(Rajesh Jantilal/Getty Images)
In May 1993, a year before the watershed vote that would forever change South Africa’s trajectory, the South African Communist Party (SACP) considered how it would promote socialism through a partnership with the ANC.
The SACP had been forced to come to an answer to one important question: would the party contest the ANC in the upcoming elections? Without the support of workers, represented by trade union federation Cosatu, the party’s ability to grow its own voter base was limited.
And so a paper titled “The role of the SACP in the transition to democracy and socialism” noted that the evolution of the ANC would become critical to this cause.
The paper also stated that the SACP should avoid adopting an autonomous character. That is unless “the national liberation project is successfully hijacked by some liberal project, or undermined by general chaos”.
After the first 10 years of democracy, the ANC has seen its own support fade, culminating in an unprecedented knock at the polls in the 29 May general elections. Although the party has managed to hold on to power through a government of national unity, its predicament raises important questions about the fate of the tripartite alliance and, by extension, the leftist movement.
Seven years ago, the communist party resolved that it would go up against the ANC, although it did not stipulate when. The party first threatened to do so back in 2007 when Thabo Mbeki was president.
Last year, this threat was revived when the SACP’s augmented central committee agreed to contest elections “with an effective and reconfigured alliance as our preferred modality as our posture toward the 2024 elections and beyond”. The party seemed to have the support of some in Cosatu, including the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union, the federation’s biggest affiliate.
But the SACP ultimately decided against contesting elections, asking of the ANC that it have a say in coalition talks in the case it loses its majority.
There was good reason at the time to believe that the SACP would have struggled at the polls.
During the 2019 elections, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) took its own swing through its Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP). The party won only 24 719 votes (0.15%), despite the union representing about 360 000 workers, making it about as big as the SACP based on membership. Numsa’s federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions, has somewhere between 600 000 and 800 000 members, making it Cosatu’s closest rival.
Reflecting on its dismal performance, the SRWP said it wasn’t shocked at the outcome.
“Here in South Africa, for example, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions in these elections openly supported and campaigned for the ANC and its billionaire leader, Mr Ramaphosa. Such historic betrayals of the working class by their own organisations work decisively against raising socialist consciousness among the working class and throws them into the arms of their cruel tormentors and exploiters,” it said in a statement.
“Against such odds, genuine communist revolutionary organisations such as the SRWP have an uphill battle to secure seats in bourgeois parliaments.”
The party did not contest the 2024 election.
Numsa’s 2014 split from Cosatu, which followed the union’s decision to withdraw its electoral support from ANC, was considered a crucial step in renewing South Africa’s left.
At that time, academic Vishwas Satgar, who had been expelled from the SACP in 2009, wrote of the “Numsa moment”: “It is about a battle to determine the future of South Africa and reclaim the strategic initiative for the country’s working class.”
A decade later, an Amandla magazine editorial published ahead of this year’s vote contemplated why no truly anti-capitalist party had emerged — surmising that while the Numsa moment may have represented a break from the ANC, there was no such break from Stalinist politics.
“There will be no shortcut out of this state of decline,” the April 2024 editorial reads. “This election may be significant in that it will, in all likelihood, end the complete dominance of nationalist politics.”
In the wake of the ANC’s waning grip on power, it is tempting to believe that the SACP and Cosatu may cut their losses and finally take up the project of renewing South Africa’s left. It won’t be that easy.
Other parties — namely ANC spinoffs, the Economic Freedom Fighters and Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party — have already sought to exploit the gap left by the left. The latter party has done especially well, benefiting from a heady cocktail of right-wing ideals and socialist rhetoric.
Building a leftist party to contest future elections will require exorcising existing organisations of their Stalinism — or creating something from a much smaller base. Both will require a tremendous effort. But one hopes that the current political quagmire, which is set to further entrench the neoliberal agenda, will hasten the process.