The Failure of the “revolutionary alliance”
And the future of a new coalition
Though the story of this alliance has a long arc, I only want to focus in on a small and basic introduction to the variously named tripartite alliance, or the revolutionary alliance of South Africa, made up for the SACP, COSATU, and the ruling party, the ANC. The South African Communist Party, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and South Africa’s ruling party since the first democratic elections, the African National Congress, have been in struggle together since the 1990 release of Nelson Mandela, and it was meant to usher in a revolutionary phase of political work, shifting the paradigms created by colonialism and apartheid in order to make a more equal and just society.
But we saw immediate and large scale pro-apartheid government, western, and neoliberal intervention. And as a definitional note, I use neoliberal here to refer to the policies of expansion of free market capitalism, the implementation of binding loans and credit structures with the IMF and World Bank, and the growing insistence on the individual as the primary focus for all economic decisions, gutting most social services programming and abandoning the socialist foundations of the ANC.
What initially prompted me to think about this alliance, about 16 years ago now, in the Mbeki/Zuma factional party fighting, was what the actual point of the South African Communist Party was. And now, with our country facing a different kind of alliance, I wonder again, what is the point of a communist organization that serves no revolutionary purpose? Our president, now, is worth over 6 Billion rand. Our then president Mbeki was an economic reformist and largely in favour of austerity measures that cut at the lives of the already poor and struggling masses of the people. In fact, I would argue that much of the xenophobic violence of that era and the violent eruption in 2008, were accelerated by his shift toward the types of austerity that fostered an already existent form of animosity without a place to center the blame. Immigrants and migrants became the easy target in the years leading up to 2008’s outbreak of violence and during the presidency of Mbeki, it became accelerated beyond a slow burn flame. Our current president, Ramaphosa, is a capitalist extreme. He sat on the executive board of mining companies, including the company that massacred miners at Marikana, fast food chains and cellphone networks. He is a perfect example of the archetype of patriarchal business ownership. He is part of labour exploitation and practices of murder in the interests of capital. How, then, does the SACP justify its insistence on staying in an alliance with the ANC and its leadership. Before Ramaphosa, we had Zuma. A man who is guilty of fraud and corruption on charges related to arms deals, a man who owns a sprawling homestead worth a reported 240 million rand, while the folks in surrounding areas struggle to survive. He, too, was and is involved in financial dealings which have seen him rack up enormous wealth. Again, in this case, why did the SACP as well as COSATU choose to remain in this alliance when it is going against everything in its ethos? What is the duty of the communist party in South Africa if not to do the work of vanguardism, of being at the forefront of holding accountable whoever is the ruling party at a given moment in order to ensure that the revolutionary work continues, or simply to do it themselves?
What we have seen, instead, is a weak communist party in bed with an ANC that, at least at the level of power decision makers, is rife with people bent on the enrichment of the self at the expense of the masses of the people, an ANC that at the executive and often mayoral level, has completely given in to the whims of capital and self enrichment. At the same time, we are also contending with the fact that only a very specific type of transition out of apartheid was permitted, the type that allowed white settler colonial business people and landowners to keep and grow their wealth in the country, or, as the threat always goes, the country would be absolutely destabilized by western influence. We know that in the years leading up to the democratic election in 1994, South Africa experienced some of its worst levels of mass killing, funded and influenced by white and western money and weapons, as well as by the waning National Party.
Now, with our country entering a different kind of phase of alliance, a coalitional government, there are whispers that the Democratic Alliance and the ANC might go into this coalition together. Few things could be worse for the poor masses of the people of the country. The DA has run public services and housing into the ground in the Western Cape where they govern, gutting budgets for public housing programs and then turning around and claiming to not have had enough money from the national government to do the work. Additionally, the Democratic Alliance has been staunchly pro-zionist and pro-genocide. The ANC, for its part, is guilty of the mass mismanagement of the transition of South Africa out of apartheid. While destabilization projects are abound from outside forces, it is the actors within the party who continue to choose to propel practices of lackluster management of provinces and cities and councils. And while I am grateful for the expanse of the gains that have been made for our country, we cannot ignore the fact that over 50% of the country is living in poverty, with some 18 million people living in what is considered extreme poverty. And the extreme majority of those people are black South Africans. Ultimately, this shift to coalition, if gone into between the DA and the ANC, will signal some of the worst conditions for South Africans, who are already starved of fully adequate public services like transport, education, and healthcare. The Democratic Alliance is the lovechild of the two white apartheid parties, the National Party, and the Democratic Party (the white liberal party that only wanted apartheid to end insofar as it could line their pockets but would materially still keep black and brown South Africans bound to the conditions of their lives under apartheid). So for the ANC to go into coalition with them, knowing the desires of some of the executive leadership of the ANC to enrich themselves, and knowing the desires of the DA to create a system of meritocracy that rewards aspirations to landlordship, whiteness, and capitalism, and the continued gutting of services for public good, we must know that this will likely be one of the worst election outcomes for a South Africa that needs the good of the masses of the people to be taken seriously, not the desires of individuals who want to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. It will also, inevitably, be extremely bad for immigrants and for our neighbours in the Southern African region.
I want to end this brief exposition with a reality check. Capitalist reform will not fix the issues of capitalism. Therefore we need a strong anticapitalist movement and strong worker led trade unions, beyond the communist party and congress of trade unions tied directly and intimately to the national ruling party, a party drowned in corruption and attempts to deal with that corruption and capture. There is no way in this world that it should be permissible for the boss to walk away with 50 times what their lower paid workers are earning. Regardless of whether they are taking the risk or not, this is inhumane and exploitative practice. There is no ethics in capitalism. And there is no capitalism without violent racism.