Organised workers, working class communities, women, youth and students must unite!
The outcome of the May 29th elections represents far more than just a defeat for the ANC, important as that is. In the final analysis, it was also a rejection of all the parties that constitute the entire post apartheid political dispensation. Every single party that contested, both those that ended up in the Government of National Unity ANC-led coalition, and those on the opposition benches are firmly committed to the preservation of the post-apartheid capitalist order ushered in by the first GNU.
The most striking feature of the May 29 elections, however, was the absence of a workers’ party. The mass stay-away in May is an indirect expression of the desire for an alternative that represents the interests of the working class.
Workers Party – an idea arisen from within the working class over decades
The desire for a working-class alternative predates even the 1994 elections as we will outline in future material. The National Union of Metal Workers ‘1993 congress adopted a resolution limiting support for the ANC to the 1994 elections only. Thereafter, the congress resolved, Cosatu should pull out of Tripartite Alliance and create an independent party of the working class. It has also been reflected in several surveys of worker political attitudes in Cosatu after 1994. By 2012, before the Marikana massacre, the Cosatu survey showed that support for a workers party amongst its member had reached 67%.
The formation of the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) in 2013, the forerunner of the Marxist Workers Party (MWP) was the first attempt historically in the post-apartheid era to attempt to fulfil this desire of the working class for their own party. WASP was formed in the aftermath of the Marikana Uprising out of the Democratic Socialist Movement (the MWP’s forerunner) and the National Strike Committee that unified the independent strike committees. These committees had been formed by workers in the different shafts on the platinum belt. The DSM assisted in forging them into a national strike committee to coordinate the strike. Their formation represented a rebellion against the National Union of Mineworkers leadership which they abandoned en masse.
Unfortunately, WASP did not win a seat the 2014 national elections because of a combination of factors. It was rejected by the Numsa leadership. WASP, launched on Sharpeville Day 2013, had appealed to Numsa to adopt it after its leadership’s announcement of plans to launch a workers’ party at their December 2013 special national congress. This, combined with the WASP’s rejection by the Left, enabled the Economic Freedom Fighters, with its vastly greater financial resources, including donations from capitalists like the self-confessed corrupt tobacco baron Adriano Mazzotti and some black capitalist tycoons, to exploit the yearning for an alternative to the left of the ANC with pseudo-socialist rhetoric and red costumes to hide their pro-capitalist programme.
In this statement, the MWP motivates for the first step to be taken towards the establishment of an independent party of the working class to head off the total onslaught the GNU and capitalist class are launching against the working class. We propose ideas that outline the path towards a mass workers party on a socialist programme: a Campaign for a Socialist Mass Workers Party – CSWMP. We propose that the steps necessary entail the unification of struggles of the working class in each of the three theatres: communities, workers, students and youth. We are also proposing a fourth theatre, to coordinate the struggles of women against gender-based violence and the even greater exploitation they suffer eg under the austerity policies the ANC had commenced and now, with its coalition partners will continue as the GNU.
For this a common platform of demands, a common programme of action, and democratically elected leadership to coordinate struggles within and across all theatres of struggle are necessary. The principle underpinning the creation of structures and election of leaders must be the right of immediate recall in structures at all levels. For public positions, eg councillors, MPLs and MPs the principle that must apply is: a workers representative on a workers wage – no higher than that of a skilled worker. Any amount above that must be paid into the accounts of structures that elected them with regular inspections by elected delegates of the books.
Over the next period, the MWP will be publishing its proposed platforms on each of these theatres, starting with this platform and programme of action for Working Class Communities to unite service delivery protests towards the formation of unified Socialist Civic Federation. We are putting forward the platform and programmes of action for discussion and debate in the broader working class so that it can be enriched on the basis of concrete experience by the working class itself.
Main parties of capital’s response to historic May 29 defeat … all-out war on working class
It is clear from the basis upon which the Government of National Unity has been put together that an offensive against the working class is being prepared. Without unity this intensified offensive will proceed without the working class being organized to defend itself. Since the GNU was inaugurated, it has embarked, in collaboration with the bosses, on a total onslaught on the working class. This offensive, rooted in the crisis of capitalism, is targeted at all sectors of the working class: communities, youth, students and organised workers. The GNU itself has set the tone for the entire ruling capitalist class.
The savage budget cuts provided for in the ANC government’s 2022 Medium Term Budget Policy Statement – likely to be consolidated at the end of October this year – are now being implemented by all its capitalist GNU partners. Provincial governments, irrespective of which party leads their coalitions, have responded to the requirement to cut spending in line with the national budget. Their plans include not filling vacant posts in health, social services, early childhood development and school transport amongst others. The GNU is effectively destroying jobs whilst promising in its Statement of Intent to grow the economy and reduce mass unemployment.
GNUphoria – irrational exuberance of political economic ruling elite
The ruling political and economic elite’s post-election conduct is reminiscent of the tale in Russian folklore of a peasant who sings funeral dirges at weddings, and wedding songs at funerals. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that agreement had been reached to form a government of national unity (GNU) between the ANC, the DA and eight other parties on 24th June 2024. The heady GNUphoria that followed in the capitalist media, amongst bourgeois analysts, captains of industry, the ANC and its GNU partners, is a perfect example of the irrational exuberance that former US Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan became famous for in a 1996 speech referring to the Dot.Com bubble that began in 1995 and burst in 2000. It is a psychological condition that spreads like a contagion. It is an evaluation of conditions that have no basis in reality but drives asset prices higher than the fundamentals justify.
Greenspan was referring to the economy. In SA’s case, it applies to the country’s political economy. The construction of the coalition and the GNU that followed is a desperate attempt to turn reality on its head not just economically, but politically. The May 29 elections outcome represents an historic defeat not just for the ANC. It represents a rejection of the entire post-apartheid political and economic order first signalled in the most pronounced manner by the mineworkers uprising in 2012 that culminated in the Marikana massacre. The ruling class responded to the uprising by trying to restore “order” with guns.
Ramaphosa led the ANC to its first election defeat since it came to power. Its vote was reduced to a humiliating 40%. That 40% itself constitutes a thick layer of facial powder on the face of the electoral leaderboard. It conceals the depth to which ANC support actually fell. It simultaneously underlines the failure of all contesting parties to convince voters they were worth registering or voting for as an alternative to the ANC a recognition that whatever their differences, they do not stand on the same side of the class barricades as the working class.
This was the basis for the historically low 58% turn-out, the fact that only 16.2m out of 27.7m registered voters did not vote and 11m did not register at all. Collectively the GNU itself represent a pitiful 38% of everyone that has the right to vote. It is an emphatic rejection of the parties that constitute the GNU in which both leading parties, the ANC and the DA lost votes. It also confirms the beginning of the evaporation of illusions in the EFF’s populist posturing. May 29 has sent the EFF into a post-election crisis with an exodus of key figures precipitated by Floyd Shivambu’s desertion.
Yet Ramaphosa, generally written off as a spineless ditherer before May 29, has gone from zero to hero in the eyes of the ruling class. Within the ANC itself, Ramaphosa has clearly consolidated his faction’s ascendancy for now. The outrage both from within and without the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance has been reduced to a whimper. SACP secretary general Solly Mapaila, as newspaper columnist Justice Malala points out, snipes at the GNU whilst its leaders enjoy the gravy train. The SACP’s current and former chairpersons, deputy general secretary and other central committee members and senior leaders are not rushing out of the GNU door. The hysteria of DA leader, Helen Zille over GNU matrimonial relations has given way to the occasional child-like tantrum. For all its protestations that the ANC is no longer the sole governing party, an electorally weakened DA is in fact obliged to cling onto the GNU like an electoral cast away to a lifeboat.
Workers party on a socialist programme now urgently needed
The National Development Plan all the GNU parties have signed up to has completely failed in every respect. Economic growth, public and private investment and poverty reduction targets have been missed by miles. The more sober-minded capitalist economists have all conceded that jobs will not be created by the very big corporates which would otherwise have to provide the vast majority of jobs. All the domestic and internal capitalist institutions from the Reserve Bank and Treasury as well as the IMF and World Bank forecasts are far below the NDP’s own 2012 targets to grow the economy at the rate of 5.4% per annum for ten years consecutively merely to eradicate extreme poverty. The economy grew at an average of 1% over the last decade. Both private and state investment have fallen drastically, the former to the levels last seen in 1946 when the SARB started collecting these statistics. An intensified class war lies ahead. The moderate job targets in both the DA and the ANC’s own election manifestoes amounted to an admission that poverty, mass unemployment and deepening inequality is what lies ahead for the working class.
The GNU has announced itself with the insult that this coalition of the rejected came into being by the will of people and considers itself mandated to carry out the offensive against the working class now unfolding. The lesson of the experience of the last sixteen years beginning with Zuma’s 2007 Polokwane victory in the ANC’s factional war, is that in the absence of an independent workers’ party created by the working class itself, there will be attempts to capitalise on the vacuum. All manner of reactionary and opportunist formation of various ideological and political shades will attempt to secure a base by cynically using legitimate grievances.
The xenophobia now rising carries all the signs of conscious orchestration to divide and to throw dust into the eyes of the working class to provide a cover for continued exploitation, self-enrichment and corruption. It is a logical development out of the translation of the ANÇ’s undeclared xenophobia into conscious party policies in the PA, ActionSA and the National Coloured Congress.
Regrettably, efforts by the MWP to have the WCS reconvened have been unsuccessful so far. On the instigation of the SRWP controlled North West Numsa, the paper “Why the 2018 Working Class Summit decision to establish a mass workers party was correct” written as mandated by the WCS Steering Committee by the MWP, was prohibited for presentation at the North West Saftu caucus on 1st June 2021. Intimidated by the Numsa leadership, the Saftu Secretary General, Zwelinzima Vavi repudiated the WCS declaration on television after the North West Summit, denying that the aim was to establish a working class party. The planned 2021 reconvened WCS collapsed, like the Cosatu Coalitions of Poverty in 2002, after the very first provincial summit in the North West.
All subsequent efforts to reconvene the WCS have been unsuccessful. The MWP’s call for the question of the May 29 elections to be placed on a special WCS Steering Committee agenda before the elections to discuss giving critical support for the Labour Party established by the Association of Mining and Allied Workers Union at its special congress in July 2023 and for a meeting of the Saftu and Amcu leadership, went unheeded.
With the LP barred from contesting the 2024 elections, the working class had no party to vote for. It expressed its rejection of the parties by the biggest stay away from elections in the post-apartheid era. It punished the ANC the most severely, humiliating it by depriving it from an outright majority for the first time since 1994.
It is only the capitalist class that understood what the likely outcome of the May 29 elections would be in relation to the ANC. This is why they poured billions into creating a range of smaller parties. They also exerted enormous pressure on the DA to abandon plans to continue with the Phala Phala prosecution and to moderate its more provocative positions eg on cadre deployment so that they could be enlisted into the GNU.
The leadership of the working class on the other hand remains paralysed, divided on the trade union front, in communities, and amongst youth and students. There is no credible women’s movement. With the exception of Amcu’s LP, there is no effort by the unions to enter the political fray. Instead, there is ongoing active obstruction of the creation of a workers party. Yet the evidence of the yearning for a workers party has been clear for decades as we explain above. Moreover, whilst the working class registered its rejection of the ANC thunderously, its decline has not benefitted any party that remotely could be considered as oriented to the working class.
The MKP’s attempt to secure an organised workers base will fail both because of its thoroughly anti working class reactionary programme and its strategy to build a base in the organised workers movement that entails dividing workers into rival trade unions. The SRWP is dead. Unable to recover from its 2019 humiliation, it could not even attempt to contest May 29, 2024.
The appeal of the EFF’s radical populism has begun to wane. The leadership has been unable to suppress discontent over the authoritarian character of its internal party regime, nor has it been able to cleanse itself of the stench of corruption.
For Workers Unity – An injury to one is an injury to all!
More than ever before, the common interests of working class communities, have been demonstrated by the simultaneous jobs destroying budget and public sector wage cuts as well as private sector retrenchments. Workers, as was asserted during the anti-apartheid struggle are members of working class communities. An injury to one is an injury to all. A struggle against government cuts is simultaneously and inherently a political struggle.
We repeat our pre-and post- election call on the leadership of Saftu and Amcu to bring their respective initiatives together. Saftu must proceed with a follow-up of the post-election Mini Summit of 12th June to prepare to reconvene a full national summit to implement the 2018 Working Class Summit Declaration and invite Amcu and all other federations to attend. Amcu is correct in the meantime to prepare for the 2026 local government elections by contesting in local government bye-elections.
The MWP also fully supports Saftu’s call for a general strike of all federations against the full-frontal assault proposed by big business and government at Nedlac to completely cripple workers’ rights through LRA amendments. The significance of these amendments lies in the fact that the ruling class is fully conscious of the fact that to solve the crisis they have created, the working class must pay and not be able to defend itself.
We agree with Saftu’s comrade Vavi that even after the general strike the capitalist system will still be in place. The answer to that is to prepare for the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
Capitalism will not collapse on its own
The capitalist crisis in SA is global. Worldwide capitalism is going through its death throes. The US’s backing of the far right Israeli regime’s genocidal war on Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon is its desperate attempts to prevent a further decline in its power in a multipolar world in which it is no longer the sole, unchallenged world hegemon. The climate catastrophe, wars on the African continent and elsewhere, droughts, floods, the incitement of racism and xenophobia attacks on women rights, worker rights and democratic rights are all the convulsions of a system that is ripe for overthrow.
Capitalism will not die of its own accord. It must be overthrown. Unless the working class replaces capitalism with socialism based on working class democracy, it will recover. It had done so many times often relying on the ideologically bankrupt class collaborationist leaders not accountable to their members in trade unions and political parties.
Only the working class has the power, the collective consciousness, the historical traditions and organisational capacity to do so. But to realise its potential it needs to be organised in all arenas of struggle but above all on the political plane. Socialism cannot be built in one country. It is international or it is nothing. We need to join forces with workers of southern Africa and the continent and internationally in a struggle for a socialist SA, a socialist Africa, and a socialist world.
It is now more urgent than ever to build that alternative that will represent the interests of the working class through establishing a mass workers party on a socialist programme. To aid the process the MWP has begun preparations for the launch of a Campaign for a Socialist Mass Workers Party. The working class remains determined to struggle in all terrains: communities, students, and the workplace.
For Working Class Unity in Struggle
Holding back the potential power of the working class is that there is no unity either in each of the main theatres of struggle, nor across them. There is no countrywide point of reference either in the individual theatres of struggle or countrywide on the political plane. The task of the CSMWP is to create unity in each theatre of struggle on a common platform of demands, a common programme of action and, to coordinate struggles on a local regional, provincial and national basis, the election of a fully representative leadership elected on the principle of the right of immediate recall. To the three theatres of struggle, we are proposing one for women. This will provide a common point of reference for struggle in each theatre.
The CSMWP must approach these mobilisations simultaneously to assemble the forces of a mass worker party to enter the struggle on the political plain. Such a party will be constructed on the same principles as the structures in each of the four theatres. The party should operate as a united front of all four theatres of struggle and provide all of them a national point of reference to unify struggle at each level from local to national on the political plane. As a tactic, the party will contest elections. The principles that should guide this party must be the principle of a working-class representative on a worker’s pay and the right to immediate recall. This principle will apply to contestants at every level of government from local to national.
The entire post-apartheid experience has demonstrated, with the exception of WASP, the bankruptcy of all those “Left” alternatives that have either been present from before like the SACP, and those posturers that came after like the EFF and the SRWP. WASP’s electoral manifesto, before its own 2018 split, remains the only red-blooded socialist programme ever presented to the working class.
The MWP stands by that programme. The SACP is highly unlikely to recover from the shattering blow to its credibility resulting in from the role in supporting the ANC and its disastrous capitalist policies. The ANC Youth League has drawn attention to the sharpest contradiction of all – that its secretary general condemns the GNU as a “sell-out” but its most senior leaders occupy key positions in it. Any attempt to resolve this contradiction can only be resolved by a split out of which no faction can recover because the entire programme of the party is bankrupt. The SRWP has been buried under the same contradictions, as is the EFF- bleeding from opportunist desertions that could turn the current trickle into a flood.
The working class must reclaim its class, ideological and political independence. Only a mass workers party on a socialist programme can unite the working class and prepare the grounds for the abolition of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
