerful educational force, drawing the wider community into
the ideological embrace of the workers’ movement. Drawing additionally on
Bakhtin’s writings on the carnivalesque, the chapter also demonstrated that
mass action is not only instrumental in intent, but as a core tool of mediation
in workers’ organisations, it plays a powerful symbolic and ‘public education’
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144 chapter 6
role. In Stetsenko’s terms, it offers a vision for the ‘collaborative purposeful

transformation’ of the world.
This chapter has demonstrated the powerful educational role of culturally-
embedded forms of communication and historical traditions of working class
culture. Workers’ culture – as another key tool of mediation – is threaded
through different sites of informal learning and teaching, ranging from organ-
ising and mobilising, to cultural activism, to strike action and other forms of
collaborative action. The rich culture of oral performativity that predomi-
nates in workers’ meetings, cultural activities and instances of mass action is
generally indicative of workers’ creativity, and signals a space where ordinary
workers draw on familiar, historical cultural resources to mediate knowledge
and facilitate learning. Oral performativity as a tool of mediation is a means
whereby rank-and-file workers give voice to their experience and knowledge,
and its use is most prevalent in sites where democratic, participative forms of
communication predominate.
In presenting vivid pictures of how these processes of informal learning and
educating have been enacted in the South Africa context, it may be tempt-
ing to view them as having rather local, parochial relevance. However, the
broader principles illustrated here – that is, the important role that language
and culture play in enhancing learning, and the significance of widespread,
democratic participation for enriching learning and our collective knowledge
archive – have broader relevance for workers education and social movements
elsewhere in the world.
It has been acknowledged that trade unions are not immune from the
broader relations of power and inequality that pervade society. Furthermore,
the contextual conditions which have promoted workers’ informal learning
within the South African trade union movement are not a given but are sub-
ject to history and to shifting power relations both within and outside of these
organisations. The particular, historical conditions of collectivity that allowed
a rich, oral-performative culture as well as a widely dispersed educator role to
act as vehicles for the creation and mediation of knowledge ‘from below’, have
been undermined significantly by developments over the last two decades in
post-apartheid South Africa. This theme is addressed more fully in the next
chapter.
Notes
1 All quotes and descriptive details are drawn from Cooper (2005).
2 For example, representative committees at branch, regional or national level; union
women’s structures; health and safety committees, and so on.
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3 Part of this section has been published previously in Cooper (2006).
4 Sitas, together with von Kotze, were members of the Junction Avenue Theatre Com-
pany that produced ‘agitprop’ plays in Johannesburg in the early 1970s and that sup-
ported the development of worker theatre.
5 See http://www.populareducation.co.za for this and other interviews conducted
with South African activists from the 1970s and 1980s.
6 See Essays 3 and 6 in Sitas (2016).
7 Qabula’s life story was published by the National Union of Metalworkers of SA
(NUMSA) (see Qabula, 1989), while his collected poems were published by Sitas in
an edited collection (Sitas, 2016). Some of Hlatshwayo’s poems are contained along-
side those of Qabula and a woman, trade union activist, Nise Malange (Qabula,
Hlatshwayo, & Malange, 1986) and published by COSATU.
8 The black mamba is a highly poisonous snake.
9 An organiser in the more conservative, racially constituted TUCSA trade union fed-
eration at the time, who nevertheless gave support to the emerging, black trade
unions in Natal.
10 In May 1979, the Wiehahn Commission report recommended registration of African
trade unions to bring them under legislative control, while still excluding migrant
workers from enjoying trade union rights. After union resistance, this exclusion was
later removed, and most black trade unions registered. See Davies, O’Meara, and
Dlamini (1984, pp. 325–328).
11 Today named Ekurhuleni.
12 In terms of number of working days lost.
13 Power!
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CHAPTER 7
Workers’ Education and the Formal System
Democracy has become institutionalized.

Kessie Moodley, Director of Workers’ College (2013 workshop)
…
… one of the abiding strengths of capitalism is its ability to adapt and
colonise radical forces or initiatives and use them for its own ends ….
David Harvey (as cited in Cosatu, 1997, p. 39)
∵
In 1991, the National Union of Metalworkers, NUMSA,1 published a set of basic
principles that had emerged out of its Vocational Training Project, established
to come up with proposals for a trade union perspective on post-apartheid
education and training reform. These principles laid the basis for a set of edu-
cation and training policies adopted at COSATU’s 4th National Congress later
that year. The policies were strongly influenced by the Australian and New
Zealand models of competency-based education and training, and proposed
that a new system of education and training should:
– provide paid education and training leave
– be financed by employers and the state
– give access to lifelong education and training for all workers
– provide a broad education foundation
– ensure delivery of flexible, transferable skills
– provide horizontal and vertical occupational mobility
– be linked to broad bands of skills categories and to formal certification and
career paths
– incorporate Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) to facilitate further learn-
ing and better job opportunities
– be linked to new forms of participatory work organisation and a flattening
of management hierarchies (COSATU, 1992).
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Workers’ Education and the Formal System 147
The appeal of these principles and policies to the majority of black workers in
South Africa who had suffered the indignities of apartheid is undeniable. How-
ever, some of the principles outlined above draw on ‘global market’ discourses
of worker education and training and bear a remarkable resemblance to the
language of capital’s proposals for reforming workplace training at the time.
The shift from the radical education discourse of the labour movement in the
1970s and 1980s as outlined in previous chapters, to a discourse more closely
related to human capital theory and expressed through the language of post-
Fordism, is startling.
Up until the late 1980s, the issue of workplace training barely featured on
the education agenda of the democratic trade union movement in South
Africa. In fact, workplace training was viewed with suspicion by many trade
unionists, being seen as a potential means of diluting class consciousness and
as a tool of co-opting workers. Furthermore, the absence in these new policy
proposals of the counter-hegemonic ideals that had infused workers’ educa-
tion over the previous few decades is striking. How did this shift come about,
and what did it signify? What implications has it had for the continuation of
traditions of emancipatory education created and nurtured in the past in the
workers’ movement in South Africa? It is these questions that this chapter will
address.
The chapter will focus on the labour movement’s post-apartheid strategies
of engagement with workplace training and the impact of these on the labour
movement’s own traditions of workers’ education. In line with the historical
materialist approach of CHAT, it begins by locating these strategies against
the backdrop of the history of skills development within the evolving politi-
cal economy of 20th century South Africa. It also locates trade union training
policies within the context of the labour movement’s attempts to influence the
broader trajectory of economic development of South Africa in the post-1994
democratic era. It shows how these strategies were influenced by the selective
‘taking on board’ of some of the dominant thinking about workplace training
amongst trade unions globally, and the ‘muting’ of other, more critical voices
from within labour movements internationally and locally.
The chapter then goes on to show that little has actually been achieved over
the past two decades in terms of transforming workplace education and train-
ing in the interests of workers or poor communities, and it critically assesses
how this can be accounted for. The argument is that a key factor is the weaken-
ing of organised labour not only in South Africa but globally during this period,
and that this is dialectically linked to the undermining of critical traditions
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148 CHAPTER 7
of workers’ education within labour movements. The final part of the chapter
takes a look at attempts by labour educators in South Africa to rebuild the edu-
cation capacity of worker organisations via – amongst other things – different
approaches to formalising and accrediting worker education.
1 The Apartheid Labour Market and Skills Development
McGrath (2004, pp. 16–17) sums up the deeply problematic nature of skills
development in South Africa and subsequent legacies inherited by the first
democratic government in 1994:
The evolution of attitudes towards skill; of labour market structures; and

of the economy in just over a century of South African industrialisation
had, by 1994, resulted in a seriously dysfunctional skills development sys-
tem. Three principal problems faced the incoming state in this area. First,
skills had been profoundly racialised and gendered … and provider insti-
tutions and delivery systems were fragmented and dysfunctional. Sec-
ond, … (t)he state had abandoned much of its responsibility for building
skills and business seemed incapable of developing a strategic position …
Third, South Africa’s apartheid-driven industrial development path2 had
led to an intense polarisation of skill between high skill and low skills
elements; with a serious underdevelopment of the intermediate skill seg-
ment,3 which is seen as essential to successful industrialisation and com-
petitiveness internationally.
McGrath (2004, p. 12) details some of the historical factors that shaped this
model of a highly polarised, racialised and gendered system of skills develop-
ment. Early industrialisation (particularly that linked to the mining industry)
relied on the craft skills of white immigrant workers, thus disincentivising
indigenous skills formation. An early 20th century strand of skills training
focused on the political incorporation of ‘poor whites’, with the result that the
notion of skill became associated with notions of social control and the value
of industriousness, rather than with economic development. The political
need of a racially constituted state (dependent as it was on the ‘white vote’)
to protect white, semi-skilled labour from being replaced by African labour
also meant the ruthless enforcement of a migrant, cheap labour system, where
‘unskilled’ African workers were viewed as homogenous and interchangeable.
By the 1960s, there were growing contradictions between this system and
the growing need of employers for more highly skilled workers. This – together
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with growing internal resistance and struggle – led to attempts by the apartheid
state to relax job reservation and reform the education, training and labour
market nexus. Already by the 1980s, there were increasing numbers of black
skilled operatives, and a new stratum of black apprentices and artisans was
emerging (von Holdt, 2003, p. 48). At the same time however, this period saw
the increased abdication by the state for responsibility for skills development:
“A unique South African version of neo-liberalism emerged in which market
forces were lauded but were shaped profoundly by attempts to maintain racial
privilege” (McGrath, 2004, p. 16). In other words, the impact of globalisation
and neo-liberal economic policies was being felt in South Africa a considerable
time before it began its transition to democracy in the early 1990s.
2 Transition to Democracy – But Also to Neo-Liberalism
Gillian Hart describes the collaboration of the liberation movement – primar-

ily the ANC – with corporate capital to bring an end to apartheid as a “Faus-
tian bargain” (2013, p. 198). In this moment of ‘double transition’ (Webster &
Adler, 1999, as cited in von Holdt, 2003) a political transition to democracy was
‘traded’ for an economic transition to a ‘liberalised’ economy. According to von
Holdt, 1994 was “a moment of democratic incorporation of the black working
class which fundamentally altered its relations to other classes and the state”
(2003, p. 4). At the same time however, a decade after the end of apartheid,
“the terms and modes of incorporation continue at all levels to be a matter of
profound contestation”.
One early sign of this contestation was the heated debates that took place
within the labour movement in the early 1990s (and more generally within the
‘Alliance’ formed between the ANC, the SACP and COSATU) over the basis of
South Africa’s reincorporation into the global economy. COSATU and its ally,
the SACP, envisaged a ‘two stage’ transition to socialism: a first stage would
see a deepening of democracy and the development of a black middle class,
while a second stage – at some unspecified time – would involve a transition
to socialism (Webster & Pampallis, 2017, p. 3). In adopting this view, COSATU’s
leadership largely accepted the necessity of South Africa’s reincorporation into
the global economy. But it sought to influence the terms on which South Africa
was to be reincorporated into the global economy (ANC/COSATU, 1990).
The favoured view within the labour movement was economic growth
stimulated by the redistribution of wealth. In addition to contributing towards
greater social justice, the redistribution of wealth would lead to greater inter-
nal demand for goods and act as an engine for economic growth. An alternative
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150 CHAPTER 7
view favoured an export-led growth path. This position argued that South Afri-
ca’s economic growth depended on its ability to re-enter and compete success-
fully on the international market after years of isolation of the apartheid state.
The wealth thus generated would ‘trickle down’ to the majority (Kraak, 1992).
It was the second growth model that also advocated the introduction of post-
Fordist forms of work organisation. This would require ‘multi-skilling’, team
work, ‘flexible specialisation’ and opportunities for recurrent training, all of
which would put education and training at the centre of efforts to restructure
the economy. Economic advisors to the trade union movement urged labour
to accept some elements of the export-led growth model, but to take the offen-
sive and ensure that this strategy and its consequent economic restructuring
would happen on terms favourable to workers (ibid.).
The Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) that emerged as
a labour-led national development strategy, foregrounded ‘growth through
redistribution’ but also incorporated some elements of the export-led growth
model. The RDP was short-lived however, and in 1996, it was replaced by the
Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy. GEAR was a far more
neoliberal-oriented, macro-economic policy that placed primary emphasis on
economic growth and global competitiveness (Lehulere, 1997). The ANC gov-
ernment’s unilateral adoption of GEAR,4 its subsequent moves to privatise key
parastatals and its partial privatisation of water services, were all an indication
to many that by the late 1990s, COSATU had lost influence within the ruling
alliance (Marais, 2011; Pillay, 2006).
Despite its neo-liberal orientation, the policy of GEAR was also accompa-
nied by plans for an expansionary infrastructure program that aimed at creat-
ing jobs and addressing the service delivery needs of poor communities. From
2001 onwards, there were substantial increases in government expenditure
to manage poverty. Hart (2013, p. 4) argues that “these moves represent sig-
nificant departures from the harsh, home-grown structural adjustment in the
first phase of the post-apartheid era (1994–2000)”. She cautions that “While it
may be tempting to dismiss such efforts as sheep’s clothing draped over a neo-
liberal capitalist wolf, we do so at our peril because they represent part of an
ongoing official battle to contain and control popular discontent”.
This ‘two track policy’ of the ANC (Pillay, 2006, p. 190) of integration into
the global economy while increasing social expenditure, failed to prevent the
growth of popular discontent during the first decade of the 2000s. This period
saw the emergence of new social movements such as the Anti-Privatisation
Forum, the Treatment Action Campaign, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Com-
mittee, and the shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali Basemjondolo. Tensions
intensified within the ANC as well as within its alliance partner, COSATU,
with growing workers’ disaffection over the political affiliation of their union
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leadership. There were a number of breakaways of splinter unions, including

from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), one of COSATU’s largest affil-
iates. Ensuing conflict between the NUM and its rival, the African Mining and
Construction Union (AMCU) boiled over in August 2012 and culminated in the
tragic shooting of striking mineworkers by police and para-military units near
the town of Marikana in the north-west platinum belt. 34 strikers were killed
and another 78 injured. As Hart (2013, p. 2) puts it:
The Marikana massacre was the single most traumatic event of the post-
apartheid era, evoking images and memories of police brutality at Sharp-
eville in 1960 and the Soweto uprising in 1976. Along with the corpses,
hopeful visions of a new South Africa lay shattered on the killing fields
of Marikana.
These political struggles were not yet on the horizon in the early 1990s how-
ever, when South Africans looked forward with hope to a new, post-apartheid
future, including access to education and training for the majority.
3 Unions and Post-Apartheid Education and Training Policies
As already noted, the labour movement enjoyed considerable influence within

the broader democratic movement in the early 1990s and acted as a leading
force in the development of post-apartheid education and training policies.
By that time, it was already clear that COSATU as the leading trade union
federation had shifted from a position of all-out challenge to post-apartheid
capitalism, to a course of strategic engagement and reconstruction through
participation in new, tri-partite institutions and national policy forums.
The approach by the labour movement to reforming South Africa’s system
of skills development reflected the tension between its radical political vision
on the one hand, and its pragmatic accommodation to some of the conse-
quences of South Africa’s re-insertion into the global capitalist economy, on
the other. Labour’s education and training strategies were essentially viewed
as a lever of broader economic and political change. In particular, they aimed
at promoting active labour market policies that would rid the labour market
of its centralised, over-regulated and racist features acquired under apartheid.
Organised labour also viewed education and training as a tool to democratise
the workplace through more participative forms of work organisation. This, it
was claimed, would not only shift the balance of power towards workers at the
point of production, but also enhance innovation, motivation, efficiency and
productivity (Kraak, 1992; Ray, 1997).
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152 CHAPTER 7
The labour movement’s approach to education and training needs to be

understood in the context of deeper structural changes in the world economy
and the responses of labour movements elsewhere in the world. The global
economy that South Africa was poised to re-enter after years of economic iso-
lation, had already seen significant changes in workplace technologies, in the
organisation of work and in the international division of labour (Livingstone &
Guile, 2012). There was greater mobility of capital, increased competition
around wages and labour costs, and the relocation of production to take advan-
tage of lower labour costs (Webster & Buhlungu, 2004). There was a general
trend towards decentralised bargaining and other strategies designed to under-
mine trade union organisation and make employees identify more closely with
their employer. This was paralleled by the emergence of new approaches to
knowledge (David & Foray, 2003) and systemic transformations of education
and training systems. Unions in many parts of the world had begun to involve
themselves in the reform of workplace education and training systems, as a
way of seeking greater job security and learning opportunities for union mem-
bers in a context of growing insecurity of work, and where unions needed to
find benefits other than higher wages.
Partly in response to these new strategies of global capital, in South Africa
that was transitioning from apartheid, NUMSA took the lead in evolving new
approaches to workplace education and training. In 1989, NUMSA set up a
range of policy ‘Research and Development Groups’ (RDGs),5 amongst them,
a ‘Training Group’ focusing on vocational education and basic literacy and
numeracy (Bird, 1992). The RDGs were comprised of shop stewards and union
officials, and they engaged in research seminars and overseas study tours to a
number of countries, including Australia (von Holdt, 2003, p. 187). The Train-
ing Group presented its proposals to NUMSA in 1991, and in early 1992, COSATU
took the decision to establish the Participatory Research Project (PRP) along
the lines of NUMSA’s training project (Bird, 1992). NUMSA’s proposals would
later be adopted by organised labour more widely.
The principles embedded in these proposals were strongly influenced by the
Australian labour movement’s ideology of ‘strategic unionism’. The approach
to education and training, which promoted competency based learning and
multi-skilling, was particularly influenced by the work of John Matthews’ Tools
of Change (1989). This publication represented one of the most enthusiastic
arguments in support of the view that work was undergoing fundamental
change and that the role of trade unions needed to change from one of antago-
nism to protagonism. This would require labour to adopt strategies that drew
on concepts of ‘new production’, ‘human centred manufacturing’, ‘flexible spe-
cialisation’, ‘diversed quality production’ and ‘functional flexibility’ in order to
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advance a ‘strategic accommodation’ between capital and labour (Law, 1994).

It was widely believed that a highly-skilled labour force capable of achiev-
ing flexible specialisation would enable South Africa to succeed in the global
economy (Allais, 2007, 2014).
It will be shown below that by the 1990s, there was already a significant body
of critique of these strategies emanating from the UK, Canada, New Zealand as
well as Australia itself. However, these critical voices did not find expression –
or were deliberately ‘muted’ – in public discourse and debate around educa-
tion and training in South Africa. Before going on to consider these critiques,
the following section looks briefly at how labour’s principles for education and
training reform translated into legislation, policy and institutional develop-
ment in the post-apartheid era. It poses the question: 25 years after the formal
end of apartheid, has this approach to skills development ‘worked’ for work-
ers? And if not, why not?
3.1 A New Skills Development System: Disjuncture between Policy and

Practice
Writing in 1992, Kraak (a labour market researcher who had a significant influ-
ence on COSATU’s thinking around education and training) made note of the
historical resistance of (largely white) management to the provision of any
form of education and training for black workers:
In South Africa, the notion that the non-managerial workforce repre-

sents a reservoir of skills, knowledge and ideas that can be harnessed to
improve economic performance is an alien one. There is an almost ‘obses-
sive reluctance on the part of management to allow workers to acquire or
to use skills which are traditionally management skills: production plan-
ning, product planning and development’ (Fanaroff, 1991, p.12). This has
led South African workers to view all skill enhancement suspiciously as
being part of management co-optation. (Kraak, 1992, p. 55)
This being the case, significant state intervention was required to put pressure
on employers to engage in skills development.
A new National Qualifications Framework (NQF) based on Outcomes Based
Education (OBE) was introduced in the mid-1990s. Under the auspices of the
South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), an ambitious project of ‘stand-
ard setting’ for a host of new qualifications took off, in which trade unionists
became heavily involved (Allais, 2018). The Skills Development Act of 1998,
the Skills Development Levies Act of 1999 and subsequent regulations were
aimed at establishing a new institutional framework, expanding delivery of
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154 CHAPTER 7
workplace training, and ensuring that such training would enjoy an adequate
financial base. New legislation also established Sector Education and Training
Authorities (SETAs), a National Skills Authority and Skills Development Com-
mittees at the enterprise level and institutionalised the right of worker repre-
sentatives to participate in each of these levels of decision-making.
At the enterprise level, legislation required workers to be involved in the
development of a Workplace Skills Plan. To provide a financial incentive for
training, organisations were required to pay a Skills Levy of 1% of payroll that
could be reclaimed in part for training purposes if employers complied with
requirements. ‘Learnerships’ were intended to broaden access to apprentice-
ships, tarnished by their exclusionary nature and historical association with
the apartheid division of labour. The Employment Equity Act (1998) was aimed
at further reforming the racial job structure and ensuring greater gender equity
(Jones, 2013, p. 74).
Many of these policy interventions were led by ex-trade unionists who had
now entered government. There was a genuine intention that these policies
should provide access to skills development for workers, but it soon became
clear that most of these measures had limited impact at shop-floor level, and
that new skills policies were not benefitting workers.
This first emerged in a research report produced by COSATU in 1997 (sub-
sequently published by Lugg, Mabitla, Louw, & Angelis, 1998) that focused on
two pilot RPL projects in which unions were actively involved. One involved
NUMSA and employers in the auto industry while the other involving NUM
and the assessment of mineworkers’ literacy and numeracy capabilities. Both
unions started out as strongly in favour of RPL, but their experiences of the
pilot projects led to disappointment, anger and frustration. In the auto industry,
workers were assessed against adapted, Australian unit standards which were
oriented towards multi-skilled work processes, and which bore little resem-
blance to their own work practices. Methods of assessment were regarded by
workers with deep mistrust because they felt “that they were unable to show
what they (workers) really know” (COSATU, 1997, p. 19). In the case of literacy
and numeracy tests in the mining industry, many workers felt that the test was
loaded against them because it advantaged formal school-based literacy and
numeracy skills. They concluded that the test was intended to “find out who
is clever and who is stupid, so they can identify who is not clever and retrench
them …” (COSATU, 1997, p. 24).
A decade into the post-apartheid era, a document circulated at COSATU’s
2003 Education Conference outlined key problems from the perspective of
workers:
– Control of education and training remained in the hands of big business;
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– Workplace education and training had itself become ‘big business’ (rather
than a social good), and skills priorities were set by the demands of com-
petitiveness at a local and global level rather than social needs;
– Education and training issues had been removed from bargaining forums at
workplaces (where workers are a large, organised force) and transferred to
SETAs. Here organised labour had little capacity to engage in the bureaucratic
and technical processes involved in standard-setting and quality assurance;
– Workplace Skills Plans and Employment Equity plans were not being imple-
mented;
– RPL remained ‘weak and poorly defined’ and was unable to assess non-tra-
ditional forms of knowledge;
– There was little monitoring of SETA learnerships, resulting in the exploita-
tion of learners as ‘cheap labour’.
Within the labour movement itself, there was inadequate co-ordination
between structures engaging with broader economic policy, and those dealing
with skills development or education and training policies.
Research carried out five years later in 2008–9 amongst union skills represent-
atives in the Cape Town metropolitan area echoed these concerns (Cooper &
Nkomo, 2009). The research critically assessed representatives’ views on who
was benefiting from the new skills dispensation. It also probed their under-
standing of workplace structures established for the purposes of skills devel-
opment, and the degree to which they actively participated at shop-floor level
in shaping the content and direction of enterprise skills development. The
findings indicated that most of these union representatives who carried spe-
cific responsibility to promote education and training in the workplace had
little or no understanding of the legislation, the shop-floor structures that
were supposed to be in place, their own role in such structures, or the extent
of workers’ rights to training. In short, trade unions seemed to lack the capac-
ity or political will to equip representatives with the necessary understand-
ing and skills to carry out their skills development roles. More recent research
on the state of workers education within the labour movement (Jones, 2013;
Koen et al., 2018) confirms that this picture has not changed much in the
last decade.
South African trade unions are not unique in their difficulties of promot-
ing workplace education and training opportunities for their members. Weak-
nesses in this respect have been common internationally, as seen from Stroud’s
(2012) account of worker engagement within the European Union steel indus-
try, and Scully-Russ and Chiera’s (2005) account of American trade unions.
However, we need to understand the particular, conjunctural nature of the
weaknesses of South Africa’s labour movement in this regard.
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156 CHAPTER 7
4 What Went Wrong?
4.1 “A Democratic Project Trapped within a Neo-Liberal Paradigm”6

This section highlights the difficulties that trade unions have experienced in
engaging with education and training policy development and implementa-
tion. In doing so, it in no way intends to suggest that organised labour should
not engage with issues of workplace education and training. Law (1993, 1994)
shows how in Western Europe and Britain, labour’s vision of education and
training rights for workers originated over a century ago in the course of work-
ers’ struggles for a modern, inclusive democracy. He locates the struggle for
worker education and training firmly within labour’s reformist wing and its
social democratic politics, although in some cases, it was inspired by a more
radical agenda. Examples of more radical projects were the 150 hours move-
ment in Italy,7 the 1968 demands of workers in France for self-management,
and the extension of public control over the Swedish economy in the 1970s8
(Law, 1994). There are also instances where radical currents of workers’ educa-
tion have prioritised vocational skills training for workers (see for example,
Fischer & Hannah, 2002 on Brazil, Moussouris, & van der Walt, in press, on
Anarchist views on skills development).
The problem for South African trade unions is that they began their engage-
ment with workplace education and training in a very different context to
those mentioned by Law. This was one that was already being shaped by glo-
balisation and neo-liberal, market policies rather than social democratic edu-
cational reform. Some have argued that the global, neoliberal, market-driven
context made it possible for labour’s demands for reform of education and
training to dovetail with those of leading sectors of global capital.
For example, Sedunary (1996) argues that under globalisation, two very dif-
ferent education discourses – that of radical education and that of the ‘new
vocationalism’ – have found common ideological ground and have come to
share similar commitments in terms of educational reform. Both movements
(for different reasons) share a rejection of the exclusive character of traditional
academic curricula (see for example Gibbons et al., 1994, on Mode 1 and Mode
2 knowledge). Both reject traditional distinctions between mental and man-
ual labour (see for example the ‘learning organisation’ literature mentioned
in Chapter 6). Similarly, Muller (1996) has described South Africa’s NQF as a
‘hybrid model’, driven by two very different social projects. On the one hand,
the union movement and its educational allies have driven forward a project of
social justice, redress and empowerment. On the other, employers and policy
makers have promoted market-oriented training associated with the commod-
ification of knowledge, and an emphasis on flexibility, mobility and re-train-
ability. Muller argues that in the long run, the impact of the global economy
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and pressures towards market responsiveness will mean an NQF increasingly

dominated by the second of these social projects, with workers’ training needs
reduced to a reflection of the labour needs of capital. As a result, worker educa-
tion could well lose its historical autonomy and distinct identity. More than 20
years since he made this prediction, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
this is, in fact, what has taken place.
As noted earlier, the discourse associated with a post-Fordist, market-
oriented education reform has been subjected to ongoing, and widespread
critique. For example, the notion of ‘flexible production’ – described as ‘post-
Fordism of learning’ (Edwards, 1995) – is seen as having more to do with the low-
ering of labour standards and allowing employers greater freedom to hire and
fire at will, than providing workers with opportunities for recurrent training.
Critics point out that ‘mobility’ and ‘career paths’ are only open to a privileged
few while for the rest, there is a ‘revolving door’ of employment/unemploy-
ment. Multi-skilling has been characterised as ‘management by stress’ while
promises of ‘life-long learning’ have been associated with attempts by employ-
ers and the state to lay the burden of learning – and thus employability – on
workers (Edwards, 1995; Foley, 1994; Grenier,1988; Hart, 1992; Johnson-Riordan,
1994; Rhinehart, 1995).
It is notable that these critiques were not only in the public domain in the
1990s when the South African labour movement began to forge its new vision
of education and training, but in many cases were put forward by those closely
associated with labour movements in other parts of the world.9 Writing in
the mid-1990s, Law argued that in New Zealand, while some education and
training reforms “did not abandon (worker) education’s democratic heritage”
(Law, 1996, p. 166), increasingly “… the ‘ideology of the market’ had squeezed
the democratic dimension out of workers’ education and training …” (ibid.,
p. 159). He concluded that:
worker education and training continues to be a site of contestation

between capital and labour … But with the deepening of the crisis of
welfare capitalism the rise of ‘New Right’ ideologies and governments,
structural change, and the continuing marginalisation of trade unions in
several Western countries, the balance of influence has shifted dramati-
cally … while the challenge to assert a democratic vision remains urgent,
the restructuring of worker education and training makes that increas-
ingly difficult. (1994, p. 2)
Writing about the British labour movement in the early 2000s, Forrester
pointed to the increased casualisation and informalisation of work in order
to account for the “minimal practice and commitment towards (training)
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158 CHAPTER 7
activities ‘on the shop floor’ by local managers and frontline supervisors” (2001,
p. 8). He cautioned that the ‘shared partnership’ perspective underpinning the
TUC’s skill strategy risked “subsuming union aims and objectives with those
of the employers” (2001, p. 324). Writing on Canada at about the same time,
Cruikshank (2002) and Livingstone (2004) both argued that globalisation had
led to the spread of part-time, low-paid and casualised work which simply did
not require high levels of education, education credentials nor experience.
Samson (1999) and Mojab (2009) have pointed to the feminisation of work
under globalisation and argued that since women formed the majority in the
most insecure, exploited areas of work, they are the most excluded from access
to training.
Perhaps the most telling argument is that of Brown (2006) who critiques
the Australian labour movement’s approach from which South African unions
borrowed so heavily. He argues that while Australian unions provided the
driving force behind Australia’s reform of its vocational education and train-
ing system, by the early 1990s they had lost the initiative and their original
expectations were undermined by the shift towards training ‘for the needs of
the enterprise’ and for the market (Brown, 2006, p. 498). He concludes that
labour’s expectations could not be realised without confronting more funda-
mental relations of power. At the heart of the Australian labour movement’s
failure to drive forward training reform lay the union movement’s consensus
politics, and their failure to confront more fundamental inequalities:
The idea that workers’ earnings, job security and work satisfaction could
be substantially improved by establishing a new training system without
also tackling economic inequality and power in the workplace was illu-
sory … Suggestions that sustained advances could be achieved without
confronting the issues of ownership and power and by avoiding conflict
with the employing class were fundamentally flawed, and gradually con-
tributed to the movements’ weakened position. (Brown, 2006, p. 503)
There have also been critiques on pedagogic grounds of competency based

training, and of NQFs more generally. Writing twelve years after the introduc-
tion of South Africa’s NQF, Allais (2007, p. 523) argued that “… the NQF has
spectacularly failed to live up to the claims made about it”. Its implementa-
tion had backgrounded the role of expert knowledge and the role of educa-
tion institutions and education experts. She showed that the vast majority of
training was not happening against the newly established, unit standard-based
qualifications, and concluded that South Africa’s NQF is “a policy that has very
little to do with education at all, and in fact undermines the work of educa-
tional institutions” (p. 541). There have also been strong critiques of the human
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capital paradigm10 within which competency-based training is located (see

Vally & Motala, 2014). A recent report on workers’ education in South Africa
captures the nub of this argument:
The central problem with the human capital approach is that it misdiag-
noses the problem of unemployment as related to a skills shortage, rather
than due to the structural nature of capitalism. It further implies that
the individual unemployed workers are themselves at fault for not being
skilled enough, rather than identifying the real cause of the problem.
This narrow approach sees education as a mere instrument for economic
growth. The solution then becomes the skilling of individuals, which in
itself further disempowers the working class from finding collective solu-
tions to the real problem, which is the nature of the exploitative, profit-
based economic system. (NALEDI, 2018, p. 262)
Thus the labour movement’s approach to post-apartheid workplace training,

which represented a significant political and ideological departure from ear-
lier, radical traditions of workers education, was adopted despite widespread
local and international critiques. I have argued earlier that there is a dialectical
relationship between education practices and the broader context. The South
African labour movement’s adoption of what is essentially a human capital
approach to skills development is both a cause and an effect of the growing
weaknesses of workers’ organisations and workers’ education in the post-
apartheid era.
4.2 Weakening of Trade Union Organisation and Workers’ Education

Webster and Buhlungu (2010, pp. 234–235) write that in the transition to
democracy in South Africa, trade unions have encountered a ‘crisis of repre-
sentation’ that involves two dimensions: an external dimension, where trade
unions have lost their capacity to provide a voice for the ‘new working poor’,
and an internal crisis of representation, associated with poor delivery to mem-
bership and widespread loss of trust in leadership amongst union members.
4.2.1 Unions’ External Crisis of Representation: ‘A Double Logic of

Inclusion and Exclusion’
Perhaps the biggest challenge that has faced labour movements internation-
ally – and South Africa’s trade union movement specifically – is the shrink-
ing of their historical membership base. South Africa’s re-entry into the global
economy has meant the liberalisation of the economy, the importation of new
technologies and restructuring of workplaces. This has led to what Castells
(1999) has called the ‘double logic of inclusion and exclusion’ where education
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160 CHAPTER 7
and cultural capital are extremely unequally distributed, and where inequal-
ity has been amplified by automation and other new technologies. In South
Africa, this has meant massive retrenchments particularly in the mining and
manufacturing sectors that constituted the heartland of the union movement
from the 1970s onwards, and the relative growth of white-collar occupations in
the finance, service and state sectors. Alongside that, there has been a mush-
rooming of outsourcing and casualisation of labour, and rising unemployment
(Webster & Buhlungu, 2004; Webster, 2006; Buhlungu & Tsoaedi, 2012).11
As noted in Chapter 1 of this book, Webster (2005) has described three
‘worlds of work’ which have merged in post-apartheid South Africa, but which
are characteristic of other countries in the global South. Of those who ‘earn a
living’, the ‘salariat’ constitutes a diminishing core in the first world of work,
while alongside this is a growing ‘precariat’. In the informal economy of the
second world of work, increasing numbers struggle to ‘make a living’,12 while
in the subsistence economy of the third world of work, there are burgeon-
ing numbers who simply struggle to survive from hand to mouth (and are
uncounted in official, labour force statistics).
These structural changes in the labour market have had a significant influ-
ence on the composition of the membership of trade unions in South Africa.
Unions have experienced an overall drop in membership, and union density
has fallen (NALEDI, 2018).13 At the same time there has been increased strati-
fication amongst union members, and a significant shift in the location and
character of the majority of union members. The past two decades has seen
a significant increase in the numbers and levels of remuneration of state-
employed workers, and along with this, the increasing dominance of public
sector unions within the trade union movement (Bezuidenhout & Tshoaedi,
2017).14 This period has also seen a growing weight within the labour move-
ment of more urbanised, highly educated workers and those in professional
or semi-professional areas of employment such as teaching, health care or
policing15 (Sitas, 2012). While the union movement’s traditional base amongst
semi-skilled migrant workers has shrunk, unions have failed to engage with the
realities of emerging forms of work or extend organisation to workers in the
informal economy, casual and contract workers, or migrant workers from else-
where in Africa (Hlatshwayo, 2012). In recent years, there have emerged some
organisations amongst self-employed women (for example, the Self-Employed
Women’s Union, SEWU; and Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and
Organising, WIEGO), and amongst casualised or contract workers (the Casual
Workers’ Advice Office, CWAO), but their efforts to join up with mainstream,
organised labour have so far achieved limited success.
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4.2.2 Unions’ Internal Crisis of Representation: ‘Snapping the Elastic

Band’ of Solidarity?
Many labour analysts have sought to explain what lies behind the weakening
of participatory structures within the trade union movement and the ‘empty-
ing out’ of its political vision since the transition to democracy (von Holdt,
2003; Webster & Buhlungu, 2010; Buhlungu & Tsoaedi, 2012; Hlatshwayo, 2012;
Bezuidenhout & Tshoaedi, 2017). The institutionalisation of trade unions
through their engagement with industrial relations machinery, involvement in
collective bargaining and use of industrial courts was not new and had already
been under way since the early 1980s. What was new in the post-apartheid era
was a significant change in the labour movement’s dominant ideologies and
value systems, and its organisational practices.
Following the 1994 elections, most of COSATU’s top leaders who had been
at the forefront of promoting a ‘working-class politics’ during the 1980s were
co-opted by the ANC and went on to become government ministers and
businessmen, far removed from the world of the working class (Pillay, 2006,
p. 172). The loss of layers of leadership to government and the private sector
diminished the labour movement’s strategic and organisational capacity. Buh-
lungu (2010) characterises COSATU’s position in post-apartheid South Africa
as a ‘paradox of victory’: COSATU gained recognition and some influence
over the state while it lost power vis a vis capital. Despite widespread criti-
cism from within and without the labour movement, COSATU’s has retained
its alliance with the ANC in government. Critics argue that this alliance pri-
marily serves middle and upper layers of union leadership by allowing them
to advance politically and materially (Buhlungu & Tshoaedi, 2012). The role
of social partner of the state and capital has had demobilising effects, weak-
ening COSATU unions’ ability to protect workers from the growing effects of
globalisation.
The post-apartheid period has seen the locus of decision-making within
unions shifting towards upper leadership, and a weakening of traditions of
workers democracy and control (Buhlungu, 2010). Webster and Buhlungu
(2010, p. 237) write that the growing gap between leadership and membership
has allowed new ‘union entrepreneurs’ to set up and run union investment
companies in virtual secrecy. In recent years, there have also been repeated
accusations against union leaders of corruption and financial mismanagement.
Increased stratification amongst workers has led to growing tensions and
what von Holdt (2003) has described as the dissolution of the collective iden-
tity and solidarity that had been forged both outside and inside the union dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s:
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162 CHAPTER 7
The transition replaced the class compression of apartheid, character-

ised by a closed class structure defined by race, with an open and porous
structure characterised by class fragmentation, new class formation and
class mobility, thus undermining the historically constructed collective
solidarity of social movement unionism. (von Holdt, 2003, p. 293)
Sitas has argued that the “elastic band that held the horizontal comradeships
of the labour movement together in the past has not snapped” – but has come
under tremendous strain (in Webster, 2018a, p. 171).
What implications have all these developments had for worker education?
5 Navigating the Accreditation Terrain
It was noted earlier that changes since the 1990s required unions to signifi-
cantly expand and diversify the knowledge, capabilities and expertise of their
members. Economic policy debates, new labour legislation and initiatives
around ‘participative management’ required unionists to engage in an unprec-
edented range of issues. The area of education and training policy alone
required unions to engage in a wide range of issues that did not previously
fall within their areas of concern or expertise. From the early 1990s, internal
education within trade unions began to shift its emphasis from ‘consciousness-
raising’ to expanding and diversifying the knowledge, capabilities and exper-
tise of worker leaders.
It was in this context that the trade union movement began to make serious
moves towards the institutionalisation, formalisation and professionalisation
of trade union education. The establishment at the end of 1996 of a national
Development Institute for the Training, Support and Education of Labour
(DITSELA) which was to offer more systematic training programs with the
future possibility of formal accreditation, was illustrative of some of the for-
malising and professionalising moves being made in trade union education.
Other worker organisations which began to offer formal qualifications were
the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) College16 and the Natal Workers’
College, which will be dealt with in further detail later in this chapter.
Final steps towards accreditation took place after a very longstanding and
contentious debate around the pros and cons of formally accrediting a trade
union qualification. What were some of the main contours of this debate?
Those trade unionists pressing for formal accreditation made the argument
that accreditation would enhance both the quality of union training and the
value placed on it and would help to build organisational capacity. It would
also provide recognition of the skills and knowledge which workers already
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possess as well as provide access to qualifications that could facilitate mobil-

ity in their jobs. A document presented to the COSATU Education Conference
in 1996 shows how the position supporting union accreditation still drew on
some of the emancipatory discourse of the labour movement in the 1980s:
… we should not turn accreditation into a principle but rather we need

to turn it into a struggle for accreditation that works for us … standard
generating is a terrain of struggle and must be taken forward. (COSATU,
1996, p. 8)
Other trade unionists presented strong arguments against accreditation,

including:
– being a shop-steward is not about a vocation – it is a political commitment
and a revolving role;
– work within the trade union context represents a collective endeavour mak-
ing it difficult to grant individual reward;
– accrediting some shop-stewards who have studied formally would lead
to greater exclusion, and would intensify the processes of stratification
increasingly apparent amongst workers;
– accrediting union education would lead to its depoliticisation, compromise
its autonomy and workers control over their own education, and lead to the
loss of the distinct political identity of workers education;
– accrediting worker education would lead to placing stronger value on for-
mal bodies of knowledge, and devalue workers’ experiential knowledge;
– accreditation could become the main driver of union education, replacing
its transformative social purpose;
– accreditation and professionalisation of educators would lead to a change
in the relatively equal power relations that have existed between union edu-
cator and learner;
– unions do not have the capacity to engage in accredited education and
training.17
The irony is that two decades later, despite the hope that formalisation would
help to strengthen workers’ education within trade unions, it has weakened
further. As noted in a recent report on workers education commissioned by
the Human Resources Development Council of South Africa (HRDCSA) (Jones,
2013, p. 14): “… ironically … attempts to regularise and formalise trade union
education towards greater coherence within the NQF has led to reduced capac-
ity in the unions”. Successive research reports (see Cooper & Qotole, 1996;
Ditsela, 1997, 1998, 2005; HRDC, 2013; NALEDI/Koen et al., 2018), beginning
in the mid- to late-1990s and continuing well into the 2000s and 2010s, report
a worsening picture of the declining ‘reach’ of workers education within the
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164 CHAPTER 7
trade unions. Most resources have been allocated to leadership development,

with very little shop steward training or membership education taking place
(Koen et al., 2018, p. 18). As the focus has shifted from shop-steward training to
‘capacity-building’ of leadership and full-time staff, this has tended to privilege
those with higher levels of formal education and marginalise those without
(often women workers, older workers, and those living in rural areas). In con-
trast to the ‘widely dispersed educator role’ described earlier in Chapters 5 and
6, there has been increased reliance on outsiders with specialised expertise.
There is also a greater reliance for educational purposes on written text, par-
ticularly policy and legal texts, meaning a shift away from more ‘multi-voiced’,
oral forms of communication to more univocal and authoritative forms of
communication (see Cooper, 2006). Union training has become more nar-
rowly focused and depoliticised while the organic relationship between edu-
cation and organisation has weakened in a context of declining organisational
vibrancy (Koen et al., 2018, p. 10).
Moves towards the institutionalisation of labour education and increasing
pressures for union education to become credit granting were seen as a way
to reverse the decline of worker education. But the pressure to accredit trade
union education was also a response to the fact that outside providers had
increasingly moved in to exploit the ‘trade union market’. The HRDSA report
(Jones, 2013, p. 13) noted that trade unions were increasingly outsourcing their
shop-steward and other training to external education and training providers,
many of which have no understanding of trade unionism. NALEDI’s (2018)
report found union’s attempts to access SETA funding – reserved only for
accredited education – had exacerbated this trend. The report concluded that
“The institutional preference for funding accredited education has stripped
union education departments of their capacity and introduced private provid-
ers and higher education institutions to play the role of movement educators”
(Koen et al., 2018, p. 21).
Concerns over all these developments have given rise to various attempts to
use accreditation to reverse the trend of worker education being ‘outsourced’
to private providers, to counter the devaluing of union education, and to
rebuild skills and intellectual capacity within the labour movement. The final
section of this chapter will critically assess some of these initiatives. Two dif-
ferent routes of ‘navigating the accreditation terrain’ will be considered: the
formal accreditation of the labour movement’s own provision, through DIT-
SELA; and partnerships with higher education institutions.
5.1 The Trade Union Practices Qualification

DITSELA was established in 1996 as one of a number of the trade union ini-
tiatives to institutionalise, formalise and professionalise labour education.
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Its founding principles included playing a “dynamic part in the building and
maintenance of a strong, independent labour movement” and making a criti-
cal contribution to the development of trade union members and staff “into
creative, critical and effective trade unionists and citizens who transform soci-
ety with other organs of civil society” (DITSELA, 1997, p. 8). These aims ech-
oed some of the values of earlier, radical traditions of worker education, but
also reflected the political and identity shifts taking place within the labour
movement in post-apartheid South Africa. Over the years, DITSELA has pro-
vided research and education programs (mainly non accredited) for unions
from three federations, created forums – including national conferences – for
worker educators to exchange ideas, and acted as a support for trade unions in
developing their own internal education programs.18 It has also formed part-
nerships with a number of universities to offer ‘advanced’ courses with univer-
sity qualifications (considered in the next section).
In 2010, a new, Level 4,19 qualification was developed by a group of trade
union educators and registered on the South African NQF: the Trade Union
Practices Qualification (TUPQ).20 It is interesting how the stated aims of the
qualification attempt to retain the ideological flavour of earlier, radical dis-
courses of workers’ education. The registered qualification aims to enhance
the ability learners to: organise strategies to advance trade unionism; under-
stand and advance the rights of workers; understand the relationship between
the economy and political power and formation of social classes; and under-
stand the history and impact of the trade union movement in South Africa.21
The qualification has thus far been delivered by DITSELA to two successive
cohorts (in 2010 and again in 2014) with a combined intake of 90 union organ-
isers and shop-stewards (Webster, 2018b). Delivery takes the form of a learn-
ership involving some structured, classroom learning but with the bulk the
learning taking place on-the-job (i.e. in the union) under the guidance of a
mentor (for further detail, see Allais, 2018).
Unions around the world have generally not sought formal accreditation for
their own educational offerings, viewing it as neither necessary nor desirable
(Cooper, 2014). A research survey entitled Labour Education in Canada Today
(CWCS, 2001) suggests that trade unions elsewhere have come under some
pressure to do so, but there have been concerns that if union courses were to
seek formal accreditation, “this would shift the emphasis of labour education
from social to individual purposes. Labour education is one of the few remain-
ing adult education practices that challenge the notion that the purpose of
education is to serve individualized economic objectives” (CWCS, 2001, p. 4).
It is interesting to note that in recent research on the TUPQ, Allais (2018)
found that most of the concerns put forward by those opposed to accredita-
tion of workers’ education do not seem to have materialised. She set out to
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166 CHAPTER 7
explore whether registering a trade union practices qualification on the South

African NQF presented a major threat to worker education. She found “little
evidence that credentialing has been a major threat to worker education” in
the sense of it undermining the democratic principles of worker education or
leading to upward mobility for some. At the same time, she could also not find
any evidence that this qualification had added value to worker education, and
her article puts forward a strong critique of the qualification on educational
grounds.
Allais’ critique essentially concerns the effects of locating this qualifica-
tion within the unit standards, outcome-based requirements of the occupa-
tional qualifications sub-framework of the South African NQF. Problems with
competency-based models include that they lead to over-specified, narrow
qualifications, and in their constant attempts to delimit tasks more finely, they
marginalise and undermine the knowledge base of curricula. She examines in
some detail a number of examples of unit standards contained in the TUPQ.22
Two such examples are: “demonstrate an understanding of political economy”,
or “demonstrate an understanding of working class theories”. She argues that:
Thinking about any of these as a ‘competence’ makes nonsense of

them—none of them are simple skills that can be measured as present
or absent in an individual. The ‘learning outcomes’ [of this qualification]
are based on complex, nuanced organizational skills, subtle ideological
debates, and broad bodies of knowledge. All point to the complexity of
the work of unionists, and the range of areas of education and training
which could benefit unionists in their work. But none of them make
sense as a learning outcome. (Allais, 2018)
Allais’ article recounts how problems with the competency-based and unit
standard-based approaches to occupational qualifications have led to the post-
schooling and higher education sector in South Africa opting for a different,
whole-qualification approach. The following section explores two different
initiatives on the part of trade unions to partner with higher education insti-
tutions to deliver advanced training through whole qualifications, and criti-
cally assesses the consequences of these features of higher education for such
initiatives.
A whole-qualification approach is more in harmony with a holistic perspec-
tive on knowledge and learning and may be more appropriate way to formalise
workers’ education. However, higher education tends to transmit knowledge
that is generalised or abstract in character, and that is not particularly sensi-
tive to particular social contexts or to learners’ cultural histories. The latter are
important principles of learning in CHAT and have been important features of
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radical education in the past. Furthermore, as higher education has become

increasingly commodified under globalisation, its institutions predomi-
nantly promote individual competitiveness and reinforce capitalism’s social
structures and power differentials, rather than promoting collective devel-
opment and social transformation in the interests of those who are poor or
exploited.
5.2 Building Partnerships with Higher Education Institutions

Since the early 2000s, DITSELA has partnered with two universities – the
University of Cape Town and University of the Western Cape – to offer five
‘advanced’ certificates/diplomas. These are in the fields of Labour Law, Political
Economy, Leadership and Management of Trade unions, Women’s Leadership,
and Trade Union Education (Jones, 2013). Both universities have RPL policies
and procedures in place, and these have been used to accept applicants who
do not have the required university entrance-level qualification. In some cases,
students who have successfully completed the DITSELA-sponsored program of
study have proceeded to degree studies in these institutions.
Partnership arrangements between trade unions and universities are not
uncommon internationally but are also not without challenges.23 For example,
trade union educators canvassed in Canada by the Centre for Work & Com-
munity Studies (CWCS, 2001) expressed concerns about the comparability
or ‘fit’ between formal education and labour education. Amongst these were
the point that while much of trade union education is aimed at empowering
members and is critical and transformational, in contrast, formal education is
accommodative and reproduces the dominant system and approaches of soci-
ety (see Cooper, 2014, for further critiques).
As noted in Chapter 1, between 2001 and 2017, I was part of a team of uni-
versity lecturers, DITSELA staff and trade union educators, who designed
and taught DITSELA’s ‘Advanced Course for Trade Union Educators’. Offered
through the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) Higher Certificate in Adult Edu-
cation, our experiences of teaching this program illustrate some of the com-
plex challenges of such initiatives. The course has drawn in approximately
30 educators bi-annually from a wide geographic spread, and from a range of
unions. Participants have been a mix of full-time educators, gender co-ordi-
nators, office bearers and shop stewards. Staff have been able to make use of
the strategic space offered by this liberal university’s historical practice of ‘aca-
demic autonomy’ to develop a program that strives for direct relevancy to the
trade union education context, that highlights the historical legacies of radical
workers’ education, and that instils the principles and values of these tradi-
tions of workers’ education. While the program has given rise to interesting
curriculum innovations, and has no doubt impacted on many of the individual
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168 CHAPTER 7
participants, it has faced many challenges in achieving these goals of which

this chapter will focus on three. These are: its distance from the everyday prac-
tices of the trade union as an activity system; its difficulties in developing and
sustaining a critical mass of trade union educators who can act as a force in
reviving the ideals and practices of radical workers’ education; and the chal-
lenges faced in ‘translating’ transformative learning into new, lasting organisa-
tional practices.
The first issue is that such a program is necessarily somewhat isolated from
the ‘heartbeat’ of their union’s organisational life and cannot on its own repro-
duce the intellectual potential of everyday organisational activity. As Crowther
and Lucio-Villegas (2012, p. 63), following Gramsci, note: “… there has to be
a dialectic between the organic intellectual and their constituency which, if
undone, separates ‘intellectuals’ from the ‘popular’. Movements cease to move
without the dynamic relationship between the two”. Although participants
are required to undertake course assignments which involve them in experi-
ential learning within their organisations, the program has not been entirely
successful in linking to the many sites of informal learning that have been so
important in the history of the labour movement, such as meetings, organ-
ising campaigns, cultural activities, taking part in collective decision-making
and mass action. This problem is exacerbated by the general decline in union
democracy, and the weakening and demobilisation of workers’ struggles, in
recent years.
The second issue is related to the hope from the outset that the program’s
foregrounding of radical traditions of worker education and the values of soli-
darity and collectivism, would enable participants to network and build soli-
darity across their unions and sectors. This, in turn, might help to develop a
‘community of practice’ amongst trade union educators who – inspired and
energised by the vision of radical workers’ education – would become a criti-
cal mass in helping to renew and revitalise workers’ education in South Africa.
Despite the program’s promotion of group assignments that require partici-
pants to work collectively in-between course blocks, and its attempt to inte-
grate the widespread use of social media amongst participants into its delivery,
it has been unsuccessful in sustaining a vibrant trade union educator network
outside of the course. This is in part a reflection of how substantially com-
munication within unions and across the labour movement has weakened
over time, as have the practices that have enabled solidarity within and across
unions. It is also inevitable that aspirations of individual upward mobility and
‘career-pathing’ have become a major motivation for course participants that
may – and often do – take them out of the labour movement altogether. As
Crowther and Lucio-Villegas (2012, p. 67) have noted, “Too often education
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is constructed as a ladder out of communities for individuals to climb rather

than a collective resource for change”.
A third issue is the question of the organisational impact of the program.
Little research has been done on what impact such courses have when trade
unionists return to their organisations, but what little evidence there is suggests
that there are numerous obstacles to ‘ploughing back’ the new knowledge and
skills acquired. Pillay (in press) conducted an in-depth study of a small sample,
drawn from approximately 300 trade union women who completed a three-
year program at the University of Western Cape (UWC). They were sponsored
by their union24 to attend a Higher Certificate in Economic Development, run
from 2006 to 2008. Pillay’s key focus was on whether participants were able to
‘apply their learning’ in order to build women’s leadership within their union.
She found that while participants felt significantly more confident to offer lead-
ership in their communities, churches or workplaces, they felt blocked from
implementing their new skills and knowledge by the patriarchal attitudes and
practices in their trade unions. Hartman (in press) conducted a similar study
with a group of trade union women who had completed a DITSELA womens’
leadership course at UWC. She found that while this women’s-only course pro-
vided a ‘safe space’ for women to engage in political debate and to develop their
knowledge and self-confidence, they felt unable to impact on improving the
lack of women in leadership positions within their organisations.
In both these studies, the notion of ‘application’ of learning to practice was
somewhat problematic as it suggests a one-way transfer of knowledge from the
formal education curriculum to the trade union and fails to capture the CHAT
notion of dialectical interaction between these two spheres of knowledge. A
CHAT analysis might also provide some explanation as to why the new knowl-
edge acquired by the trade union women was not able to bring about changes
to the exclusionary and oppressive gender practices within their trade unions.
This perspective views learning as embedded in complex ways within an activ-
ity system and intertwined with the established division of labour and exist-
ing norms. Sannino, Engeström, and Lemos (2016) show that a ‘transformative
intervention’ that enables learning to be materialised into new organisational
practices – such as new, gender-related power relations and practices within a
trade union – would require widespread organisational support and collective
willingness to engage in critical, ‘expansive’ thinking on the part of a range of
actors, if it is to begin shifting existing roles and ‘rules’.
The Natal Workers’ College presents an interesting example of a trade
union-university partnership that – originally at least – viewed the transfer of
knowledge in a dialectic way. As noted earlier, the College’s diplomas have not
only provided access to higher education for workers but have also challenged
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170 CHAPTER 7
the dominant knowledge paradigms of the university by insisting that work-

ers’ experiential knowledge surfaced in its programs, can enrich the formal
knowledge archive of the academy. However, research conducted in 2012
showed little success in systematically recording and codifying the experien-
tial knowledge that was surfaced in the College’s programs (clearly recorded
on newsprint that was later discarded), nor evidence of a process whereby this
knowledge could be fed into the university curriculum.
In its early years, the College negotiated to have considerable influence over
the curriculum of an Industrial Sociology degree program at its partner univer-
sity, specially designed for trade unionists (Vally et al., 2013). However, once the
academic who had championed the establishment of the Workers’ College-
university partnership left the department, the degree program became much
less responsive to the needs of the trade union students.25 The College’s link
with the university raised a number of further challenges. Moodley et al. (2016)
identify two main tensions or disjunctures. One was the tension between the
creative, experiential approach embedded in the College’s pedagogic practices
on the one hand, and the rather formal, traditional examinations held at the
end of each module of the Workers’ College, that were externally moderated
by the university and necessary to allow participants access to undergraduate
study. The other was the difficulty most learners experience in coping with
English language, heavily text-based material necessary to prepare them for
entry to higher education.
Relationships between workers’ education and universities go back more
than a century and have taken many innovative forms in different parts of
the world. However, the experiences described above illustrate some of the
complex challenges presented by such partnerships. The challenges faced are
intensified by recent developments in higher education: the steady commodi-
fication of universities since the late 1980s, their greater dependence on corpo-
rations for research funds, and the rise of managerial elites within universities
who use corporate techniques of labour control (Connell, 2017, p. 5). In this
context, it is questionable how long the space for progressive trade union-uni-
versity partnerships that seek to generate and share ‘really useful knowledge’
for workers, will continue to be viable.
6 Conclusion
This chapter has located trade union training policies within the context of the
labour movement’s attempts to influence the broader trajectory of economic
development of South Africa in the post-1994 democratic era. It has shown
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that organised labour was selective in adopting some approaches to education

and training reform of labour movements elsewhere while ignoring or playing
down critical voices from within and outside of labour movements interna-
tionally. It has shown that despite a barrage of new legislation setting in place
an ambitious institutional infrastructure, there has been little transformation
of workplace education and training for workers. A key factor accounting for
this is the weakening of organised labour and its loss of a radical vision, and
linked to that as both cause and effect, the weakening of the tradition of inde-
pendent, radical workers education.
An important lesson for unions seeking to advance workplace training
reform seems to be that it cannot easily be used as a lever of broader economic
and political reform, as the South African labour movement sought to do. In
fact, the success of labour’s vision of education and training reform seems
rather to have been predicated upon a transformation of power relations from
the level of the shop floor right up to the controlling heights of the economy
and society – a process of change that has shown little sign of taking place.
The final part of the chapter has acknowledged attempts by labour edu-
cators to use opportunities offered by the new education and training sys-
tem to rebuild the education capacity of worker organisations via different
approaches to formalising and accrediting worker education. While individual
trade unionists have clearly benefitted from this, the approach has not only
involved the concentration of resources on relatively small numbers of benefi-
ciaries, but there is no indication that these have actually helped to rebuild or
renew workers education practices within the organisations from which par-
ticipants have come.
Labour’s adoption of what is generally regarded as a ‘human capital’
approach to education and training has seriously undermined critical tradi-
tions of workers’ education within the South African labour movement. One
way of understanding this is by focusing on the metaphor of boundaries.
Within the radical tradition of workers’ education, strong boundaries had his-
torically been drawn between workers’ education and the formal system of
education as well capital’s workplace training. On the other hand, there were
extremely fluid boundaries within workers’ education between education,
organising and mass action, and between the roles of educator and learner.
More recently, the distinct identity of workers’ education, as opposed to work-
place education, has been weakened by tying a trade union qualification to
the NQF’s sub-category of ‘occupational qualifications’. Similarly, the formal
accreditation of, and relocation of trade union courses into higher education
also runs the risk of diluting the distinct character of workers’ education, of
widening the distance between education, organising and mobilising, and
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172 CHAPTER 7
deepening the divisions between those union members with qualifications

who enjoy the benefits of education advantage, and those without.
Seen through the lens of a CHAT analysis, all this demonstrates how change
in one or more elements within an activity system – its object, its values or
‘rules’, or the nature of it specialisms/division of labour – can shift the historic
trajectory of that activity system. Given these shifts, how then is it possible for
workers’ education to reclaim and reinvent its radical historical character?
In the context of current changes in the labour market, where increasingly
the workers of the future will not be found in stable, globally integrated work-
places, it seems that a new and very different strategy for revitalising work-
ers’ education will be necessary. It will need to base itself on a strategy that is
linked to organising the unorganised – those in part-time, casual, outsourced,
precarious jobs as well as the self-employed and the unemployed. As noted in
the recent NALEDI report: “if WE (workers education) is to have the transform-
ative impact intended and identified in its historical practice and contempo-
rary interpretation, it simply has to overcome the traditional barriers to worker
organisation”, that is, to organise the unorganised, wherever they may be (Koen
et al., 2018, p. 13). The concluding chapter of this book will look at some initia-
tives that are already striving to do so.
Notes
1 NUMSA is the successor of MAWU whose workshop on socialism was described in

the opening chapter of the book.
2 A path of import substitution “overlaid by the historical development of the econ-
omy towards highly capital intensive economic activities in the ‘minerals-energy’
complex”, and supported by parastatal industries (Fine & Rustomjee, 1996, cited in
McGrath, 2004, p. 15).
3 It is not entirely clear what McGrath is referring to as an ‘intermediate skill segment’,
but in the context of other chapters in the book, this category seems to suggest craft
skills, vocational and technical skills, increasingly linked to digital technologies
today.
4 It was not negotiated through the tri-partite economic development forum,
NEDLAC (National Economic Development and Labour Council) which had been
established in 1994 as a tripartite forum.
5 Others focused on pension/provident funds, housing, and political economy (Bird,
1992).
6 Allais (2003) describing and critiquing the South African NQF.
7 See Yarnit (1980) for a detailed account of this.
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8 Central to the Swedish model of educational reforms was the idea of ‘active labour
market policies’ as a solution for the employment-inflation dilemma, as well as an
emphasis on tripartism where unions became ‘social partners’ with representation
on central policy bodies, industry training boards, regional bodies, and the councils
of tertiary institutions – not unlike South Africa in the post-apartheid era.
9 See for example Nancy Jackson’s edited collection: Training for What: Labour per-
spectives on skill training, 1992; and an excellent collection of critical essays, edited
by Dunk, McBride and Nelsen – The training trap: Ideology, training and the labour
market – published by the Canadian-based Society for Socialist Studies in 1996.
10 Human Capital Theory which views investment in education as a key source of
capitalist economic growth, is generally seen as originating in the ideas of econo-
mists Schultz (1971) and Becker (1962). For critiques of this approach, see Livingston
(2012) and Vally and Motala (2014, p. 29).
11 In 2019, according to official statistics (StatsSA, 2019), unemployment had risen to
round about 37%, but the real figure was much higher, particularly amongst youth,
women and outside of major cities.
12 Estimated to be about 17.5% of the South African working age population (StatsSA,
2019).
13 As noted in Chapter 1, union density fell from 47% in 2000 to 28% in 2017. While
28% density of unionised workers amongst those in formal employment is not
small by international standards, it represents a dramatic contraction of union
membership in South Africa since the turn of the millennium.
14 Between 2005 and 2012, the number of state employees in central and provin-
cial government rose by 27%, and their average per capita remuneration doubled
(Satgar & Southall, 2015, p. 11).
15 Under apartheid black professionals were excluded from the established, white-
dominated professional associations. Contrary to trends in the rest of the world,
black professionals first sought unionisation to protect their positions, and only
later joined professional associations.
16 This has become a state recognised Further Education and Training institution
(Jones/HRDC, 2013, p. 25).
17 See COSATU discussion document, circulated at the DITSELA Education Confer-
ence, November 1996; see also Cooper (1998, 2002, 2014).
18 For more detail, see http://www.ditsela.org.za/
19 Equivalent to a senior secondary school qualification.
20 A second, Level 5 (first year of higher education) qualification was also registered
but to date has not yet been offered.
21 See http://regqs.saqa.org.za/showQualification.php?id=58337
22 See http://regqs.saqa.org.za/showQualification.php?id=58337 for the full list of unit
standards.
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174 CHAPTER 7
23 Institutions that have afforded access to workers include Ruskin College and
the Northern College (established by the Trades Unions Council) in the UK; the
National Labour College (NLC) of the American AFL-CIO, Athabasca University in
Alberta which grants advanced credit in a Labour Studies programmes for those
who have completed some union education programmes; the State University of
New York’s Empire State College which offers credit-bearing programmes to meet
the specific needs of trade unions; and the European TULIP (Trade union and Uni-
versity Lifelong learning Partnership) network aimed at widening access of trade
union members to higher education (Cooper, 2014).
24 The National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU).
25 Personal communication with the College’s director, as well as one of the workers’
who had gone on to study at the university, in 2012.
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CHAPTER 8
Reinventing Workers’ Education
Given the current times we live in, critical pedagogy needs to reflexively
engage its own premises, to challenge its own decidability, and to be self
conscious of its own constructed character.
McClaren (2001, p. 121)
∵
This book has attempted to engage reflexively on the premises underpinning
the radical tradition of workers’ education in South Africa. It has explored how
this ‘southern’ context has historically constructed workers’ education as one
strand of the broader radical tradition of adult education – a tradition that has
been characterised by collective social purposes, criticality and transformative
vision. By identifying its historic practices and how its character has changed
over time, it has aimed to contribute to the reclaiming and revitalisation of
workers’ education.
Drawing on the theoretical resources of Cultural Historical Activity Theory,
combined with selected conceptual tools from other frameworks that seem
compatible with the socio-material approach of CHAT, the book has identified
some of the distinctive features of workers’ education. These features char-
acterise workers’ education as it developed in the historical context of South
Africa, but they both echo and recreate features of workers’ education else-
where in the world.
1 Distinctive Features of Workers’ Education as an Activity System
The argument derived from CHAT, and made in this book, is that an analysis of
radical workers’ education must begin with an understanding of its transform-
ative purpose, as the key to understanding its other features. The strong, ideo-
logical purpose of radical workers’ education and its commitment to social
justice, which it shares with other forms of radical pedagogy, distinguishes it
and shapes and guides its epistemology and pedagogy. The ‘why’ of workers’
education is almost synonymous with the ‘what’. In other words its critique
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176 chapter 8
of the current order, its vision of an alternative future and the building of col-
lective identities needed to achieve these goals are the curriculum of workers’
education.
Chapter 2 tracked continuity and change in the purposes of workers’ educa-
tion in South Africa from the 1970s to the second decade of the 21st century. It
showed that despite a shared purpose, like elsewhere in the world, there has
been considerable political and ideological contestation over time between
different role-players in workers’ education over what the precise nature of
an alternative future should be and how to get there. Contestations over the
purposes of workers’ education can be distilled into two main ideological cur-
rents, linked to the dual role of workers’ organisations under capitalism. One
adopts a radical position that seeks to challenge and overthrow the current
order, while the other adopts a more reformist view that seeks to win gains for
workers within the current order.
In practice, workers’ education has always needed to engage with both of
these goals, although one or the other has been dominant at any one time or
place. This dual ‘object’ of workers education as an activity system has been a
source of tensions and contradictions that cannot easily be resolved by edu-
cators nor even within the sphere of education. The chapter showed how a
radical transformative purpose was dominant within South African work-
ers’ education from the 1970s through to the late 1980s. To some extent, this
counter-hegemonic character continued well into the post-apartheid era as
illustrated by the case studies of SAMWU in the early 2000s and the Workers’
College a decade later. However, from the early 1990s onwards, a significant new
thread within the reformist tradition – that of a ‘human capital’ discourse –
had begun to influence the ideology of workers’ education. As it began to shift
the purpose of workers’ education towards expanding access for workers to
workplace education and training and formal qualifications, this intensified
the tensions and contradictions already embedded in its ideology and prac-
tices. The Workers’ College can be seen as an experiment in trying to engage
productively with these tensions and contradictions. Alongside efforts to act as
a vehicle for the political conscientisation, it has also acknowledged the need
of trade union and community activists as individuals to gain recognition of
their experiential knowledge and access to on-going learning opportunities.
The radical, transformative purpose that predominated in South Africa
workers’ education has helped to shape its approach to knowledge – seen as
an ‘object’ in itself as well as a key tool of mediation for securing the work-
ers’ movement’s longer term goals. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book showed that
workers’ education constitutes an ‘epistemological community’ in that it not
only has distinctive knowledge practices (ways of drawing on and combining
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Reinventing Workers’ Education 177
different forms of knowledge), but it also has its own epistemology, views on
what ‘counts’ as knowledge and how knowledge is generated. Chapter 3 argued
that workers’ education is deeply invested in overcoming the intellectual/man-
ual divide that has underpinned the dominant ‘epistemology of binaries’ of
the past 400 years, through a process conceptualised by Gramsci and Freire
as ‘praxis’. In contrast to more humanist traditions of adult education, radical
traditions such as that of workers’ education have acknowledged the differ-
entiation of knowledge. They have placed value not only on the experiential
knowledge of workers but also on the more systematically organised bodies
of theoretical and historical knowledge (seen by some as a body of collective
wisdom with its origins in workers’ experiences but codified and passed down
over time).
Embedded in many of the pedagogic practices described in this book,
but also explicitly articulated on occasions, is the view that it is the dialecti-
cal interplay between these two, broad categories of knowledge that leads to
political conscientisation and produces new knowledge. This understanding
of knowledge making was illustrated in Chapter 3 in the educational philoso-
phy of the emerging labour movement in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as that
of the Workers’ College more than 25 years later. This process was illustrated
in Chapter 4 in the evidence of the hybrid forms of knowledge drawn upon in
workers’ education. The dialectical movement between ‘experience’ and ‘the-
ory’ was particularly vividly demonstrated in the case of those worker lead-
ers in SAMWU who play the role of organic intellectuals. These ‘midwives of
a shared philosophy and culture’ (Crehan, 2016, p. 76) were seen to engage in
a process of identifying elements of (Gramsci’s) ‘good sense’ within workers’
‘common sense’ and relocating or recontextualising this experiential knowl-
edge within a broader context. In this process they afforded ‘subaltern experi-
ence’ a new, collective meaning that might, potentially, form the basis of an
alternative hegemony. Following theorists of social movement learning, this
dialectical ‘braiding’ or ‘interweaving’ of different forms of knowledge can be
viewed as the making of new knowledge.
What is the relationship between the purpose (or ‘object’) and epistemol-
ogy of workers’ education, and its pedagogy? Answering this question has
revealed a number of paradoxes that lie at the heart of workers’ education.
One such paradox is that workers’ education has most often assumed quite
didactic forms, despite the strong value that it places on workers’ experien-
tial knowledge and in contrast to more humanist, ‘experiential learning’ tradi-
tions of adult education. Drawing on Bernstein’s (2000) concepts of ‘visible’
and ‘invisible’ pedagogy, Chapter 5 presented examples ranging from FOSATU
in the 1970s/1980s to SAMWU in the early 2000s, and to the Workers’ College
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178 chapter 8
a decade later, to show that the pedagogy of workers’ education has tended
generally to be overt and directive (visible pedagogy). Even where worker edu-
cation projects such as UTP or LACOM adopted more facilitative, participatory
and experiential methodologies (invisible pedagogy), they were nevertheless
ideologically positioned and guided by a politically transformative vision of
the future. This chapter argued that the ideological directedness of workers’
education is related to two other features. First, it is related to the strong,
counter-hegemonic thrust of this radical pedagogy tradition and its need to
construct a collective, working class identity in opposition to capitalism and
its competitive, individualistic ideology. And second, this ideologically direc-
tive pedagogy is an outcome of the internal political contestation that has
always characterised workers’ education. Most practical instances of workers’
education will comprise a mix of visible and invisible modes of pedagogy, and
there will inevitably be tensions and contradictions between them. While not
fully able to resolve these, efforts to address them have the potential to give rise
to new, creative forms of pedagogy.
A key maxim of all radical education is that education cannot be politically
neutral. However, this gives rise to a second paradox that lies at the heart of
workers’ education and radical pedagogy more generally. Education within
working class organisations has always sought to support the egalitarian and
democratic principles espoused by these organisations. So how is it possible to
reconcile these egalitarian, democratic principles with a pedagogy that seeks
to shape – and according to its own goals, needs to shape – the identity and ide-
ology of its participants? Or following the way this question has been posed to
critical pedagogy more generally: “how is it possible to teach for social justice
without engaging in indoctrination?” (Freedman, 2007).
The workers’ education practices described in this book have not been able
to fully resolve this paradox. However, some of the practices that have been
described provide a partial answer. One of these is learning through active
participation in organisational practices that embody the wisdom of past gen-
erations around how to sustain democracy. Another is a widely shared edu-
cator role, where different actors within the workers’ organisation exchange
educator and learner roles at different times. A third way of addressing this
paradox is the use of culturally embedded tools of mediation. These give voice
to the ideas, experiences and aspirations of the ordinary workers who are
the participants in workers’ education initiatives. In the case of South Africa,
these have involved the creative use of language and oral-performative genres
that are deeply embedded in indigenous cultures and in the cultural history
of black workers. This voice ‘from below’ operates as a dialogical response to
the strong ideological messages being imparted ‘from above’, allowing workers
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to appropriate and impart their own meaning to these messages. This is most
vividly illustrated in Chapter 6 that focused on informal processes of learning
within the routine practices of the trade union. Drawing on Gramsci’s notion
that the working class needs to learn how to exercise power not only through
the exchange of ideas but through concrete organisational praxis, the chapter
explored the potential of the trade union as an organisational environment
to offer affordances for learning. It argued that the features of social interac-
tion and collectivity and a widely shared educator role, together with the use
of culturally embedded tools of mediation can provide a glimpse of what an
‘expansive learning environment’ can be (Fuller & Unwin, 2004).
Through an exploration of the emergence and blossoming of a vibrant,
workers’ cultural movement alongside the burgeoning trade union move-
ment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Chapter 6 also demonstrated the rich
potential for workers’ culture – poetry, song, theatre, often combined in one
performance – to act as a powerful resource for the development of working
class identity and worker agency ‘from below’. In addition to these tools of
mediation, this chapter also explored the educative and knowledge-making
role of mass action. Drawing on Bakhtinian and feminist notions of the ‘body’
as an important reservoir of knowledge and a tool of mediation, it analysed
the symbolic significance of a local workers’ march in the midst of a national
strike of SAMWU in 2002. It argued that this instance of collective action may
be seen not only as an exercise in identity construction but also as a carrier of
important messages to the broader public. It showed how this instance of mass
action comprised a critique not only of workers’ immediate exploitative condi-
tions but of the current social order. The march communicated in an embod-
ied form the anger of workers over being treated as expendable as the garbage
which they remove. It was a declaration by workers of their ‘ownership’ of the
city that they work to maintain, and a celebration of their power.
2 The Contribution of Radical Workers’ Education to Our Knowledge

Archive
This book has attempted to sketch the contours of workers’ education as one
particular strand within the tradition of radical adult education, drawing on a
case study of the South African workers’ movement. In doing so, it has sought to
contribute to our understanding of how knowledge is generated in collective,
social action or social movement contexts, and to suggest how such knowledge
may enrich our formal knowledge archive. It has explored how workers’ educa-
tion in this local context has engaged with, and contributed answers to some
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180 chapter 8
of the most longstanding and widely-posed questions facing those engaged

in education policy and practice: What purposes should education prioritise?
What forms of knowledge – and whose knowledge – can enrich our collective
knowledge archive and most successfully take society forwards towards a more
socially just and sustainable future? What kinds of pedagogy and learning can
enable maximum participation and the creation and strengthening of human
agency?
How has workers’ education contributed to answering these questions? The
exploration in this book of the purposes of radical traditions of workers’ edu-
cation in South Africa acts as a reminder of the potential of education to fulfil
‘utopian’ purposes. McLaren (2001, p. 117, citing Neary, 1999) argues that “(d)
isutopia is the most significant project of our time. It is not just the temporary
absence of Utopia, but the political celebration of the end of a social dream”.
He argues that Freire’s ‘pedagogy of hope’ (Freire & Freire, 2004) is needed
in order to develop a critical pedagogy that is able to challenge the devastat-
ing effects brought about by the globalisation of capitalism. Crowther (2009,
p. 76), too, argues for the continued relevance of utopias in education: “One
key quality of utopian thinking is that it ‘relativises the present’ and thereby
introduces a critical perspective on the partial and selective nature of the cur-
rent reality”. Although hope alone is not enough to achieve a more socially just
world, without hope there is no struggle at all. The radical tradition of workers’
education shows how knowledge can be used as a collective resource for social
purposes, and that it can have both an instrumental purpose as well as act as a
means for exploring alternative futures.
Examples of workers’ education presented in this book illustrate the rich-
ness and complexity of forms of knowledge generated and shared in informal
and non-formal settings. Its practices of braiding together different forms of
knowledge suggest how dominant forms of knowledge might be reconfigured
to afford recognition to more diverse forms of knowledge, and to more diverse
ways of producing knowledge. This can contribute to a more inclusive under-
standing of what constitutes ‘really useful knowledge’ and enrich our thinking
about curriculum. It can also contribute to the collective recognition of workers
as bearers of knowledge and expertise, thereby providing some redress for their
historical disparagement as ‘knowers’ of anything of value (Michelson, 2014).
One field of theorising and practice for which this has significance is the
Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). Recent research (Cooper & Ralphs, 2016)
suggests that not all forms of experiential knowledge provide an equal plat-
form from which to navigate across the boundaries between informal and for-
mal knowledge. It has been argued that some, selected or specialised forms
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of experiential learning offer a more effective platform for access into formal
education. For example, Harris (2004) has shown that trade unionists and
other political activists often enjoy a ‘head start’ in being able to meet the con-
ceptual and discursive demands of academia. These research projects were left
with the question as to how to conceptualise the particular discourses of expe-
riential learning that provide easier access to the academy. The accounts of the
knowledge practices of workers’ education in this book might provide some
answers to this question.
While the epistemology of workers’ education is deeply influenced by
Enlightenment thinking about ‘truth’, ‘progress’, reason and equality, at the
same time, there are numerous ways in which it is not typically ‘modern’ in
nature: it is oriented towards the collective rather than towards individual
rights; it encompasses ‘passion’ as well as intellect or reason, it seeks ‘truth’
while at the same time asserting that knowledge cannot be neutral. Workers’
education initiatives continue to offer models of how we might understand the
relationship between diverse forms of knowledge in educational practice and
inspire hope that we will one day be able to breach the intellectual/manual
knowledge divide in ways that broaden democracy, deepen ‘epistemological
justice’ (Frickler, 2007), and enable us to produce better, more reliable knowl-
edge. These qualities can potentially enrich established, academic bodies of
knowledge and our broader, societal knowledge archive.
The Fees Must Fall (#FMF) student movement that began mobilising across
South African universities in 2015 highlighted how university curricula con-
tinue to reflect the ongoing ‘coloniality’1 (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) of the
country’s dominant knowledge systems, and gave rise to a wider project of
decolonising the curriculum. As noted in Chapter 1, Connell’s (2007, 2018) work
has focused on critiques of global-North hegemony in the discipline of sociol-
ogy. She argues that the idea of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ should be viewed
as a way of “correcting the distortions and exclusions produced by empire and
global inequality and reshaping the discipline in a democratic direction on a
world scale” (2018, p. 402). Such a process of decolonising would need to go
beyond simply ‘replacing an alien knowledge system’ or rethinking familiar
methods to more effectively involve social groups ‘marginalized by empire’
(ibid., p. 403). What is needed is a ‘solidarity-based epistemology’ that looks for
connections between different knowledge systems and promotes ‘braiding at
the borders between them’ (ibid., p. 404). It is arguable that if decolonisation
is conceived in this way, then the knowledge practices promoted by the radical
tradition of workers’ education may be able to contribute something of value
to this project.
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182 chapter 8
3 Radical Workers’ Education at the Crossroads?
The tensions embedded in workers’ education described above are not ones
that worker educators can easily resolve. They need to be ‘held’ through the skill
and art of a ‘balancing act’ as suggested by Trimbur (1990) in Chapter 5, through
which working new practices might be created. The book has argued however
that the conditions enabling these tensions to be ‘held’ lie outside the immedi-
ate sphere of education and reside in sustaining broader practices of democ-
racy and accountability within workers’ organisations. Drawing on Newman’s
(1993) model of ‘the Third Contract’, it is argued that as democracy and account-
ability have been weakened within the labour movement in recent years, the
strong ideological directedness of workers’ education increasingly runs the risk
of descending into ideological rhetoric, propaganda and indoctrination.
Chapter 7 showed that the weakening of the democratic character of radical
workers’ education in South Africa has ironically coincided with the transition
to a more democratic and non-racial South Africa. It described how new edu-
cation and training policies were spearheaded by the trade union movement
as part of its attempts to influence the broader trajectory of economic devel-
opment in post-apartheid South Africa. While aiming to afford workers access
to lifelong learning, in reality these policies drew on global market discourses
that are ultimately aimed at strengthening the power of capitalism interna-
tionally. New approaches to worker education and training were borrowed
from labour movements elsewhere in the world and reflected the growing
influence of human capital discourses internationally. Despite critical voices
elsewhere and in South Africa, the development of new policies and institu-
tional frameworks for workers’ education continued unabated.
New approaches to education and training have coincided with a serious
weakening of the South African labour movement in the post-apartheid era.
This was in part a result of the changes in the organisation of work locally and
internationally and their impact on the composition of the working class and
on the membership of the trade unions. However, these structural factors have
been aggravated by the political trajectory of organised labour, and in particu-
lar, the formal alliance of COSATU, the largest trade union federation, with an
ANC in government that has pursued neo-liberal economic policies in line
with those dominant internationally. This political alignment of the dominant
strand of the labour movement has been the source of deep political conflict
leading to the splintering of a number of major trade unions and of COSATU
itself. Coupled with the increased bureaucratisation of trade unions and the
rise of a corrupt, predatory leadership elite in unions, trade union education
that used to be at the heart of the radical tradition of workers’ education in
South Africa, has become a shell of its former self.
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Chapter 7 explored a number of attempts by labour educators since the

1990s to rebuild the education capacity of trade unions and other working
class organisations via different approaches to formalising and accrediting
worker education. However, I have argued that while these may have benefited
individual workers, they have also acted to deepen the contradictions between
older principles and values of radical workers’ education and newer principles
and values of a credentialised, commodified and human-capital oriented edu-
cation system.
4 Finding a Way Forward: Re-Inventing Workers’ Education
Since the turn of the millennium, many have argued that since increasing num-
bers of workers are employed in ‘flexible’ forms of work – that is, in contract,
casual or outsourced work – traditional, industry-based trade unions are no
longer capable of protecting the bulk of workers, let alone the unemployed.
Some argue that new forms of working class organisation are needed, and that
these are indeed emerging as workers begin to self-organise to confront the rav-
ages of neo-liberalism. Others argue that traditional working class organisations
like trade unions remain relevant, and that the focus should be on reclaiming
and reinvigorating them (Webster & Buhlungu, 2004, p. 243; ILRIG, 2017).
In South Africa some of the most innovative workers’ education initiatives
in recent years have been undertaken not by established trade unions but by
a range of organisations working with marginalised, vulnerable and precari-
ous workers. For example, Bonner (in press) describes the educational work of
organisations in different parts of the world2 aimed at supporting the organi-
sation of self-employed, informal sector workers such as street vendors, waste
pickers and home-based workers. She highlights the educational work in South
Africa of SAWPA (the newly formed South African Waste Pickers Association)
and WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing)
in supporting workers’ advocacy at a local level, and their efforts to build a
national movement to represent themselves in negotiating and policy forums.
Having had longstanding experience as a trade union educator in South Africa,
she argues that the pedagogy of these initiatives demonstrates “links and con-
tinuity with the best traditions of workers’ education” (Bonner, in press). She
also argues that established trade unions should be playing a much stronger
role in strengthening workers’ education for informal workers: “informal work-
ers are potentially the majority membership of the future and/or important
class allies in the struggles that lie ahead” (ibid.).
Hlatshwayo (in press, citing Bhorat et al., 2015) shows that nearly half of all
employed workers in South Africa are in the category of ‘precarious’ workers.
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184 chapter 8
They are employed in both the public and private sector as casual, short-term
contract and/or outsourced workers, with many being economic migrants
from elsewhere in Africa, and with women constituting the majority. He
describes precarious workers as “the major embodiment of the future of work”
and laments the bias of established trade union education towards the ever-
diminishing number of employed, unionised workers. His chapter documents
the work of the Casual Workers’ Advice Office (CWAO) that was established
in 2011 as a non-governmental organisation to provide advice and support
to precarious workers, based on the recognition that “the traditional labour
movement appears incapable or unwilling to organise the new kinds of work-
ers created by neo-liberalism” (ibid.). Using popular education methodologies
as well as film, radio and social media as tools of mediation, CWAO educates
workers on the constitutional rights that they do have and attempts to build
unity and solidarity within and between groups of workers.
Von Kotze (in press) describes a project of producing plays and street thea-
tre with and for unemployed and semi-employed workers and their communi-
ties. Having gained her early experience in the workers’ cultural movement
that flourished in the late 1970s/early 1980s (see Chapter 6), she contemplates
the differences between workers’ theatre ‘then’ and ‘now’. Whereas workers’
cultural work under the apartheid era was buoyed by a vibrant social move-
ment with an ethos of collectivity, today people have to compete for their daily
survival. Whereas earlier cultural work could rely on a large degree of shared
experiences within the working class, today people “arrive at workshops for dif-
ferent reasons and with varying identities”. Nevertheless, this work can begin
to help people share common problems and build mutual trust. Popular thea-
tre is not only entertaining and creative but it can ‘light fires’, act as ‘rehearsal
spaces’ for longer term behaviour change (for example allowing women to
discover ways of challenging domestic violence), and de-naturalise and make
connections between different social problems visible.
Two final examples show that some of the new initiatives in workers’ edu-
cation have emerged through some degree of co-operation with established
trade unions. Salim Patel (2017) provides an account of how the Labour
Research Service (LRS) in Cape Town which is affiliated to IFWEA (the Interna-
tional Federation of Worker Education Associations) has used study circles to
create spaces for grassroots activists of trade unions and community organisa-
tions to learn from each other “about forging solidarity under precarious con-
ditions in the world of work and in our communities” (Patel, 2017, p. 171). He
describes a context where, although “workers rely on the services that unions
provide, there is increasing awareness that unions are unable to lead their
struggles against oppression and deteriorating working and living conditions”
(ibid., p. 173). Assisting workers across different unions to create study circles is
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a conscious effort to introduce spaces for “grassroots leaders to actively partici-

pate in developing strategies and independent activities that unite their mem-
bers around their own demands and interests” (ibid.). Study circles established
thus far have focused on rights at work; developing a union choir; the use of
ICTs for improving member communication; community gardening; health
and traditional medicine; violence against women; and organising migrant
workers.
Hamilton’s (2017) account of the #Outsourcing Must Fall (OMF) movement
demonstrates what workers can achieve when allying themselves with other
social movements, in this case, the student campaign of #FeesMustFall (#FMF)
at South African universities between 2015–2017. The students’ #FMF cam-
paign was initially directed against the language policies and colonial symbols
that continue to dominate at historically white, English-speaking universi-
ties, but evolved into a sustained (and ultimately partially successful) struggle
against financial exclusion of (largely) black students. The #Outsourcing Must
Fall movement had already existed for some years in the form of a campaign
amongst university cleaning, catering and security workers to reverse their
outsourcing to private companies in the late 1990s/early 2000s – a struggle that
had been conducted largely without union support. Hamilton (2017) describes
how, as the student movement began, workers repositioned their campaign as
one of #Outsourcing Must Fall and managed to get the #FMF student move-
ment to incorporate #OMF’s demands into their own demands, with remark-
ably rapid success.3 Hamilton argues that in a short space of time, the student
#FMF movement “was able to achieve what powerful organisations like trade
unions had been unable to” (ibid., p. 190). Hamilton notes that the educative
dimension of this experience was that by forcing university authorities to
‘insource’ them, workers were in fact encouraged to become more active in,
and to strengthen their trade unions:
… the prior organisation of workers in trade unions is not necessarily a

prerequisite of struggle … (however) the necessity to defend and consoli-
date such victories allows workers to draw the conclusion that permanent
representative structures are essential. The meaning of representative
democracy was learnt in struggle and will be an important resource in
the efforts to contribute to the revitalisation and (re)building of the trade
unions these workers have now joined. (Hamilton, 2017, p. 190)
In a number of the cases described above (the Casual Workers’ Advice Office,
the LRS/IFWEA programs, and the #OMF), social media has begun to be used as
an educational tool. However, like in the rest of Africa, the use of social media
in workers’ education in South Africa is significantly constrained by the ‘digital
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186 chapter 8
divide’ or the inequality of access to the Internet (Fuchs, & Horak, 2008). In
South Africa, the digital divide is related to “underlying social, ideological (rac-
ism), and economic factors that result in structural inequalities” (ibid., p. 110).
In other words, social and economic inequality is closely mirrored in the digi-
tal divide.4 In 2017, more than half of all South Africans lacked access to the
Internet as a result of lack of material access to technology, lack of digital skills,
and the very high costs of data – one of the highest in the world (Goldstuck,
2017). While the use of social media has enormous potential to connect work-
ers across time and space, particularly those working in isolated, precarious
and unpredictable conditions, lack of access means that this educational tool
will continue to have limited use until broader issues of social inequality are
addressed – or the ‘market’ brings down the cost of access.
5 Rethinking ‘Workers’ Education’ – Rethinking ‘Work’
There is a need to reclaim the political and ideological premises of radical

workers education if we are to challenge and transform a global system that
not only relegates large parts of humanity as irrelevant to ‘social progress’, but
which also threatens ecological disaster. This renewal of workers’ education
cannot take place without a parallel process of seeking alternatives to the pre-
sent understanding of what constitutes socially useful work.
A number of local and international scholars have written extensively on
this question. Enver Motala (2013, p. 3) has argued that:
The grim reality is that there are no jobs for the millions of citizens of
the democratic post-apartheid and post-colonial state as the demands
of a new and rampant global capitalism continues to shape the nature of
employment despite the best intentions of radicals and constitutional-
ists seeking to implant the ideas of freedom ….
He continues:
… we are required to rethink the objective and subjective conditions for

a more rational and human organisation of work in society, in effect the
relationship between work and society and the role of work as a produc-
tive human activity and not merely as a job which is alienating if it is
necessary. (ibid., p. 25)
Together with Salim Vally he concludes that:
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… worker education cannot be simply about the present forms of work

and the validation of prior learning or lifelong learning but has to be
about new socially determined forms of work related to new conceptions
of production and realisation outside the framework of exploitative and
oppressive systems. (Vally & Motala, 2017, p. 16)
It is clear that the conditions for a ‘more rational and human organisation of
work’ cannot be realised without a transformation of global capitalism, and so
we need to continue to take seriously the battles that take place at the heart
of the current nexus of capitalist-organised work. This points to the continued
relevance of workers’ organisations such as trade unions and the continued
importance of the principles of radical workers’ education historically forged
within these organisations. As noted by Andre Gorz in his Critique of Economic
Reason (2010) where he argues for liberation from work for economic ends,
workplace struggles have not lost any of their significance. However, he adds
that:
Trade unionism cannot continue to exist as a movement with a future

unless it expands its mission beyond the defence of the particular inter-
ests of waged workers. (Gorz, 2010, p. 223)
Thus the building of broader alliances – between organised and unorgan-

ised workers, between those with secure employment and ‘precarious’ work-
ers, between organised labour and contemporary social movements of shack
dwellers, students, communities struggling for service delivery, or those oppos-
ing gender-based violence or environmental degradation – is crucial to the
development of a working class-led counter-hegemony and the formulation
of viable alternatives to a society dominated by the needs of global capital. A
revitalised workers’ education that articulates in new ways the traditional prin-
ciples of radical workers’ education, will be a crucial ingredient in the develop-
ment of this alternative society.
Workers education in South Africa cannot unproblematically return to
those forms of educating and conscientising of the 1980s but needs to re-
invent past values and practices in a way that will inspire new layers of the
working class, not least of all, younger employed workers and those millions
of youth who may never be formally employed. This book cannot prescribe
how this should be done, but its review of the radical traditions of workers’
education in South Africa over time provides some pointers to what some key
principles would be. A ‘reinvented’ workers’ education might find new ways
to include the use of popular, culturally meaningful tools of mediation that
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188 chapter 8
facilitate widespread participation by workers, and allow them to contribute

to the substance of the ‘messages’ that are conveyed. It would also explore
different ways to generate and share hybrid forms of knowledge that afford
recognition and give value to workers’ experiential knowledge, while ensuring
that learning is extended beyond individual experience and is enriched by the
theoretical insights that emerge out of collective history and experience. Such
revitalised practices might also create spaces for the emergence and develop-
ment of new layers of organic intellectuals who would play a role in weaving or
braiding together these different forms of knowledge. A renewed workers’ edu-
cation could seek novel ways of maintaining the dialectical tension between
more didactic and more facilitative forms of pedagogy, and between its more
instrumental and more transformative purposes. And lastly, the reimagining
of workers’ education in South Africa cannot be achieved without a parallel
process of reclaiming the radical political purpose of the workers’ movement
as whole, the rebuilding from the grassroots up of democratic, participatory
practices, and the invention of new forms of struggle – all of which are the
lifeblood of the radical tradition of workers’ education.
Notes
1 Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 4) writes that: “Coloniality is different from colonialism.

Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of
a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation … Coloniality, instead,
refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism,
but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production
well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations”.
2 These include amongst others, StreetNet International, the International Domestic
Workers Federation, HomeNet South Asia and South East Asia, the Global Alliance
of Waste Pickers and the Latin America and Caribbean Waster Pickers’ Network
(Bonner, in press).
3 A number of universities accepted ‘insourcing’ on paper, but few have implemented
it thus far.
4 For South Africans earning more than R30,000 a month, the internet penetration
was at 82.4%, similar to most industrialised nations, while for those earning below
R2,500 (a common wage level for employed workers), access was less than 30%
(Goldstuck, 2017, p. 3).
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Index
accreditation 41, 44, 65, 162, 163, 165, 171 intellectual-manual 54, 58, 62, 68,
activity systems 4, 14–18, 26, 27, 39, 40, 61, racial 5, 54
66, 87, 115, 120, 122, 127, 130, 137, 139,
168, 169, 172, 175, 176 education
activity theory 4, 14, 26, 27, 61, 120, 175 adult 2–4, 8, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28–30, 32,
adult literacy 32, 50, 53, 69, 102, 117 45, 48, 50, 53–55, 58, 64, 66, 79, 93, 95,
apartheid 1, 3–6, 10–13, 18, 19, 22–24, 27, 102, 108, 121, 137, 165, 167, 175, 177, 179
32–35, 38, 55, 58, 62, 68, 70, 72, 73, 80, and training 3, 8, 9, 13, 26, 27, 34, 35, 37,
84, 88, 90, 96, 97, 99, 106, 112, 118, 121, 40, 75–77, 100, 107, 108, 110, 125, 146,
139, 141, 144, 146–154, 159–162, 165, 173, 147, 150–157, 162, 164, 166, 171, 176, 182
176, 182, 184, 186 non-formal 2, 41, 46, 55, 68, 84, 93, 95,
96, 180
bureaucratisation 70, 155, 182 outcomes-based 73
workers’ 2–4, 7–13, 16–24, 26–35, 39, 40,
capitalism 3, 9, 10, 34, 40-42, 47, 49, 55, 61, 43–46, 50, 54–58, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71,
67, 68, 76, 88, 93 72, 75, 76, 80, 83–86, 88–90, 92–96, 98,
global 40, 43, 67, 151, 152, 156, 186, 187 98, 101, 105, 106, 114, 115, 118, 119, 128,
class consciousness 9, 12, 30, 33, 34, 49, 50, 137, 138, 143, 147, 148, 156, 157, 159, 163,
69, 121, 147 165–168, 170–172, 175–188
colonial 5, 21, 49, 53, 68, 89, 185, 188
conquest 5, 21 Freire, Paulo 49, 50, 53, 65, 94, 101, 102, 114,
coloniality 46, 49, 181, 188 120, 122, 177, 180
communities of practice 86, 109, 122–125,
127, 168 globalisation 3, 13, 27, 29,39, 40, 43, 49, 61,
competencies 74, 126, 152 66, 72, 126, 137, 149, 156, 158, 161, 167, 180
contradictions 4, 15–17, 20, 30, 39, 40, 43, Gramsci, Antonio 17, 28, 43, 51–53, 55, 65,
44, 61–63, 66, 69, 87, 88, 91, 116, 138, 143, 69, 70, 72, 80–86, 88–91, 93, 99, 116, 118,
148, 176, 178, 183 120–122, 168, 177, 179
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)
4, 14–18, 24, 26, 27, 40, 43, 57, 83, 95, 111, hegemony 17, 28, 30, 53, 69, 80, 82, 88,
116, 119, 120, 122, 123, 128, 138, 139, 143, 90, 93, 99, 100, 114, 120, 134, 177, 181,
147, 166, 169, 172, 175 187
decolonisation 49, 181 ideological

democracy contestation 18, 30, 32, 34, 98, 176
transition to 149, 159, 161 directedness 110, 143, 178, 182
depoliticisation 4, 163 ideology 16, 17, 19, 20, 28, 35, 36, 39, 40, 62,
dialectical 16, 17, 50–53, 57, 65, 74, 77, 78, 97, 99, 104, 109, 111, 113, 120, 141, 142, 152,
83, 86, 87, 89, 114, 130, 138, 147, 159, 169, 157, 173, 176, 178
177, 188 informal sector 6, 183
didactic 18, 93, 94, 96, 98, 106, 109, 110, 113, institutionalisation 4, 13, 161, 162, 164
177, 188
division of labour 5, 14–16, 18, 47, 53, 57, 69, knowledge
127–130, 152, 169, 172 disciplinary 45, 65, 73, 83
apartheid 154 everyday 67, 89, 91
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Index 209
experiential 11, 45, 48–50, 54, 57, 59, radical adult education 2–4, 20, 30, 54, 95,
63–66, 68, 74, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 93, 104, 177, 179
163, 170, 176, 177, 180, 188 recognition of prior learning (RPL) 20, 44,
formal, codified 56, 71, 84, 91 63, 64, 84, 146, 154, 155, 167, 180
production of 82, 83, 137
really useful knowledge 27, 44, 46, 71, 72, skills development 7, 55, 76, 147–149, 151,
75, 78, 80, 83, 170, 180 153–155, 159
theoretical 50, 60 social justice 4, 17, 74, 94, 149, 156, 175, 178
social purpose 3, 14, 26, 63, 130, 163, 175,
learning 180
informal 7, 18, 93, 118–120, 143, 144, 168 social transformation 18, 41, 81, 83, 167
in mass action 10, 16, 35, 36, 43, 51, 55,
80, 93, 101, 119, 134, 137, 144, 168, 171, 179 tools of mediation 14–16, 18, 66, 111, 113, 114,
in social movements 28, 29, 95, 137, 138, 177 127–130, 140, 178, 179, 184, 187
learning organisation, the 119, 126, 127, 130, 156 trade union
democracy 32, 168, 182
Marxist 4, 14, 17, 28, 31, 36, 48, 49, 51–55, 64, history 19, 39, 58, 70, 144, 165,
65, 70, 73, 76, 81, 93, 97, 99 movement 1, 23, 31, 32, 35, 38, 73, 96,
movements 98, 101, 111, 119, 121, 144, 147, 150, 159,
labour movement 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 160–162, 165, 179, 182
26–31, 33–35, 40, 41, 56, 62, 68, 70, 78, 81, politics 4, 31, 58, 97, 99, 104, 156, 158
85, 88, 97, 98, 103, 107, 113, 114, 116, 118, transformation 12, 15, 17, 18, 29, 34, 39, 41, 81,
120, 122, 131, 134–136, 143, 147–149, 151, 83, 127, 139, 144, 152, 167, 171, 187
152, 155, 157–165, 168, 170, 171, 177, 182, 184
social movements 2, 4, 28, 29, 41, 42, 46, utopian
70, 71, 80, 83, 85, 87, 95, 119, 120, 137, 138, future 37, 180
141, 144, 150, 162, 177, 179, 184, 185, 187 vision 2, 37
neo-liberalism 6, 61, 149, 183, 184 vocational training 31, 146
organic intellectuals 17, 52, 72, 80, 82, 83, 85, workers

86, 88, 89, 98, 100, 101, 114, 125, 133, 168, casual 3, 6, 13, 67, 158, 160, 183–185
177, 188 migrant 5, 19, 58, 92, 98, 100, 131, 145, 148,
organisations 160, 184, 185
trade union 7, 32, 33, 89, 116, 122, 127, 152 organised 12, 13, 40, 67, 103, 106, 118, 147,
workers’ 7, 41, 105, 123, 143, 159, 176, 182, 187 151, 152, 155, 156, 160, 171, 182, 187
unemployed 5, 6, 13, 29, 41, 44, 67, 110,
pedagogy 159, 172, 183, 184
critical 2, 42, 53, 94, 175, 178, 180 unorganised 13, 172, 187
directive 94–96, 99, 113, 178 working class 4–7, 9, 10, 28, 33, 34, 41, 44, 59,
invisible 94, 96, 102, 110, 113, 114, 177 67, 71, 82, 99, 149, 182
modes of 94, 95, 106, 114, 115, 178 culture 119, 131–134, 144, 179
visible 95, 96, 101, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114, 178 history 2, 7, 10, 11, 14, 18, 19, 24, 26, 32, 34,
power relations 16–18, 21, 27, 46, 69, 76, 84, 35, 39, 50, 66, 70, 78, 97, 103–105, 118,
85, 88, 96, 108, 110, 116, 123, 126, 129, 130, 134, 178
141, 144, 163, 169, 171 identity 9, 18, 26, 33, 106, 107, 110, 112, 129,
praxis 15, 17, 54, 58, 131, 177 131, 134, 163, 165, 171, 178, 179
learning through 121 movement 33, 88, 90
organisational 120, 179 resistance 35, 37, 145, 149, 153
professionalisation 88, 162, 163 struggle 1, 9, 30, 63
Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0


Workers' Education in The Global South

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Workers’ Education in the Global South

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

D.W. Livingstone (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

Stephen Billett (Griffiths University, Australia)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/know

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

1 Introduction: A Workers’ Education Event in 1980s South Africa 1

3 ‘Healing the Breach’ between Intellectual and Manual Labour: The

4 What Is ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ in Workers’ Education? 71

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

6 Tensions and Contradictions in the Knowledge Practices of Workers’

5 The Pedagogy of Workers’ Education: Conscientisation or

6 Informal Learning: Workers’ Education as Praxis 118

7 Workers’ Education and the Formal System 146

8 Reinventing Workers’ Education 175

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

ABET Adult Basic Education and Training

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

UKZN University of Kwazulu-Natal

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

Introduction: A Workers’ Education Event in 1980s

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004428980_001

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

1 Reclaiming the Radical Tradition

This description of a workers’ education event in South Africa in 1986 is sig-

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

What purposes should education prioritise? What knowledge or whose knowl-

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

2 Defining Workers’ Education

Before proceeding to a definition of workers’ education, the question must be

2.1 Historical Development of the South African Working Class

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

2.2 The Post-Apartheid Working Class

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

2.3 The Distinctiveness of Workers’ Education

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

In this relationship, union representatives and elected officials are account-

… it is as if the triangular set of contracts has ‘snapped’ into the verti-

The consequences of the weakening or breaking of the ‘third contract’ in work-

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

2.4 Defining Workers’ Education

Worker education is education of workers by workers (through their

This book follows this definition of workers’ education and is particularly

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

3 A Brief History of Workers’ Education in South Africa

3.1 Workers Education under Apartheid10

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

During the 1950s, as the Nationalist Party government introduced legisla-

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA) became increasingly planned and

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

3.2 Workers’ Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Linda Cooper - 978-90-04-42898-0

perspectives. Foremost amongst these is the post-Vygotskian perspectives of

4 Framing the Book Theoretically and Methodologically

4.1 Cultural Historical Activity Theory