Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union

The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) was founded in Cape Town, South Africa in 1919 with the aim of 'creating one great union' (on the model of the Industrial Workers of the World, which dockworkers in Cape Town had learned about from visiting black American sailors).

Its membership grew throughout South Africa until by 1927 it could boast a membership of 100,000 - the largest trade union ever to have taken root in the continent of Africa. No movement before or since has succeeded in mobilizing the rural poor on that scale. The movement also succeeded in mobilizing shack dwellers in Durban on a large scale. Helen Bradford's detailed study describes it as "one of the most radical movements ever seen in Southern Africa."

In the 1920s the movement took on a millenarian aspect in the rural Eastern Cape where predictions of airborne liberation by black Americans captured the imagination of thousands of people. At the same time an outbreak of militant strikes spread through the big cities, reaching their climax in 1920 when 40,000 African mine workers downed tools in Johannesburg in demand for higher pay. Farm workers also engaged in militant action across the country. The ICU also made extensive, and often successful, use of the courts.

By the late 1920s the ICU faced severe repression, especially the eviction of activists from white farms. However, in 1928 the union was still able to play a major role in the famous women's beer hall boycott in the shack settlements of Durban. During the 1930s the union had its own hall in Prince Edward Street in Durban, and undertook mass marches through the suburb of Sydenham. However by the end of the 1930s the Union's twenty years of militant activism was over. Some blame the leadership from drifting into professionalized self-interest, others blame increasing state repression.

In 1941, the ICU along with the ANC, helped to form the African Mine Workers Union.

The ICU generally mobilized the underclass (peasants, farm workers and shack dwellers) and faced constant condescension from the elite nationalism of the African National Congress and the elite-dominated, European-oriented Communist Party of South Africa. Orthodox Marxist analysis, which often retains a suspicion of the underclass, today largely chooses to see the ICU as not particularly significant despite its unparalleled size and ability to organize across the rural/urban divide. However, analysis more sympathetic to an autonomous and self-directed politics of the poor is increasingly revisiting the history of the ICU. Anarchist scholars have returned to a consideration of the ICU, as have scholars seeking to make sense of the post-apartheid emergence, outside NGO and party control, of an autonomous and self-directed mass movements of the poor.