Part 1
The messages emanating from the various annual commemorative Marikana massacre events rightly denounced the bloodletting on the day as the ANC’s worst act of suppression since the Sharpeville massacre of the apartheid regime. It was the ANC’s most bloody act of class warfare against the black working class since it came to power.
But too many commemorative messages overlook the Marikana massacre’s profound political significance. The most important feature of the uprising was the political conclusions the mineworkers drew. The massacre revealed the ANC’s class character much more sharply than the implementation of its neo-liberal capitalist policies had been doing incrementally since the imposition of the Growth Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy in 1996. The mineworkers recognised that the working class was in fact politically disenfranchised. Their independent national strike committee therefore collaborated with our predecessors, the Democratic Socialist Movement to launch the Workers and Socialist Party – the first party with a red blooded socialist programme to contest the elections in the post-apartheid era.
Marikana opened new epoch in class and political relations
As we pointed out at the time, the massacre divided the post-apartheid era into two epochs: the first was one of illusions in the post-apartheid bourgeois democratic dispensation. This was founded on the mistaken belief that the ANC was the representative of the working class majority that would bring about the transformation in their lives, end poverty and exploitation and bring about in the words of its slogan: “a better life for all”.
Marikana shattered that illusion. It opened up a new epoch marked by the recognition of first the mineworkers themselves and then the working class as a whole that the ANC represented the interests not just of the mining bosses but the capitalist class as a whole. In defence of the capitalist class, the ANC was prepared to drown the aspirations of the working class in blood.
As Leon Trotky, co-leader of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, pointed out: “The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class.” (The Class the Party and the Leadership – Why Was the Spanish Proletariat Defeated? – 1940)
In SA, the mineworkers heroic 2012 uprising and its brutal suppression by the ANC regime constituted the “great historic shock” Trotsky refers to. The conditions under which this year’s Marikana commemorations took place were prepared by those events. Most important of all, the mineworkers had recognised the need to reclaim the proletariat’s class, ideological and political independence and to place the question of a workers party back on the agenda.
As we show in Part 2, the idea of a workers party is not new. It has been on the agenda of the workers movement since the commencement of the rebuilding of the workers movement in the 1970s. The working class first made its reappearance on the stage of class struggle as the central force against apartheid and capitalism in the great 1973 Durban strikes. The leading role of the mineworkers independent national strike committee in the launch of WASP was in fact a retying of the historical knot between the guiding layers of the pre- and post-apartheid generations of the working class. Unfortunately, today, the central question facing the working class, the resolution of what Trotsky describes as the central question of the epoch globally, the subjective factor i.e. the political unification of the working on a socialist programme, still eludes the working class. It is no consolation of course, that the crisis of the subjective factor is not unique to SA. Its international manifestation is dealt with comprehensively by Tony Saunois, the secretary of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) that the MWP is affiliated to in: “The Struggle for a Revolutionary Party Today”. (Tony Saunois’ article).
The numerous opportunities to resolve this crisis on a world scale have been squandered especially by the leadership of the trade unions, but also those of the traditional parties of the working class. The majority of trade union leaders have become what Trotsky described as the “lieutenants of capital in the labour movement.” The traditional parties of the working class have been transformed into open capitalist parties.
The failures of the new left formations that the class struggle had made possible from Europe to Latin America and in SA itself have added to the crisis. As Trotsky continues in the same piece quoted above: “… But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilizing the collapse of the old leading party.”
Crisis of political representation – the political and economic ruling elite
This year’s commemoration took place against the background of the worsening of the disastrous social and economic conditions that led to the ANC’s defeat in the 2024 elections. The discontent over social conditions had spilt over onto the political plane. This raised the crisis of political representation for both the capitalists and the working class that had been unfolding incrementally before the 2024 elections, onto a qualitatively new level. Less than two years into the post-2024 elections, that crisis continues to deepen today.
The disastrous outcome of the elections for the ANC and DA, the first and second eleven of the capitalist class, compelled the strategists of capital into compelling both into the forced marriage of the Government of National Unity (GNU), with the additional eight others in the role of maids and men of hour. This coalition of he rejected isa desperate emergency political rescue act that has resolved nothing. If anything, the GNU, which has stumbled from one crisis to another going through a near death experience more than once, has underlined the ongoing fragility of political formations on which post-apartheid capitalist rule now rests.
The ANC, that has served as the main instrument of their rule, is unlikely to ever recover from the catastrophic loss, for the first time in the post -apartheid era, of its overall majority. Hardly 18 months into the post-2024 era – the end of presumptive ANC rule – any illusions in the possibility of a return to the relative stability of the first thirty years of post-apartheid parliamentary democracy have, as we predicted, evaporated.
Superimposed on the deepened socio-economic crisis, is a palpable sense of a failing state. Crime and corruption are now much more brazen inducing a growing sense that matters are out control. The SA Police Service (SAPS) and the criminal justice system as a whole convey a sense of paralysis. Little to no action much less prosecution have followed the billion-Rand Zondo Commission into “state capture’ i.e. corruption. SAPS is in turmoil with accusations and counter accusations of corruption at the highest level playing themselves out in the courts. The police minister is on “special leave” following public accusations of corruption against senior government officials, ministers and the judiciary to be investigated by yet another Commission of Inquiry headed by a retired judge this time. Service delivery protests are on the rise against a worsening decline in water and electricity provision.
The government’s unofficial xenophobic sentiments have resulted in criminal campaigns against the use of public health facilities by African immigrants. The ANC has issued public reprimands over Operation Dudula preventing African migrants accessing health services at over 53 clinics and hospital across the country. But it has at the same time condoned its actions, taking on the role as their political attorneys. The ANC has seized on the xenophobic attacks, using them as a smokescreen to conceal their responsibility for the degradation of public services through neo-liberal austerity. ANC ministers and other senior leaders sympathetically describe these actions as driven by legitimate concerns over the alleged strain on public services they say are caused by illegal immigrants.
The GNU – the continuation of class warfare under the guise of national unity
The strategist of capital’s foreboding of the electoral calamity that lay ahead in 2024 spurred them into unprecedent action – the million rand sponsorship of numerous bourgeois formations in anticipation of the ANC’s post-2024 need to be propped up. In the cynical manner of all bourgeois ruling elites, the capitalists repudiated any responsibility for the crisis of their capitalist system. It is the fault of all of us – oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited alike. This is what lies behind the cynical promotion of the fiction of “national unity.” The working class in the nation must unite with the parasitic minority whose boots are on their neck in a common national effort to solve the crisis.
The GNU, born in 2024, is in reality the reincarnation of the original coalition that ushered in the post-apartheid political dispensation over thirty years ago – a GNU 2.0. The ANC, with a 62.7% majority, did not need a coalition to govern on its own in 1994. It chose to. The alternative was a likely further electoral demise. That ever being able to form a government on its own was emphatically underlined by its failure to benefit from the ANC’s biggest electoral reverse losing 600 000 votes. It they were ever going to be in government; this was the only way.
GNU 1.0 was a contrivance – the ANC leadership’s pretext for the betrayal of the aspirations of the working class majority. GNU 2.0 with the ANC now unable to form a government on its own, became an unavoidable necessity. The purpose was exactly the same in 1994 as in 2024 – the continuation of the capitalist policies under whose ruins the working class’ post-apartheid hopes and dreams lie. A new global capitalist is looming accelerated by Trump’s traffic wrecking ball among others. It is likely to be worse than that of 2008 that cost SA 1m job losses. GNU 2.0 is destined to fail with even greater certainty than GNU1.0.
The ANC collaborated first in ensuring the attainment of the strategic aim of the negotiated settlement agreed at the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa) – the preservation of the capitalist economic order. It then proceeded within two years to abandon even the social democratic promises incorporated in diluted form from the abandoned Freedom Charter into the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). It capitulated to the pressure of imperialism and domestic capital by imposing the neo-liberal GEAR policy. This lies at the heart of the social and economic disaster today.
The full responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the ANC. It imposed Gear in June 1996, the very month when the Nationalist Party (NP) resigned from the first Government of National Unity. The NP’s resignation did not disturb one hair on ANC governance. The ANC went on to implement Gear with single minded determination brushing aside the protestations of its Tripartite Alliance partners. The ANC leadership reminded them that the ANC was not even the first amongst equals. The SACP and Cosatu were cheerleaders and prison warders of the Alliance – a political prison in which the working class had been incarcerated.
DA kicks and screams but fears leaving GNU
As events have demonstrated since the formation of the GNU, the Democratic Alliance has disabused itself of the illusion that it can blackmail the ANC by threatening to walk out of this coalition of the rejected. The DA has kicked and screamed hysterically, thrown tantrums and postured. But it has stayed. Its hysterical threats to walk out of the GNU have come to nothing. It would have left the ANC with no alternative but to draw into the GNU the very parties the DA had sworn to keep out – the EFF and possibly former president Jacob Zuma’s Umkhonto we Sizwe Party. Terrified of taking political responsibility for such a scenario, the DA elected to remain handcuffed to the ANC in the GNU like escaped convicts on the run from the wrath of the electorate.
From the point of view of the strategists of capital who control the DA’s purse strings, it’s continued presence offers the best constellation of parties to insulate a weakened ANC from the populist pressures of the likes of the Economic Freedom Fighters. The threat of the ANC calling on the EFF to replace the DA has concentrated its mind. It cannot be ruled out that Helen Zille was reined in and reminded of her humiliating removal to make way for its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane in 2015. She was removed after the DA’s best ever election result in 2014. If the interests of capital took precedence over Zille’s personal ambitions, then they would prevail again a decade later under conditions where the DA’s electoral position had weakened.
A DA exit would be undesirable from the standpoint of the capitalist class. Although the EFF poses no threat to capitalism, it is untested and unreliable. Despite the unashamed ease with which its leadership consorts with and accepts funding from the very “white monopoly capital” it ritually denounces, they cannot be trusted to contain the expectations its populist demagoguery may arouse. The EFF’s incorporation into the GNU would complicate capital’s ability to keep the ANC on the last thirty years’ straight and narrow road of neo-liberal capitalism. However, in the final analysis, the DA is as dispensable for capital’s purposes today as its political ancestors, the NP were in 1996.
The merger planned between the miniscule bourgeois parties on which billions had been spent in preparation for the 2024 elections, Bosa, Rise Mzansi and Good, is likely an attempt to consolidate them into something weightier as the sum of their nearly inconsequential individual parts they emerged as from the 2024 elections. This is an attempt at constructing a new prop for the ANC ahead of the 2026 local government elections and beyond. Such is the desperation of the capitalist class in attempting to address their deepened crisis of political representation given the crisis in the ANC which remains its main instrument for the protection of their interests.
This crisis in the GNU’s main anchor tenant is deepening ahead of the 2026 local government elections. The presidential succession race to come in the 2027 National General Council and the fear of a complete rout in 2029 under a lame duck Ramaphosa’s second term are the new landmines on the road ahead. The National Dialogue debacle underlines this. Far from reviving the ANC and the GNU’s fortunes, the August national convention came nowhere near even resembling a Codesa reunion. It was a pale even ridiculous mimicking of Codesa’s lofty aims of creating “national unity”. Even the proponent of the idea, former president Thabo Mbeki withdrew his Foundation from participating in it.
Crisis of political representation – the working class
Outside the Tripartite Alliance, the Left’s reaction to the formation of the GNU resembles a political and ideological Tower of Babel. Its political evaluations of the elections outcome have veered wildly between ultraleftism and opportunism. On the one hand, for some it signified the readiness of the working class for revolution that allegedly began with the riots orchestrated by the reactionary pro-Zuma forces in 2022. For others, the outcome reflected the complete demoralisation of the working class who allegedly lacked the appetite for both socialism and a workers party. Located on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, these polar opposite views have contrived to be as false as each other.
Within the “official” left of the Tripartite Alliance, the ideological disorientation has taken a different form as incapable as that outside it, of charting a way forward for the working class. To the GNU coalition some have counterposed a “patriotic alliance” of black parties as a “progressive” alternative. Others have called for the radical sounding “popular front” oblivious of the catastrophic defeats that this idea of a “strike breaking conspiracy” as Trotsky described it, paved the way for the defeat of the working class in e.g. Spain in the 1930s.
Candidates for both these popular fronts share between them either petty bourgeois nationalist populism, tribalism even xenophobia or a combination of these. Their common denominator is the DA’s exclusion – anything but the DA coalitions. Their proponents vastly overestimate and confuse the DA’s position. The DA is a prisoner of the GNU, not its prison guard.
Concomitantly, they have bestowed supernatural powers on the DA’s shoulders. By the logic of their arguments, the DA succeeded in dictating the adoption of the neo-liberal Gear to the ANC four years before it was itself born. The DA had even more magically done so after its political part-ancestors, the NP, had jumped the GNU 1.0 ship leaving the ANC as its sole captain. In so doing, the proponents of these ideas have absolved the ANC of all responsibility for the catastrophe of the last 30 years of neo-liberal capitalism.
Most important of all, the candidates for inclusion in the popular fronts are without exception pro-capitalist. Not a single one of them stands for the socialist transformation of society. They would therefore be operating within the framework of the very same capitalist policies as the ANC with the same disastrous results.
The mineworkers Marikana uprising – a political rebellion against the Tripartite Alliance
Marikana shifted what had been the steady erosion of the credibility of the post-apartheid political dispensation into higher gear. It accelerated the crisis of its political custodians, the Tripartite Alliance, jointly and severally. The Tripartite Alliance pre- and post-1994 had always been a political prison for the working class. Its intention has been to keep the working class in an alliance which serves the interests of the ANC, the political representative of the emerging black capitalists and by extension the capitalist class into whose ranks they aspired to be assimilated at the summit of the commanding heights of the economy.
The fulfillment of the aspirations of the emergent black capitalist class required the preservation of capitalism. The fulfillment of the aspiration of the working class whose electoral support the ANC needed required, the overthrow of capitalism. This is the conclusion that the guiding layers of the working class had already concluded in the 1980s.
The Tripartite Alliance was thus born as an alliance of incompatible class interests. To keep the working class in check they had to be politically and ideologically policed. The prison warder mentality on the part of the Cosatu leadership stems from this. They accepted the SACP’s ideological misdirection – the Stalinist two-stage theory. Irish socialist James Connolly, summed up this policy as: “the workers must wait.” We would add wait for the unicorn of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
According to the NDR, before proceeding to the second, socialist stage, the material conditions must first mature; the balance of forces domestically and internationally must turn in the working class’ favour etc etc. To the extent that this means that the level of economic development (and the size of the working class) in the colonial world must first reach a level comparable to the advanced capitalist countries, it is a fantasy.
In giving way, under the pressure of the colonial revolutions’ demand for independence, the colonisers ensured that they surrender direct political control but retained their economic subjugation. This is the essence of neo-colonialism. By the logic of the NDR, the Great October Revolution of 1917 the Stalinists ritually celebrate, was premature. The working class was no more than 10% of the population, and Russia economically a semi-colony of Europe. The two-stage theory, the foundation of the NDR, is a policy of the Mensheviks, the enemy of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
In practice it meant that the economic foundations of the “democratic” first stage was therefore the very same capitalist system previously managed by the apartheid regime, against which the workers had risen, were preserved, and their exploitation perpetuated indefinitely. The workers were thus prevented from proceeding to the overthrow of capitalism by their own leadership.
The most grotesque expression of this service to the capitalist class was clear for all to see in the run up to and after 16th August 2012 in Marikana. The SACP and Cosatu leaderships were joined at the hip in their betrayal of the mineworkers.
The Cosatu leadership turned their backs on the mineworkers observing not even so much as a moment of silence for the martyrs of Marikana. Instead, they echoed the ANC leaders’ crocodile tears in describing the massacre as a tragedy. The Cosatu leadership’s then secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi denounced those like the Democratic Socialist Movement, holding us responsible for instigating “illegal strikes. The SACP leadership went even further. Then SACP deputy secretary general, Jeremy Cronin, denounced the mineworkers strike as orchestrated by a “Pondoland vigilante mafia.” The NUM’s secretary general, Frans Baleni condemned the mineworkers demand for a living wage of R12 500 as excessive and unaffordable and condemned the Lonmin mining bosses for setting a “bad” precedent for conceding it.
The launch of WASP was part of the wider, decisive reconfiguration of the political landscape. This was reflected in the pressure by the National Union of Metal Workers of SA (Numsa) workers for the convening of its special national congress in 2013 to launch a workers party. After WASP’s March 2013 launch followed that of the populist Economic Freedom Fighters in July – the ANC’s second major post-apartheid split after that of the Congress of the People (Cope) in 2008.
The aftershocks of the Marikana earthquake continued to reverberate across the political landscape, further fracturing the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance’s foundations. Cosatu expelled its biggest affiliate, Numsa, in 2014. This in turn led to the launch of the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) in 2017. MWP comrades (then as WASP) played an important role in the Saftu’s founding congress adopting a resolution to form a worker party. Saftu convened a Working Class Summit (WCS) in 2018 where a thousand delegates representing a 147 political, student, trade unions and social movement formations adopted a declaration to form a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
The formation of the now discredited Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) by the SACP 2 grouping dominating Numsa was an act of political strike breaking to cut across the implementation of the 2018 WCS declaration. The SRWP’s 24 439 votes – not enough for even one seat – was a humiliating failure for its Stalinist leadership. It represented an emphatic rejection by Numsa’s 350 000 members. Their message was clear: the SRWP was not the party they had in mind when they called for the 2013 special national congress.
The SACP 2.0 cabal’s legacy is the paralysis it had created in Saftu – an important, but not the only factor in the failure to implement the 2018 WCS Declaration. Opposed as its leadership was to the fulfilment of the aspirations of the martyrs of Marikana for a workers party, it nonetheless owed its birth to the conditions created by their martyrdom.
Despite overwhelming evidence as we show in Part 2 of this article, of the desire for a working class political alternative, every opportunity to unite the working class on a common platform of demands, a programme of action and a socialist programme, has been spurned by the leadership not just of the labour movement, but the middle class-led social movements, research institutes and academics pre-occupied with their single issue campaigns.
Moreover, to the extent that they all recognise the link between whatever their particular campaigns may be their sole pre-occupation, whether e.g. climate change, housing, land, or a universal basic income grant, they do not see capitalism as a system as the problem, but its particular neo-liberal austerity model. They suffer from the illusion that a better capitalism is possible. Their point of reference is the era of post-World War 2 social democratic reforms wrung from the capitalist class mainly in the advanced capitalist countries through working class struggle. They are completely blind to the reality that those reforms belong to a bygone era, never to return. They arose in geo-political historical conditions that have ceased to exist. After their systematic dismantling over the past 50 years there is virtually nothing left of them anywhere. Committed therefore to the reform of capitalism and not its overthrow, they see no need for socialism and consequently no need for the only instrument to achieve it, a workers party on a socialist programme.
The combined role of all these leaders has been the to prolong the crisis of political representation of the working class itself. The MWP believes that the desire for a mass workers party has never been greater. It may have may have waxed and waned over the past 50 years, but it has been a constant in working class consciousness.
In Part 2 we trace its presence in the organised working class from its origins in the impact on consciousness that followed the revival of the modern trade union movement in the 1970s and its evolution since.