Although the working class entered the democratic era without its own independent workers party, socialism and the yearning for such a party survived the SACP’s onslaught. As the end of apartheid came into sight, a healthy class suspicion towards the ANC still ran through the outlook of the leading layers of the organised working class despite yielding to the pressure the SACP exerted on the Cosatu leadership to support the ANC.

Numsa’s 1993 congress for example adopted a resolution that called on Cosatu and the working class to support the ANC in the 1994 elections. However, thereafter immediate steps must be taken towards building a workers party.

Unfortunately, the capture of the Cosatu leadership in the class collaborationist Tripartite Alliance meant that it was converted into what Trotsky described as “lieutenants of capital in the labour movement.”

Absorbed into senior positions in government and the private sector, many Cosatu leaders were also infected by the corruption that oils the machinery of capitalism. Trade union leaders were first given positions on the boards of profit-making “service providers” for funeral and life insurance policies. Investment companies in some instances entered into partnership with private companies in which the unions themselves were organising, sparking a vicious rivalry for the accompanying perks of vehicles, laptops and lucrative salaries amongst officials. Union investment company CEOs and trade union leader board member incomes served as the benchmark for higher salaries for leaders within unions themselves. This widened the gulf between a wealthy leadership and a rank-and file in a constant struggle against deeper impoverishment.

The NUM for example entered into a 50/50 partnership with the Chamber of Mines in Ubank with mineworkers its primary clientele. Ubank’s profitability became as dependent on slave wages as the mining companies themselves. The NUM secretary general Frans Baleni denounced his own members R12 500 wage as excessive during the 2012 uprising that culminated in the Marikana massacre.

After the ANC’s accession to government, its capitalist policies inevitably brought it increasingly into conflict with the working class. Working class community protests against poor service delivery and corruption, were violently suppressed. Police action claimed the life of 17 year old Teboho Mkhonza on August 31, 2004, during a march by thousands of residents in the township of Intabazwe in the Free State against what has come to be known as service delivery protests. On the 13^th April 2011, a year before the Marikana massacre, community leader Andries Tatane was shot and killed by police live on television in another such protest.

The accelerated polarisation between the classes fertilised the soil for the rebirth of the ideas of socialism and working class independence. It inevitably expressed itself on the political plane, within the ANC indirectly and within Cosatu, first implicitly and then explicitly. The Cosatu leadership’s loyalty towards the ANC placed it on the opposite side of the class barricades. It was caught between the conflicting interests of the class the ANC represented, the capitalist class, and the aspirations of the working class the federation was created to fight for. The logic of the Cosatu leadership’s loyalty to the ANC not only alienated it from the working class; it turned its leadership hostile to the very class that had created it.

In the 1980s in particular, the independent trade unions and then Cosatu itself had played a leading role in uniting the organised working class in the workplace and the townships. The struggles of these different sections of the working class were regarded as battalions of the same proletarian army. Even Ramaphosa was compelled to proclaim the inextricable link between them at Cosatu’s founding congress. In the absence of an independent mass workers party, and with the SACP acting as the ANC’s political and ideological police to restrain the working class, it was to Cosatu that the majority of working class people looked for leadership in the mass struggles of the time. The 1984 Transvaal general strike was organised on the basis of this unity.

In the aftermath of the ANC’s accession to power, these ties between Cosatu and working class communities were severed compelling township residents to organise themselves independently. Today’s social movements, many of them not organic outgrowths of working class communities but petty bourgeois-led, nonetheless owe their existence to the vacuum that had developed to left of Cosatu and the ANC. The logic of the Cosatu leadership’s position furthermore led them to view these community protests and the organisations they gave rise to with hostility. This was captured in Cosatu’s 2003 congress resolution: “The emergence of social movements hostile to the alliance necessitates the strengthening and consolidating of the political centre, with a view to leading the masses on the issues that have given rise to these single issue based movements. Cosatu’s task is to lead and mobilise mass campaigns to avoid opportunism and undermining of Alliance organisations.”

The Tripartite Alliance’s class contradiction just as inevitably reflected themselves in Cosatu itself. Post 1994 the “ANC broad church” started showing the cracks that led to the crumbling that has produced splits within each component of the Tripartite Alliance. The MWP’s predecessors’ call on the Cosatu rank-and-file to take the federation out of the Alliance was in step with a growing recognition in the working class that it had become a prison for them. This contradiction led to splits in a number of unions over the years. The majority of these were not precipitated directly by a conscious rounded out understanding of the ideological contradictions, but by the consequences of the leaders’ ideological degeneration. The union splits in particular were triggered by the results of the habits adopted by a leadership that had, consequently, mimicked the post-apartheid political elite’s culture of self-enrichment and corruption.

This significantly degraded their capacity to provide members even a basic union services.

Post apartheid bourgeois democracy re-ignites yearning for a workers party

The common thread running through a number of events post-apartheid was workers’ desire to reclaim their class independence and for the reassertion of the workers movement’s socialist traditions. Not all the precipitating factors, and the actions they gave rise to, reflected a rounded out understanding of their interconnectedness and common roots. In the political and ideological disorientation that filtered down from the top of the unions in particular, this was inevitable. The solution lay in recognising that each individual manifestation, whether a service delivery protest, or opinion polls and even splits in unions, was part of a whole. They could be overcome only through working class unity in struggle. This in turn requires a common platform of demands in all the different theatres of struggle, unity in struggle within and across them on a common programme of action, united on the political plane under a mass workers party on a socialist programme.

Despite the ANC/SACP’s success in capturing the Cosatu leadership, the Tripartite Alliance was founded on the insecure foundations of irreconcilable class contradictions. The Cosatu leadership’s political loyalty obliged it to oppose any struggles and movements that arose in opposition to the ANC’s capitalist policies. This included for example initially the Treatment Action Campaign launched in 1998 in opposition to President Thabo Mbeki’s catastrophic HIV/Aid denialism that was to claim 300 000 lives under the ANC government. It was only in 2002 that the Cosatu leadership, under the pressure of the TAC’s mass action campaign, that it adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the TAC. Cosatu supported the TAC’s tabling a national HIV/AIDS treatment plan at the National Economic, Development and Labour Council (Nedlac).

However ideologically inchoate, and lacking in organisational unity, the events that unfolded post-1994 nonetheless reflected a yearning for unity in struggle, ideological clarity and working class political independence. In time the question that was implicit in all these events – socialism and a workers party – would become explicit and be placed back on the working class agenda.

Indicators of support for a workers’ party:

• Towards the end of the ANC’s very first term, in 1998, Cosatu’s first post-apartheid survey on member political attitudes, already 30% – a substantial minority – expressed support for the formation of a workers party.
• In 2003 the Witwatersrand region of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union moved a resolution calling for a referendum in Cosatu over the federation’s membership of the Alliance. The national Ceppawu and Cosatu leaders were not satisfied with merely ensuring the resolution was rejected. A vicious witch-hunt followed. 16 Wits office bearers and officials were undemocratically removed from office, labour laws violated, locks of offices changed and placed under guard. In protest 9 000 workers cancelled their subscriptions and marched in protest. In the end 6 000 workers resigned. Today’s Giwusa arose out of this.
• In 2005 rank-and-file discontent over Cosatu’s failure to act against Gear’s destruction of jobs, the orgy of self-enrichment of the new black elite, and lack of support for rising community protests, compelled the leadership to adopt a resolution to reconnect with working class communities. Cosatu resolved to establish Coalitions against Poverty (CAP) in all provinces. The first of these in the Western Cape in April attracted, 72 different organisations, representing labour, churches, land sector NGOs and fishing communities, among others. “We never fought to make a few black people wealthy, we fought to enrich all of our people,” Western Cape Cosatu secretary Ehrenreich said to the 1 300 crowd to loud applause. (Mail & Guardian – 23/08/2005).
• The SACP leadership in particular reacted to the red flags at the rally like a bull to a red rag. The rally was denounced variously as an attempt at “regime change” by the mythical “third force” in concert with imperialism. It was an attempt, they claimed, to thwart the National Democratic Revolution through the revival of the United Democratic Front the Alliance leadership had unilaterally dissolved in 1991. The Cosatu leadership repudiated its own resolution ensuring that the Western Cape would be both the birthplace and the burial ground of the CAP – the first and last province where a CAP would be established.
• The Cosatu leadership’s subversion of its CAP resolution at the Western Cape rally was premeditated. Cosatu deputy provincial chairperson Wente Ntaka told the crowd that… former deputy president Jacob Zuma had been attacked by South Africa’s leaders “left and right, centre, criss-cross …” (Mail & Guardian – 23/08/2005). In arguably their most shameful act of betrayal, they supported Zuma even though he was already facing charges of arms deal related corruption and the rape of a comrade’s HIV/Aids positive daughter.
• Confirming the Cosatu leadership’s complete ideological and political degeneration, they attempted once again to ensure that the working class like voting cattle, would be herded behind the ANC by supporting Zuma in the ANC Polokwane conference in 2007. Both the SACP and Cosatu leadership had initially supported the neo-liberal Gear despite its undemocratic imposition on the Alliance. This did not prevent them from an opportunist somersault into adapting to mass anger against it by posturing as GEAR’s
• Subsequent Cosatu member political attitude surveys confirmed the rising support for a workers party. The most striking example was the survey Cosatu outsourced to Thabo Mbeki’s brother Moeletsi Mbeki’s Forum for Public Dialogue (FPD). This survey was carried out after Zuma’s installation following Thabo Mbeki’s removal at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference Cosatu had spearheaded. The release of this survey’s results was postponed to just before the ANC’s 2012 national conference in Mangaung where the Cosatu leadership had committed to re-electing Zuma as ANC president.  Cosatu leaders told researchers it was “uncomfortable” about the survey. The survey found that Cosatu shop stewards had lost confidence in the South African Communist Party and would like to see the country’s mines nationalised.
• Even more worrying to the Cosatu leadership was that the study also found that the majority of the more than 2 000 shop stewards surveyed did not support Jacob Zuma’s re-election as ANC president, preferring instead his former deputy, Kgalema Motlanthe.
• A qualitative change in political attitudes and consciousness had occurred. The immediate background was the loss of over a million jobs resulting from the stepping up of the relentless, more than a decade long assault on living standards and a million job losses after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis under Zuma’s presidency. The fall in working class living standards and the widening inequalities in the distribution of wealth led the World Bank to classify SA the world’s most unequal society in 2010. The survey found that support for Cosatu to form a workers party had risen to 65%.
• Cosatu workers had not only questioned but had seen through the fallacy of the “broad church.” Even more significantly, the report was released before the mowing down of the mineworkers at Marikana under the same ANC government and the same Zuma the Cosatu leadership had elevated to the ANC and the country’s presidency.
• It is these processes that explain the political conclusions the mineworkers drew from the Marikana massacre and together with the MWP’s predecessors, Democratic Socialist Movement, launched WASP on Sharpeville Day 2013.
• They explain also Numsa’s 350 000 members compelling the leadership to convene the 2013 Special National Congress to form a workers party.
• With the conflicting class interests in the Tripartite Alliance having become unbearable, Cosatu expelled its biggest affiliate Numsa in 2014.
• The class polarisation continued after an enormous increase in service delivery protests that catapulted SA to the protest capital of the world as well as 2015/16 #Feesmustfall protests.
• The formation of the new federation Saftu following Numsa’s expulsion by Cosatu for breaking from the ANC and SACP
• Saftu’s 2017 founding conference that adopted a resolution to form a workers party and convened the WCS which adopted a declaration for a mass workers party on a socialist programme

These irreconcilable class contradictions had their highest expression in the Marikana massacre – the public execution of 37 mineworkers. This is why the 2012 mineworkers uprising was as much against slave wages as against the class collaboration of the NUM, Cosatu leaders and ultimately the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance.

Marikana detonated the explosive social material of conflicting class forces built into the Tripartite Alliance’s foundations. Despite its failure to announce the formation of a workers party at its 2013 special national congress, Numsa broke from both the ANC and the SACP. Together these developments dealt the first major blow to the Tripartite Alliance. Followed by eight other Cosatu affiliates, Numsa initiated the establishment of the new federation, Saftu. Saftu’s founding congress adopted a resolution to form a workers party. It convened a Working Class Summit in 2018 where 1 000 delegates representing 147 community, youth, social movements and trade union formations adopted a declaration to establish a mass workers party on a socialist programme. This represented, at the time, the highest point of the process of ideological clarification and reassertion of working class independence ideologically and politically not just in the democratic era but under apartheid.

The aftershocks continued to reverberate after Saftu failed to implement its founding congress resolution and the 2018 WCS declaration it led to. Despite this, the idea of a workers party returned to the working class agenda. At Cosatu’s 2022 congress delegates from affiliates representing 600 000 members moved a demand from the floor for Cosatu to break from the ANC. At a special national congress in 2023 Amcu adopted a resolution to form its Labour Party

In 2013 Numsa workers attempted to retie the knot with their 1993 counterparts on the need for a workers party. Similarly in 2023 the mineworkers attempted to retie the knot with their counterparts in the national independent strike committee who had, in collaboration with the DSM launched the WASP in 2013. The Association of Mining and Construction Workers Union (Amcu) that had become a significant force after inheriting tens of thousands of mineworkers from the mass exodus from the NUM) returned to the question of socialism and a workers party at its own Special National Congress in June 2023. Extracts from the resolution read:

7. The working class, which is mainly black, impoverished and who live without dignity have no political party on which they can depend to pursue their interests…
8. The AMCU National Executive Committee (NEC) shall be mandated to register and establish the South African Labour Party, with a manifesto focussed on ensuring that all who are willing to work have decent work at a living wage and are able to make a meaningful contribution for the reconstruction of South Africa and the entire Southern African region on a democratic socialist foundation.

Abandoned by the Numsa leadership and the Left and squeezed in the 2014 elections by the incomparably better -resourced EFF as well as its subsequent split, WASP did not fulfil its potential to become a mass workers party, But WASP had given concrete expression to the yearning within the working class and planted the red flag of genuine, red-blooded socialism on the electoral plane for the first time in the post-apartheid era. This alone vindicated its creation.

The establishment of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (and the earlier emergence of the populist Economic Freedom Fighters) were not established for the purposes of creating a democratic mass workers party. On the contrary they functioned as a source of new divisions, with the SRWP in particular paralysing Saftu and the WCS process. Nonetheless they were a negative confirmation of the vacuum for working class representation described in the Amcu Special National Congress Resolution of June 2023 to establish the Labour Party.

Since then, the SACP’s own ideological contradictions and allegiance to classes whose interests are irreconcilably in conflict with each other, have taken its crisis to a qualitatively new level by the formation of the ANC-led neo-liberal capitalist GNU. Its leadership firstly stridently denounced DA’s inclusion in the GNU. It argued that the DA is pro-capitalist as if the ANC was not. They demanded that the GNU should be made up of ANC, MKP and EFF in a so-called “progressive alliance”. The EFF and MKP are cut from the same cloth as the ANC. The EFF’s radical pretensions are at least concealed behind talking left and walking right. The MKP does not even pretend to be anti-capitalist or even democratic. It opposes the country’s bourgeois constitution from the right not the left. It is the formation of the GNU that has acted as the precipitating factor behind the SACP into announcing that it will contest the 2026 local government elections independently of the ANC. What will understandably be seen by many as a childish tantrum could eventually turn-out to have been the SACP pressing the self-destruct button.

Aggravating its crisis, the SACP has pre-empted its decision on the future of central committee leaders in the ANC cabinet deferred to its 2027 conference. It has purged ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe from its central committee. His misconduct is his alleged failure to ensure that his ANC commitments did not conflict with his SACP central committee obligations, absenting himself from meetings without apology.   No such action has been taken to others such senior SACP leaders … so far.

Despite announcing that it is contesting the 2026 elections independently, it insists it remains loyal to the Alliance and the NDR. It will in effect be contesting against not just its own Alliance partner, but its own central committee leaders in the ANC-led GNU cabinet. With both claiming to be the custodians of the NDR, the ANC and SACP are in public conflict over a bankrupt policy that has led to both becoming renegades from and standing in opposition to the working class. These contradictions have become so acute, not to say absurd, that the New SACP is the first of what could become several splits. The SACP has remained silent over the emergence of the New SACP. But even a hairline fracture has the potential to develop into an open rupture.

The SACP can justify contesting the elections only if it does so on a programme that is based on what it claims to be – communist. Capitalism and communism are irreconcilable. The SACP may fool itself, but it will not fool voters. The derisory 1% share of the vote in the two Limpopo local government bye-elections it has so far contested show this. It is in effect contesting against itself. Unless it campaigns on a communist programme there is no reason way voters should choose this ANC imitation over the original. The SACP’s contradictions will only sharpen. Like an ostrich with its head in the sands, it imagines that its torso, riddled with ideological contradictions and tainted with its record of betrayal as a co-accused with the ANC it has supported throughout, is invisible to the working class electorate. It will not be exempted from their wrath for the crimes committed by its ANC alliance partner it has supported throughout.

Workers Party – an urgent necessity

Worldwide the material prerequisites for the socialist transformation of society have been rotten ripe since at least the October Revolution in Russia in October 1917 – far more so today. The weakness of the subjective factor – mass revolutionary working class parties – is the reason the life of capitalism is being prolonged. The crisis of capitalism is taking society towards even greater disasters as shown by the barbarism of the holocaust consciously being perpetrated on the Palestinian people, the wars in the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine etc, there are no depths to which the capitalist class will not sink to preserve their system including war and climate degradation.

In doing so they are calling into existence the most reactionary racist, xenophobic and misogynistic formations some openly identifying with fascism, emboldened by the policies pursued under the US’s Trump 2.0 regime. Trump is acting as an international point of reference for the far right and similar forces globally. SA is no exception. Xenophobia is being consciously instigated by parties funded by big business including ActionSA, as well as the Patriotic Alliance, and MKP, with the active encouragement of the ANC leadership itself. Operation Dudula founder, Nlhanhla Lux proudly posted FB pictures of himself in the company of an Oppenheimer doyen. The “Pan Africanist” EFF is disgracefully telling Zimbabweans to home for jobs where unemployment and poverty is worse than in SA.

The yearning for workers unity and socialism has been part of the tradition of struggle for at least 50 years in SA. In fact, for all its betrayals the SACP’s existence since 2021, is a negative confirmation that it goes even further back.

The building of a mass workers party on a socialist programme continues to be the main strategy of the MWP as it was of its predecessor at its founding in the late 1970s as the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC.  When the ANC adopted GEAR in 1996 and made its capitalist orientation explicit, we ended our orientation towards it. We renamed ourselves the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) and campaigned for a mass workers party on a socialist programme independent of and outside the ANC.  We made several efforts to contribute towards bringing about the unification of working class struggle.

Our record on the building of working class unity: 

• In October 2011, ahead of the 2012 local government elections the DSM took the initiative of inviting a number of organisations to establish an Assembly for Working Class Unity hosted together with the Thembelihle Crisis Committee as a step towards the building of a mass socialist workers party. It hosted an Assembly for Working Class Unity to chart the way forward together with other struggling working class communities, workers and socialists. Representatives from the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM), Golden Triangle Community Crisis Committee (Golccom) – Freedom Park, Solidarity Economy Education and Communication Cooperative – Ivory Park, Commercial Services and Allied Workers Union (Cosawu), the Mine Line Workers Committee, the Socialist Group and the Landless People’s Movement – Protea South, resolved to campaign for a national “service delivery general strike” on a common platform and programme of action at the end of November. The meeting resolved to work towards the formation of a new socialist mass workers’ party by combining mass action with taking the struggle onto the political plane. The delegates resolved to encourage working class communities contest the 2012 local government elections by standing independent candidates on the principle of the right of recall and a workers representative on a workers wage.
• Responded to the Murray & Roberts mineworkers for solidarity in 2010 and going on to support the 2012 mineworkers uprising. In collaboration with the mineworkers national independent strike committee, launched WASP in 2013 as a federal structure to enable affiliate organisations to retain their independent political and organisational identity and unite on a common platform and programme of action.
• Pledged support for, attended numerous locals and met with the leadership ahead of the NUMSA special national congress in 2013. We proposed to the leadership that it takes its place in WASP in accordance with its numbers numerical and political weight in the workers movement.
• Establishing the Greater Eldorado Park Civic in 2016 as a step towards a Gauteng Civic and then a national civic
• Campaigned for workers and student unity through the #OutsourcingMustFall Campaign during the # FeesMustFall protest movement
• We played an important role in SAFTU’s founding congress decision towards establishing a workers party and convening the 2018 Working Class Summit which adopted a Declaration for the establishment of mass workers party. We supported the reconvening of the WCS after the 2019 general elections and agreed to the Steering Committee’s assignment to draft the paper: “Why the decision of the 2018 WCS to establish a workers party was correct”, ahead of the planned reconvened WCS in 2021
• Pledged support for Amcu’s establishment of its Labour Party in 2023. We met with the leadership to appeal for unity with the Saftu and the WCS process and appalled to the Saftu NEC and WCS Steering Committee to do likewise.

The MWP outlines the above not simply to set the record straight on our role. We do so to demonstrate that the call for a mass workers party on a socialist programme accords with the outlook of the working class. We therefore reiterate our call for workers unity under a common platform of demands and programme of action in each of the main theatres of struggle – communities under a Socialist Civic Federation, youth and students under a Marxist Youth and Student Movement, women under a Socialist Womens Federation and organised workers under a Socialist Trade Union Confederation. All of these in turn must unite under the umbrella of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.