SAFTU must Convene the Working Class Summit to implement the 2018 Declaration to form
A MASS WORKERS PARTY ON A SOCIALIST PROGRAMME
“The SACP’s planned Conference of the Left, co-convened with the EFF and inviting the ANC, MKP and bourgeois institutions, is not a step towards working-class unity but another attempt to entrench class collaboration. The Marxist Workers Party argues that the real task is reconvening the Working Class Summit to implement its 2018 declaration for a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme.”
In the MWP’s view the central task is not so much the unity of the “Left” but the unification of the struggles of the working class within all three theatres of struggle – communities, students, youth and the workplace. This is the way for the working class to reclaim its political and class independence through the creation of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
We agree with many who have appealed for the need to avoid responding to the SACP’s convening of the CoL by engaging in abstract theoretical hair-splitting debates on how many angels can dance on the head of a needle and a “more Marxist than thou” university type seminar approach. We do not, however, interpret such a caution to mean that theoretical and historical debates should be avoided altogether. We proceed from the assumption that we all agree that there can be no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In this regard, Lenin states clearly what must be understood:
“Anyone who has read Marx and failed to understand that in capitalist society, at every acute moment, in every serious class conflict, the alternative is either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, has understood nothing of either the economic or the political doctrines of Marx.” (Lenin, April 1919, The Third International and Its Place in History)
The economic crisis
The SACP is convening its Conference of the Left at a time of the post-apartheid capitalist dispensation’s deepest crisis economically, politically and socially. The inequalities in the distribution of wealth that earned SA the World Bank’s designation as the world’s most unequal society are widening. The country is engulfed by a bloodbath of retrenchments. The working class is ravaged by mass unemployment and poverty.
Economist Duma Gqubule (Business Day, 19/05/2026) points out that the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for the first quarter of 2026 saw 345,000 jobs vanish in 90 days — 258,000, or 73.7%, of them young people, already afflicted by the highest youth joblessness in the world, thrown onto the scrap heap of destitution.
The unemployment crisis is but one of several symptoms of the crisis of capitalism unleashed by the ANC leadership’s neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution Policy (Gear), imposed on the country in 1996. Despite concessions to big business such as lowering corporate taxes, relaxation of exchange controls and “reform” of state-owned enterprises, privatisation, commercialisation and outsourcing; gross fixed investment is at the same level as in 1946. They are looting and plundering R400bn per annum through illicit capital flows and more than a trillion in capital flight. Thirty-eight percent of industrial capacity is lying idle. Gear has aggravated the disastrous legacy of capitalism under apartheid.
Aggravating the crisis are the eye-watering revelations of the vast network of corruption ensnaring senior echelons of the state including the police, crime intelligence, politicians and the judiciary at the Madlanga Commission hearings. Instituted less than five years after the handing in of the Zondo Commission findings into “state capture”, the testimonies broadcast live daily confirm that, for the corrupt elite, it has remained business as usual from Zondo through to Madlanga.
The political crisis’s most virulent expression – orchestrated xenophobia
The working class and middle classes are deeply disillusioned with the post-apartheid political and economic order. The political vacuum that began to develop in the ANC’s second term reached a qualitatively new level in the 2024 elections.
The poisonous winds of xenophobia blowing across the country are bringing with them its blood relatives: racism and tribalism. Fears are rising of new pogroms as in 2008 and further attacks subsequently. Of the 63 lives claimed in 2008, 21 were South African. It is a warning that this orchestrated barbarism, which criminal elements also use as cover, can morph into racial clashes amongst South Africans themselves.
Xenophobia is not a spontaneous development and is not supported by the majority. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If the vacuum is not filled by progressive political formations with programmes that explain that the crisis confronting society is rooted in capitalism, and which mobilise and unite the working class on a socialist programme, then even small but well-funded formations such as March and March or Operation Dudula can fill the vacuum with reactionary and backward ideas.
The xenophobia campaign, as we explain elsewhere, is actively incited by racist utterances by politicians and political parties like ActionSA, funded by big business, and by the two parties anchoring the Government of National Unity — the ANC and DA.
The political crisis in SA must be understood against this background. It is the expression on the political plane of the insoluble crisis of capitalism in the economy. On the electoral plane, the quantitative decline in ANC support over more than a decade turned qualitative in 2024. In what proved the most politically significant elections since the end of apartheid, the 2024 polls represented a thunderous rebuke to the ANC.
Crisis of political representation
The significance of 2024 was that it represented the end of the political and electoral architecture on which the post-apartheid bourgeois democratic dispensation had been built. It concealed and protected the capitalist class’s economic dictatorship behind the mask of parliamentary democracy, buttressed by the world’s “most progressive constitution”. Until 2024, the bourgeoisie could rely on the ANC’s presumption of governance as a source of political and social stability.
On the morning after 29 May 2024, the foundations of that dispensation lay shattered. The tide of electoral revolt had swept aside the electoral fortifications into which big business, foreboding about the ANC’s prospects, had invested millions. The new formations created to act as props for an ANC they expected would be electorally wounded proved a dismal failure.
There is now simultaneously a crisis of political representation for both the capitalist class and the working class. In desperation, the ruling political elite resorted to the political subterfuge of the Government of National Unity. An election that threw the polarisation between the classes into the sharpest relief was (mis)portrayed as a division between the races in a nation that needed uniting. Turning reality on its head, the political elite formed a coalition of losing parties into the GNU that collectively represent no more than 38% of the eligible voting population, presenting it as an expression of the will of the people.
GNU 2.0 was a desperate attempt to ensure the continuation of the neo-liberal offensive against the working class begun in 1996 with the imposition of Gear, itself originating in GNU 1.0.
In the MWP’s view the real test for any serious formation claiming adherence to Marxism is whether:
- it is committed to the fundamental principle of working class struggle – unity;
- it recognises that the interest of the working class and the capitalist class are irreconcilable
- it recognises that capitalism has been rotten ripe for overthrow since the October Revolution in 1917 and that the working class must be mobilised to overthrow it and create a socialist SA as called for by then Numsa secretary general in the 1980s
- understands that capitalism survives only because working class consciousness has fallen behind and must accordingly be raised from being a class in itself, to one for itself
- that mass independent workers parties do not exist and that it is the task of Marxists to build them.
The SACP’s record of class collaboration
The organised working class has been yearning for an independent party of its own since the 1980s, from the pre-apartheid through to the post-apartheid era. The articles dealing with this can be found here….
What is clear and needs to be highlighted is that the SACP has been at the forefront of thwarting the creation of an independent mass workers party throughout that entire period.
The historical record shows furthermore that, contrary to a view dominant on the Left, the SACP’s current position did not originate in the period of the negotiated settlement and the historic elections that followed. The position it took then was consistent with the position it adopted as long ago as 1928 when it accepted the imposition of the Communist International’s (Comintern) “Native Republic Thesis” at its 6th congress.
This policy was the offspring of the political counter-revolution of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This “the workers must wait” policy, as Irish revolutionary socialist James Connolly described it, represented a break with the very programme on which the working class came to power in Russia. It was also a repudiation of the primary motive for the establishment of the Comintern — the spread of socialist revolution worldwide. The Native Republic Thesis birthed the two-stage theory, also known as the NDR (National Democratic Revolution).
It was the equivalent, for SA, of the “Bloc of Four Classes” which the Comintern imposed on the Chinese Communist Party, requiring it to subordinate the interests of the working class to those of the native bourgeoisie organised in the Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT slaughtered the working class in Shanghai in 1927 when they attempted to emulate the October Revolution and take power. The threat the Stalinist bureaucracy feared most, that a genuine workers democracy in China could serve as a point of reference to workers in the Soviet Union and spark a rebellion to restore the workers democracy of the first period, had been averted.
Throughout its history since then, first as the Communist Party of SA (CPSA) and then as the SACP since 1953, it has consistently opposed the idea that the working class must lead the national liberation struggle on its own programme, socialism, with its own forces and methods of struggle, pulling all other oppressed classes behind it.
Instead, whilst eulogising the role of the working class as the “vanguard” and the “motive force” of the struggle, it has consistently argued for the indefinite postponement of the struggle for socialism and the subordination of the interests of the working class to those of the aspirant black bourgeoisie. It thus reduced the working class to the rearguard — the provider of the social forces on which to carry the political representatives of the black capitalist class, the ANC, into office.
Marxism, Trotsky pointed out, is the science of perspectives, providing the advantage of foresight over astonishment. The SACP had no right not to understand the ANC’s class character before it came to power, much less what would follow once it was in government. It also failed to understand the international conditions that led to the negotiations and the objectives of the strategists of capital in SA.
After thirty years of the disastrous consequences for the working class, economy and society of the ANC leadership’s imposition of Gear, the potency of the SACP’s inoculation against the virus of socialist revolution remains undiminished, two years short of the centenary of its adoption of the Native Republic Thesis.
It has played a damaging role in the workers’ movement, sowing divisions at critical stages. Hidden beneath the “revolutionary” rhetoric of the NDR is in fact class collaboration. The SACP is not a communist party. It should be renamed the SA Class Collaborators Party, as its record of betrayal shows.
SACP Record of Betrayal
- It denounced Joe Foster’s 1983 speech calling for the working class to chart its own course independently and not fall into the trap into which working classes elsewhere on the African continent had fallen by supporting liberation movements only to be betrayed.
- It ensured that Numsa’s 1993 congress resolution to establish a workers party immediately after the 1994 elections was not implemented.
- It supported the imposition of the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy in 1996.
- It accused Cosatu’s Coalitions Against Poverty of being an attempt at regime change, ensuring that the Western Cape rally was the first and last.
- It redirected the rebellion against Gear into a factional war in the ANC’s Polokwane conference to replace one capitalist leader, Mbeki, with another, Zuma, despite his facing corruption charges.
- It defended Zuma in his rape trial.
- It denounced the 2012 mineworkers uprising, in the words of former deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin, as orchestrated by a “Pondoland vigilante mafia”.
- Its leading members, including secretary general Ivin Jim, ensured that the purpose of Numsa’s 2013 Special National Congress — to establish a workers party — was derailed.It played a leading role in Cosatu’s expulsion of its biggest affiliate, Numsa, in 2014 for denouncing the ANC over the Marikana massacre and announcing that it would no longer support the ANC or pay dues to the SACP.
- It ensured that the 2022 Cosatu congress resolutions moved from the floor by unions representing 600,000 workers were not voted on and that the special congress to decide the question did not take place.
- It encouraged the Cosatu leadership to unilaterally decide to support the ANC in the 2024 elections.
SACP somersaults on Zuma
The SACP’s engineering of Numsa’s expulsion from Cosatu was the biggest blow to working class unity in the post-apartheid era. It followed its colossal betrayal of the mineworkers uprising in 2012. It proceeded to support Zuma’s re-election as ANC president even though the Marikana massacre occurred under his watch as president of the country in August that same year.
After later turning on Zuma, it proceeded to support Ramaphosa’s candidature for the ANC presidency despite his having been Zuma’s deputy during the massacre and the role he played, whilst SA’s deputy president and Lonmin board member. With his infamous condemnation of the strike as a criminal act that must be dealt with “concomitantly, he created the climate for the massacre that earned him the title “Butcher of Marikana”.
In exchange for Ramaphosa accepting Cosatu’s endorsement of his ANC presidential campaign, the Cosatu leadership bartered the fundamental right to strike. They demanded a minimum wage at slave level, in exchange for agreeing to Thatcherite compulsory balloting before strikes. Emboldened by this capitulation, capital has since embarked on the most serious assault on workers’ rights. This includes the ConCourt-endorsed 2020 public sector wage theft aimed at crippling collective bargaining and amendments to the Labour Relations Act’s Code of Good Practice that restore the workplace dictatorship bosses enjoyed under apartheid. Despite the rolling back of workers rights, there has been organised resistance by the labour movement against these attacks.
The SACP’s now rejected invitation to the ANC to the CoL was already a sufficient betrayal of what it claims to stand for and a complete failure to understand the nature and source of the present crisis. Matters are even worse in relation to MKP.
The SACP’s invitation to MKP is merely a renewal of their marriage vows with Zuma. Their abandonment of Zuma in 2017/8 was no political divorce – only a separation. It follows the logic of its political infatuation with Zuma’s populist and nationalist politics in the run-up to the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference. It first (mis)represented its support for Zuma as a rebellion against Mbeki’s championing of the very Gear it had initially supported. Then it proceeded to play a prominent role in mobilising support for Zuma and ensuring his installation as ANC president. It sowed total confusion in Cosatu over whose leadership it exercises a significant and damaging political and ideological influence.
SACP divides Cosatu
The fact that the Cosatu leadership initially rejected the invitation to attend the CoL before the SACP persuaded it to attend, papers over the cracks in the relationship between their respective bureaucracies. Significantly the Cosatu delegation consists of Nehawu only. It is unlikely that Nehawu carries the federation’s united mandate. The depth of the division that the SACP has excavated in Cosatu was demonstrated at its 2022 congress. Delegates representing 600 000 members circumvented an undemocratic attempt to stifle debate by moving a resolution from the floor. The resolution called for Cosatu to withhold support from the ANC in the 2024 elections. The leadership of the 250 000-strong teachers union, Sadtu, threatened to disaffiliate from Cosatu if the resolution was so much as discussed. The bureaucracy maneuvered to thwart the democratic will of the delegates by promising to convene a special congress to debate the matter in May 2023. The bureaucracy broke that promise and made a unilateral announcement of support for the ANC.
The divisions in the bureaucracy at the top are really the stirrings of discontent from below spilling out at the top. As a result of the SACP’s role as the ANC’s political and ideological kitskonstabels, the SACP has in fact never enjoyed rank-and-file credibility in Cosatu. The unions that moved that resolution reflect a widespread view amongst organised workers reflected in the 2013 Numsa special congress as well as the breakaway from the NUM, the Association of Mining and Construction Union (Amcu)’s July 2023 special congress. The bureaucracies of both succeeded in subverting the will of the members. The Numsa bureaucracy prevented the formation of a workers party in 2013 from being announced and imposed the SACP 2.0, the Socialis Revolutionary Workers Party, on the workers in 2018 behind their backs. The Amcu bureaucracy ignored the socialist content of the resolution and vulgarised it by promoting the LP as religious fundamentalist and xenophobic. The SRWP is completely discredited; the LP at best is treading water.
As we showed in previous articles, the SACP played a leading role in shaping the ANC’s position towards the working class movement from its re-emergence in the 1970s. It steered the (mis)guided indifference and even outright hostility towards the emerging independent trade unions and the denunciation of international direct links for them. It drove the witch-hunt and later expulsion of members of the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC for championing the leading role of the working class and a socialist programme in the liberation struggle. It was not towards the SACP that Numsa workers looked for the workers party their 1993 congress resolved must be built immediately after a once-off support for the ANC in the 1994 elections. In Cosatu’s first survey of political attitudes in 1998, the SACP received only 4% support. In not even one of subsequent surveys did that increase. Instead support for an independent workers party reached 67% before the Marikana massacre.
The Cosatu leadership’s initial rejection was, in all likelihood, forced by the pressure of the rank-and-file. Unlike their bureaucracy, the Cosatu members understand fully that the ANC and SACP are ideologically and politically conjoined twins. Their opposition to both burst to the surface only to be suppressed. The SACP has once again played a deeply divisive role in Cosatu that has the potential to develop into a split. The CoL is in reality an attempt to implement their long standing demand for the “reconfiguration” of the Tripartite Alliance without its leader, the ANC, that has continuously ignored it. It is destined to fail as surely as its predecessor.
In time, a wider, more decisive rank-and-file rebellion is most likely. The Cosatu rank-and-file must, however, not permit the split between the pro-SACP and ANC bureaucratic factions to percolate into their ranks. Cosatu workers should urge Saftu to reconvene the WCS and elect workplace delegates, irrespective of union affiliation, if necessary, to attend it.
The SACP played a leading role in Zuma’s ascendancy to the ANC presidency at Polokwane in 2007. To the party’s everlasting shame, it supported him throughout his rape trial. It backed him in the arms deal corruption charges and in what, from the standpoint of the Marxism the SACP professes adherence to, was the scientifically misnamed “state capture” collusion with the Guptas. The SACP is competing with the Economic Freedom Fighters as the country’s foremost political trapeze artists.
MKP and black business would accept an invitation to such an event precisely for the purpose of deceiving the working class once again — exploiting the discrediting of the ANC in order to install themselves in its place.
Their grievance against the post-apartheid order is fueled by impotent rage over the fact that not a single wholly black-owned company is to be found in the top 100 of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and that blacks (Coloured, Indian and African) make up less than half of the top 10% that owns 84% of the country’s wealth in income and assets. The destitution of the bottom 50%, with negative wealth, is merely collateral damage in the reality of capitalism and the least of their concerns.
For them, the aims of the NDR — a capitalist economy whose summits reflect the demographics of the country — have not been achieved. In their fever dream, the Conference of the Left must “rectify” this injustice and clear the way for what can only mean, under capitalism, “Black Monopoly Capital” replacing White Monopoly Capital.
This appellation, popularised by the SACP, helpfully provides ideological cover for the parasitic class aspirations of the black capitalist class. “White Monopoly Capital” conceals the essence of the class character of the post-apartheid economic order behind its racial form.
The SACP obstructs the WCS to create an SACP 3.0
But the SACP was not done. Numsa’s expulsion from Cosatu demonstrated to most workers that the federation’s leadership, under the SACP’s misdirection, had degenerated into voluntary inmates of the class collaborationist prison of the Tripartite Alliance.
Numsa’s expulsion precipitated the formation of Saftu. Its founding congress adopted a resolution to start the process for building a workers party. In line with this resolution, Saftu convened the Working Class Summit in 2018 where 1,000 delegates representing 147 community organisations, youth structures and trade unions adopted a declaration to form a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
The WCS was convened out of recognition that whilst the working class did not lack combativity, there was no unity in action within or across the three main theatres of struggle, thus weakening them. Working class communities struggled then, as now, against poor service delivery and corruption, but in isolation from each other. The same applied to students and workplace struggles.
The aim of the workers party the WCS called for was to overcome this disunity within and across all these arenas of struggle. Simultaneously, the WCS aimed to unite the working class on the political plane with its own voice, programme and party in order to struggle for the power to govern the country, overthrow capitalism and bring about the socialist transformation of society.
The WCS was a giant step — the most important since 1994 — towards the working class reclaiming its class and political independence.
How did the SACP respond to this historic development?
Its devoted disciple, Ivin Jim, whose break with the SACP reflected the pressure of its membership rather than an ideological conversion on the road to a genuine socialist Damascus, had never broken with the SACP ideologically, as the current reconciliation shows.
The Numsa cabal, under Jim’s leadership, played the leading role as a political strike-breaker inside Saftu. It sabotaged the functioning of the new federation, suspended subscription payments at will, defied calls for mass action, sowed disunity and, above all, obstructed implementation of the WCS declaration.
Jim’s cabal constructed the now discredited Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party as an SACP 2.0 behind the backs of both Numsa and Saftu members in defiance of the founding congress resolution. The aim was to prevent an independent workers party, uncontaminated by the Stalinist perversion of Marxism, from being established.
The SACP leadership’s attempt to drag Numsa into its latest class collaborationist adventure, the Conference of the Left, is another exhibit in the catalogue of its political crimes against the working class.
The SACP is attempting to pressure Numsa into a CoL, an SACP 3.0, to which it has invited the ANC, the very party from which Numsa announced it had broken at its 2013 Special National Congress.
It confirms the SACP leadership’s contempt for basic trade union principles and its lack of respect for the democratic decisions of the Numsa rank-and-file.
The MWP applauds Numsa members for rejecting this invitation to march even deeper into the quicksand of class collaboration with the bosses and their principal political party.
The SACP is being torn apart by the contradictions between what it stands for in name, communism and what it carries out in practice: providing ideological and political cover for capitalism.
As it implodes, it is subjecting itself to ridicule by demanding retention of dual membership of the ANC, the very party it is contesting elections against. It continues pathetically to bleat for the “reconfiguration” of the Tripartite Alliance that has lost all credibility.
In light of the indictment of the SACP outlined above, our readers and supporters would be entitled to ask: why even engage with the position the SACP has set out in its statement “Building a Left Movement for Working-Class and Popular Power”?
We will analyse it in more detail in a future statement. For us, the immediate priority is the central practical task, the formation of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
If the call for the CoL has any value, it is in providing an opportunity to politically and ideologically rearm the working class. To the CoL, we counterpose the call we have made since 2021: for the reconvening of the WCS and implementation of the Declaration to form a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
We warmly welcome the Saftu Political and Ideological Commission’s decision to reject the invitation to the CoL. We are heartened furthermore by the PIC’s decision to address the WCS declaration as well as the founding congress resolution that gave rise to the WCS and which was reaffirmed at the second congress in 2022.
We call upon Saftu to name a date for the reconvened WCS. We call on the Saftu leadership to circulate the 2018 WCS Declaration and all papers prepared for the unsuccessful attempt to reconvene it in 2021.
The Cosatu rank-and-file are bitterly frustrated by Saftu’s hesitation in following through the political logic of its own birth — taking the struggle onto the political plane.
This would enable a rank-and-file driven socialist confederation of trade unions to come into being.
We call upon activists to prepare for the reconvened WCS by uniting the struggles of communities, women, youth, students and workers.
We call for the establishment of a United Socialist Civic Federation, a Socialist Women’s Movement, a Marxist Youth and Students Movement, and a Socialist Trade Union Confederation.
The platform and programme of action that we have drafted for debate can be found here.https://marxistworkersparty.net/?p=6650
