With over 200 parties contesting the 2024 elections pro-capitalist, more misery lies ahead.
The 2024 elections are widely viewed as the most important since the dawn of democracy in 1994.Voted into office with a majority of 62.9% in 1994, the ANC has held an outright majority in every election in the post-apartheid era. For the first time since 1994, it is now widely expected to lose its outright majority. It will be compelled to form a coalition government with a selection of opposition parties.
The prospect of the ANC no longer being able to form a government on its own, has not fallen from a clear blue sky. The graph of ANC electoral support has shown a clear downward trend overall through both local and national elections for at least a decade. Our analyses over the whole period and the perspectives that flow from them have been confirmed by events. Our articles on the 2019 and 2021 elections in particular can be found on the MPW website here … and here… alongside many others before and since.
ANC’s electoral decline
The most important feature of the 2019 elections was that the “for the first time since 1994,
less than half of the voting age population cast their ballots” as we pointed out then. Collectively all the parties in parliament received the active electoral support of less than half of the eligible voting population – in that sense a minority parliament led by a minority government. Government.
The ANC’s inexorable decline continued in the 2021 local government elections. It produced 66 hung councils — no party with an outright majority — double that of 2016. Those results we wrote, pointed to: “the possibility that South Africa is living under the last ANC-majority government. LGE21 may well be the dress rehearsal for the ANC to lose its outright majority at a national level on the 30th anniversary of democracy in the 2024 general elections.”
The era of the ANC no longer being the presumptive party of government is now upon us. The ANC government’s failures are rooted in the capitalist policies it has always been committed to from birth. The ANC’s betrayal of the promise to end inequality, poverty, mass unemployment and to provide decent health, education and housing was inevitable even if it had remained faithful to the Freedom Charter. Whilst the FC called for nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, its aim as Mandela pointed in his 1956 article “In our Lifetime”, was to create the conditions for the development of a “prosperous non-European bourgeoisie” – a rich black capitalist class so that free enterprise (i.e capitalism) would flourish as never before.””
But the ANC leadership in Its capitulation to the terms set out by imperialism and domestic capital in the negotiations. It abandonment the mildly social democratic Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) – its 1994 election manifesto – and impose the neo-liberal capitalist Growth, Employment and Redistribution Policy (Gear) in 1996.
In the massive, accelerated transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that followed, SA climbed to the position of the most unequal society on the planet. Every single working class – constituency – youth, women, the unemployed and the employed and their children -has paid a heavy price with searing poverty, mass unemployment and being pushed further down the rung of inequality than even under apartheid. In not a single year since the Ramaphosa-chaired National Development Committee published its National Development Plan in 2011, has the economy reached its growth targets of 5.4 per annum for ten years consecutively, with its modest aims of mitigating and not eliminating unemployment poverty and inequality. With world capitalism convulsed by its death agony, there is no prospect of doing so.
A coalition government will be pro-capitalist
The ANC is going to the electorate with renewed commitment to these disastrous policies as will be confirmed in the Budget Speech to be delivered on Wednesday, 21st February. It remains as committed to the preservation of the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class behind the mask of bourgeois constitutional democracy today that it signed up for in 1994. The ANC leadership’s complete disconnect from the working class and political reality is confirmed by its belief that Ramaphosa’s imaginary Tintswalo must vote for them in gratitude for these betrayals.
However, even the ANC itself is resigned to being forced into a coalition government. It has amended governance legislation to ensure that the party with the blares vote share should have the prerogative to form the executive at all levels of government – to rule from beyond the grave of the loss of its overall majority.
The ANC’s decline is, however, a problem not just for the working class, but for its masters, the capitalist class. With its most reliable instrument facing an electoral massacre, the capitalist class has resigned itself to the reality that its preferred second eleven, the DA, will not be able to form even a coalition government with the ANC, let alone an alternative, on its own. In desperation, it is desperately pouring billions into pro-capitalist political parties to shore up the ANC and capitalism – ActionSA, Rise Mzansi, Change Starts Now etc.
Support for a workers party
For the working class, it has become clearer more than ever before, that the historic conquest of the right to vote has been used as an instrument to legitimise and perpetuate their oppression and exploitation. Bourgeois democracy, as leader of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, pointed out, is used to give the working class to decide which gang of their political representatives should oppress and exploit them.
From as early as 1998, 30% of Cosatu shop stewards concluded that the ANC represents the interests of capitalist class — the enemy they had fought to overthrow together with the white minority government. They, and made clear their support for the formation of a workers party. By 2012, in a Cosatu survey completed before the Marikana massacre, this had grown to 67%. The massacre placed the question of a workers party firmly on the table in the blood of its martyrs.
On Sharpeville Day, the MWP’s predecessors, the Democratic Socialist Movement, launched the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) on Sharpeville Day 2013, in collaboration with the National Independent Strike Committee of the mineworkers that had led the 2012 uprising.
In December 2013, Numsa convened a special national congress to launch a workers party. In the months running up to the congress WASP proposed to the Numsa leadership in several meetings that the union should take over the leadership of WASP. Unfortunately the leadership rejected this idea despite the enthusiasm of its members. The Numsa leadership ensure that its special national congress concluded without a decision to launch the promised workers party.
WASP secured a modest vote of just under 8 000 in 2014. But its most important achievement was the placing of the flag of revolutionary socialism onto the agenda of mainstream electoral politics.
Vacuum filled by reaction
These developments created a vacuum partially filled by the corrupt Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Launched by the already corrupt Julius Malema, it strategy was to exploit the socialist sentiments and the burning anger of the working class towards the ANC over Marikana. It adopted radical phraseology, including calls for nationalisation. That it won 6% of the vote was a distorted expression of the working class desire or an alternative. That the EFF has now publicly committed itself to a coalition with the ANC confirms its commitment to capitalism disguised by its radical socialist rhetoric. But the EFF has committed itself to entering a coalition with the ANC. Socialism and capitalism are incompatible.
Marxists oppose socialist parties forming coalitions with capitalist parties. A socialist party that does so in engaging in class collaboration. It is a strike breaking conspiracy to use co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky’s words, to use it to legitimise capitalist policies. The EFF is not socialist. Its leadership is using its supporters’ votes to enable them to occupy cabinet seats and have access to the levers of power for self-enrichment. The EFF will become a political partner in the implementation of capitalist policies at national level just as it has done at local government level.
A workers party
We played an important role in placing the workers party on the agenda of the new SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) at its launch in 2017. Saftu convened a Working Class Summit (WCS) in 2018 whose 100-0 delegated representing 147 youth, community, and trade union formations, adopted a declaration to form a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
In a conscious act of political strike breaking the corrupt Stalinist faction dominating the Numsa leadership paralysed Saftu, launched the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP). The SRWPs failure to secure even one seat in the 2019 discredited it completely. Unfortunately the 2018 WCS Declaration has never been implemented despite Saftu’s commitment to it being reaffirmed at its second congress in 2022.
The vacuum has consequently continued and exploited by reactionary xenophobic formations like ActionSA, Operation Dudula, the racist Patriotic Alliance and National Coloured Congress as platform for the ambitions of self-enrichment of their leaders and prepared to divide the working class to do so. Into the mix of a record 200 parties contesting in 2024, are a range of small parties with an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with the interests of the working class like Zuma’s MK Party and his son, Duduzane’s Change Starts Now.
The MWP remains committed to the reconvening of the WCS and the implementation. However, the Saftu leadership has recoiled from its commitment to the establishment of a workers party. The MWP has made repeated calls for the Steering Committee to be convened. The last date agreed for an extended Steering Committee meeting was 13th May 2022. Since then there has been a deafening silence from both Saftu head office and the WCS Steering Committee.
Protest Vote
The MWP will not be contesting the 2024 election as many of our readers and sympathisers have asked. The building of a mass workers party on a socialist programme remains our priority. Although the electoral achievements of both the EFF and before it, the Congress of the People, both of which received just over a million votes six months after being launched show what is possible, with the elections possibly less than six months away, it is no longer realistic to attempt to launch a workers party now.
In the highly unlikely event that the ANC scrapes past 50%+1 it will be a weak and unstable government. It will be as incapable of addressing the social and economic crisis after the elections as before on its own or in coalition. The need for a workers party will, if anything, be felt with greater urgency in the deepening crisis to follow.
Organise a protest vote to kick start building a workers party
For many working class people the 2024 elections offer an opportunity to “vote the ANC out of power”. This sentiment is not new; but has gained momentum from previous elections. It has, however, taken the form of abstention which explains the EFF’s failure to grow its vote in correspondence with the ANC’s decline. If, as we pointed out before, those who abstained in 2019 had formed a single party, it could have won the elections.
The MWP views this sentiment as understandable but mistaken. Abstention from registration and voting provides permission for capitalist parties to rule over the working class in whatever configuration of seats their coalition agreement may take. It will not prevent the ANC, which is likely still to be the larges party even if it falls below 50%, to be out of power. It will in fact be helped to stay in power with, helped by the very parties some voters may vote for to punish it.
Instead of abstaining we call upon voters to go to the polls in organised form to express their rejection of all the parties and announce their intention to form a workers party. In the 2000 elections that followed the Christmas Revolution in Argentina in 2 000, the largest number of ballots were inscribed with the words: “Todos Vamos”- they must all go. We call for a similar approach. Voters in every voting district should come together in advance and discuss how to carry this out.
This can be organised, for example, by the many existing organisations already in existence to fight the service delivery crisis, youth formations fighting financial exclusions, NSFAS corruption affordable accommodation etc, graduates fighting for jobs, and workers in their workplaces. We call for the process of building a workers party to commence now. The 2024 elections can be used in this way to start the process.
Over a long period of time we have called for the struggles taking place in the three main theatres – communities, students and the workplace – to be united within their own theatres under a common platform of demand, a common programme of action and a democratically elected representative leadership to coordinate them. The working class urgently needs to unite struggles within the three theatres and across them. This will assemble the troops to be assembled on the political plane under a mass workers party.
The MWP’s proposal for a united socialist civic movement and a young socialist movement can be found on our website. We will soon be publishing a manifesto for mass workers party on a socialist programme for discussion.
