ANCYL
The tragedy – and most severe critique of the South African Left – is that Julius Malema and the ANC Youth League were allowed to hijack the struggle for economic freedom, for their own opportunistic and demagogic purposes.  It would thus be a big mistake for the left to dismiss the Youth League’s march for economic freedom with the same cynicism of the mass media. The media both created the hysteria around the march and then systematically downplayed the numbers that participated and pooh-poohed the central theme of economic freedom.  The media additionally ‘played the man not the ball’ by focusing on the manifest and multiple contradictions of Malema: marching for economic freedom today, partying in the lap of luxury on the next in Mauritius. The march
Faced with the huge logistical challenges of marching on the Chamber of Mines in the city centre, the Johannesburg Securities Exchange (JSE) in Sandton and then going on to the Union Building some 50–60 km away is not the easiest of undertakings. Yet more than 15 000 people participated at different points on this long march. Those of us working in the labour movement and with social movements can appreciate those numbers. They are not insignificant.. This march required stamina. Some of us would baulk at a 10 km walk. This was a march where people suffered for a cause. Not an everyday occurrence in post-apartheid SA.
And the cause was economic freedom
Yes, economic freedom can mean anything and, in South Africa, it has come to mean an exceedingly privileged right reserved for the politically privileged elite and those few groups with suitable connections to the political elite.  No one should make light of the political freedom won in 1994; most people, however, are still waiting for their economic liberation from poverty and open exploitation.  The Freedom Charter – the rallying cry and unifying promises for so many during the struggle against apartheid – remains impoverished.  The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industries all remain secure in private hands. The promise of controlling all other industries to ‘assist the wellbeing of the people’ similarly remains empty.
However, workers and the unemployed throughout the world are discovering their shared plight.  Moreover, they are discovering further common features.  They are becoming aware of class, of how capitalist globalisation has become a central issue everywhere concentrating wealth and creating 99% vs 1% societies.  The global economic crisis refuses to go away, despite all the comforting assurances from our economic ‘experts’.  South Africa will become increasingly infected by the European form of the crisis and, with a likely new wave of retrenchments here, more poverty and misery will be distributed to the economically disenfranchised majority.

Economic freedom means much more than just the nationalisation of the mines and the other heights of the economy – although the left should be chastised for leaving it to the ANCYL for making this an issue of national debate. It means a wage- and employment-led growth path sufficient to sustain local production of the goods and services needed by our people to guarantee a decent life. The reality of course is that capital prefers to speculate and disinvest from SA rather than investing in the productive job-creating sectors of our economy. Economic freedom means liberating the massive surpluses in our pension funds and investing these in national priorities such as building a renewable energy industry, public transport, and sustainable small-scale agriculture that can sustain millions of jobs.  Ultimately, economic freedom means socialising the decision making over investments; economic freedom means workers and communities will decide what is produced by whom, where and in what numbers.
Economic freedom is a slogan for our time; it might even become a material force behind which millions rally.