Once the “reds under the bed” bugbear against which the entire resources of PW Botha’s militarist apartheid state was marshalled, the “South African Revolution” (capital R) as it was once hailed in the townships, and its putative SACP vanguard, appears today as spectral and insubstantially unthreatening of the new (dis)order.
In my research, writing books on late apartheid, a common theme among old apartheid apparatchiks and commanders is that in essence the white right won the contest: although eroded in its lower ranks by the death of job reservation, white privilege and wealth remains largely unchallenged, the ANC under Nelson Mandela swiftly abandoned socialism for neo-liberalism, and the red flag never flew over the Union Buildings.
The Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, SACP, and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), founded almost immediately after the unbanning of the liberation movements in February 1990, has achieved its own core objectives such as the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BEEE) in name only: via cadre deployment of the connected and corruptible, the NDR, originating in SACP chief Joe Slovo’s 1967 Strategy and Tactics document, has become a Potemkin village behind which lurks a failing state and mass unemployment, while BEEE has only created a tiny new ruling clique-of-colour.
So it is intriguing watching the SACP, faced with the electoral decline, moral turpitude, and faltering influence of its senior partner, attempt to reinvent itself as the leader of an independent leftist project for the country with its “Congress of the Left” recently. This requires a lot of legerdemain, for the communists rode shotgun on state capture, so it’s hard to see how they are unbesmirched.
In fact, it’s a little hard to see how, exactly, they are “communist” today. The original Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1920 by revolutionary syndicalists, was radically anti-parliamentary and left-libertarian (and later seeded today’s Trotskyist movement). But it was eclipsed the following year by the CPSA Communist International, ancestor of today’s SACP, which hitched its wagon to the ANC most securely with the 1928 “Native Republic” strategy, that a black nationalist state would first be pursued as a precursor to a socialist revolution.
Peaking in the late 1940s in the glow of the USSR’s wartime reputation, but forced underground from 1950, the renamed SACP developed an unenviable reputation as the most Moscow-slaved party in the world, doggedly following every irrational switchback of Stalinist foreign policy.
But ironically, it was their Beijing-derived “People’s War” policy, adopted by the ANC at its Kabwe Congress in June 1985, that arguably created such violent contestation that FW de Klerk immediately began dismantling the military state on assuming power in August 1989.
While I do not agree with my good friend Rian Malan that the commies constituted a conspiratorial tail that always wagged the ANC dog, foreign sponsorship often did shape policy, while the dynamic tension between communists and black nationalists was never entirely resolved.
In January 1990, Slovo published Has Socialism Failed?, which attempted to deal with the impending implosion of his party’s primary financiers, the USSR and of its client regimes in the East Bloc, by finally severing the SACP from Stalinism, four decades after the dictator’s death, and embracing multi-partisan democracy.
Once-powerful influence
This text paved the way for the SACP to become a social-democratic party in all but name by 1999, its once-powerful influence diluted within ANC governance and the state bureaucracy. Having expelled militants such as Dale McKinley for being, well, actual communists, other than championing an interventionist state with minimum wages, progressive taxation, and a protectionist regulatory framework, and switching their admiration to state-capitalist China while harbouring a romantic attachment to the Cuban museum, the SACP seemed barely communist at all.
Which, for a while, potentially opened the field to the old left parties such as the 1959 socialist-nationalist splinter off the ANC, the PAC, the 1978-founded black consciousness AZAPO, the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) which had originated as a Trotskyist tendency within the ANC in 1979, and the 1961-founded African People’s Democratic Union of SA (APDUSA) of murdered Dulcie September’s Western Cape Trotskyist tradition.
But the old-timers were depleted by decades in the margins: the PAC has retained only one of its original two seats in parliament, AZAPO splintered with the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA) breaking away in 1998 and it lost its sole parliamentary seat in 2014, while the DSM and APDUSA operated as currents outside parliament.
The ANC’s switch to neo-liberalism with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy from 1996 generated a rash of popular resistance formalised in new social movements and crisis committees by township and shackland residents, the unemployed, and rural poor, the most notable of which were the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), the shack-dwellers’ Abahlali baseMjondolo (ABM) in KZN, and the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in the Cape.
These movements demonstrated their strength en masse at events such as the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. They integrated themselves into the new anti-monoglobalist movement that coalesced around the World Social Forum’s “Another World is Possible” vision which challenged Fukuyamist finalism.
Leading leftist figures such as Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein, who had built global reputations analysing and critiquing rapacious neo-liberalism, visited the country, and the new movements became the subject of several academic studies such as Patrick Bond’s Elite Transition (2000), and Ashwin Desai’s We are the Poors (2002).
In the same period, the ANC disciplined organised labour by corporatising it within the NEDLAC system. In particular, it gerrymandered its more tractable Alliance partner, COSATU, by the dirigiste merger of competent militant unions like Chemical Workers’ Industrial Union with bankrupt and compliant ones like Paper, Pulp, Print & Allied, by the narrowing of internal union democratic spaces, and expulsion of radical shop-stewards such as Chemical’s Abraham Agulhas.
Quality of democracy
While liberals might celebrate such curtailing of union militancy, I argue that the deliberate destruction of internal democracy within organisations with mass membership can only have a deleterious effect on the quality of democracy outside union ranks, within broader society, something which should give the celebrants pause.
Here truly was the tail wagging the dog, with 2-million COSATU members pushed about by the leadership of a political party with then just over 340,000 members. However, the vertical fracturing of the Tripartite Alliance so desired by its liberal opponents – with communists, nationalists, and unionists parting ways – did not occur; instead, the fracturing was horizontal, as the Alliance shed disempowered members and militants across all three formations.
This environment provided fertile fields for a new extraparliamentary ultra-left, and micro-parties sprouted like mushrooms, some formed from these basal fractures. The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) was established, while the old DSM was reformed as the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP), Spartacist South Africa refounded a long-dormant tendency, and the 1987-originated Keep Left received a shot in the arm.
These entities became directly involved in working alongside the new social movements and within co-ordinating umbrellas such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) in Gauteng.
Heterogeneous and internally contested as this left was, it oriented around a set of core principles that defended our hard-won democracy as a vital advance for the populace, but one that was being hollowed out by impoverishment, marginalisation, and unemployment driven by austerity, profit-taking, and (as it turned out) asset-stripping under state capture.
To an outsider from the leafy suburbs, these red-shirted, toyi-toyiing social movements and the micro-parties in their midst may have appeared as inchoate barbarian hordes goaded by cunning instigators, but I found that the candle-lit conversations at nights in tin-roofed shacks revealed a sophisticated complexity of (mostly) progressive views.
It was not all selfless, coherent, or constructive, but it was a multiplicity of interlinked experiments in which an engaged citizenry tested the formulae of democratic praxis – liberals aught to approve – while formal democracy itself was often found wanting, with unabated police violence against demonstrators and torture of detainees, apartheid-style forced removals of poor communities, National Intelligence spies trawling the social movements, and ANC-backed political assassinations of community leaders, especially those in ABM.
Watershed event
But it was the Marikana Massacre of thirty-four striking platinum miners on 16 August 2012 that showed the democratic state had really taken the gloves off in defence of elite interests. It was the watershed event that provoked the giant National Union of Metalworkers of SA (NUMSA), at 338,000 members COSATU’s largest affiliate, to decide at its December congress to withdraw its support from the ANC in the 2014 general election, stop paying its R9,6-million annual dues to COSATU, and cease sponsoring the SACP to the tune of R1-million a year.
The impact on communist capacity was dire, but other than sponsoring their own micro-party, the Communist Party of Swaziland, founded in 2011, the SACP had in any case already disappeared like smoke on the battlefield of popular politics.
On 8 November 2014, NUMSA was expelled from COSATU, so under General Secretary Irvin Jim, NUMSA embarked on an independent trajectory that lead to the creation on 21 April 2017 of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), with 800,000 members organised in 23 affiliates and with Zwelinzima Vavi today as its General Secretary, depleting COSATU to 1,5-million members.
As the second-largest labour central in the country, SAFTU remains today the most significant force on the revolutionary socialist left, and it is highly active, but its trajectory has not been untroubled, and it has already lost seven affiliates, notably the 52,250-strong National Transport Union.
More to the point, its allied political party-in-the-making, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP), launched by Irwin Jim in 2019, failed in two electoral attempts, locally in 2016 and nationally in 2019, apparently because it was unable to determine the articulation between party, union, and its UDF-styled mass civics “United Front.” It seemingly died on the vine by 2022, by which time, the social movements and ultra-left were also in the doldrums.
But by that stage, a chill new wind was blowing – and it was coming from the right, with the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) current within the ANC generated by Jacob Zuma’s kleptocratic “lost nine years” presidency over 2009-2018. While RET argued for economic justice – the empowerment of the black majority via state-led industrialisation, land redistribution, and the localisation of economic value-chains – it provided racially-motivated ideological cover for the Zuma-Gupta clique’s grand theft estado.
It also provoked the founding in 2013 of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), as Julius Malema’s pseudo-militaristic splinter off the ANC Youth League, with its own RET faction. The EFF sees itself as simultaneously Marxist-Leninist and Sankarist, yet delights in Mussolini-like disruptions of Parliament.
Performative left-populism
This heralded the arrival of a racialised and performative left-populism that appeared as a black nationalist attempt to square the socialist circle. The EFF proved to be the seed-bed of a talk-left-walk-right zeitgeist that in 2015 offshot the Gupta-funded Black First Land First (BLF) micro-party of expelled EFF MP Andile Mnxgitama that expresses its declared “Sankarist Black Consciousness” in race-essentialist and genocidal terms, resulting in a de facto black neo-fascism.
The defection of the EFF’s own RET faction to Jacob Zuma’s authoritarian Zulu chauvinist uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) after its formation on 16 December 2023, helped the newcomer consolidate its position as official opposition to the new Government of National Unity after the 2024 elections.
The MKP, now in a so-called “Progressive Caucus” legislative alliance with the EFF, the two-seat messianic-conservative African Transformation Movement, and the ANC-splinter one-seat United Africans Transformation, has also drawn in the electorally failed BLF as a partner.
The inclusion of the MKP (incorporating the BLF) in the SACP’s broad “Conference of the Left” initiative over May 29 to 31 this year brought howls of derision from ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula, who opined that sitting “chambers of commerce alongside the [also electorally failed] Bolsheviks Party, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party alongside AZAPO, business formations alongside trade unions is not a left formation in any received meaning of the term.”
But that’s precisely the point: received meanings have increasingly become discarded in favour of opportunistic rabble-rousing formulae, which, due to a slippery politics that favours myth over programme (a core feature of actual fascism), has enabled the rise of right-populism globally.
The salient question against this backdrop is: why should liberals be concerned at all by the fate of a socialist left that is increasingly looking like the “left-overs” at the national feast?
“Beneficial in social democracies”
In a 2021 article in the journal Theoria, critiquing the failure of the SRWP, Giovanni Poggi and Ongama Mtika argue that there is “sufficient evidence to suggest that socialist-leaning policy has not only been beneficial in social democracies, but also in countries that have been considered to be essentially liberal democratic in identity.”
With the rise of race-revanchist right-populism globally – and now here in South Africa, too – an ethically coherent socialist left (not the SACP’s murky project), particularly within the trade unions, would not only provide classic liberals with a worthy opponent of defined politics, but would arguably serve as a mass reservoir of democratic praxis (the tankie minority notwithstanding), and so as a counterweight against the perilous rightward drift of national political sentiment.
[Image: Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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