At its 5th Special National Congress held in December 2024, the SACP took a resolution to contest local government elections independently. Since then, there has been a lot of commentary on that decision. The ANC, the party’s Alliance partner, while recognising the party’s right to take any decision as an independent organisation, has been vocal in its disagreement. The ANC’s main argument has been that this decision will weaken the Mass Democratic Movement, inevitably creating space for right-wing forces to gain political mileage.
On their part, the SACP has consistently argued that their decision is not meant to break the Alliance, but in a way to strengthen it, as its current model is not working. The discussion of a ‘reconfigured’ alliance has been ongoing for years now within the MDM structures. However, it is clear that those who are pushing for a ‘reconfigured’ Alliance are losing.
Read through the lens of the National Democratic Revolution, as elaborated in the 1963 “Road to South African Freedom” document, the resolution to “go it alone” is a correct ideo-political decision. However, if it is going to successfully implement the resolution, the party needs to conduct an honest reading of the South African political terrain today and face head-on two fundamental issues facing their resolution. The first is their relationship with the ANC, and the second is the state of the working class in South Africa today.
SACP Central Committee member Khaya Magaxa has argued that the problem with the Alliance in its current form is the ANC’s sidelining of Alliance partners. The veteran unionist, Dinga Sikwebu, has attributed this to the problematic ANC belief in its “preordained leadership” status. Sikwebu correctly points out that this belief in the ANC’s apparently divine right to lead the South African revolution against colonialism does not have any support in history. Its dominance over the South African political discourse has been contested many times in the past.
The two-stage theory
This strategic mistake by the MDM structures can be traced back to the hotly contested ‘Black Republic Thesis’ of the 1920s. The Communist International’s 1928 resolution on ‘The South African Question’ proposed a two-stage theory for the South African liberation struggle. It called on the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) to:
combine the fight against all anti-native laws with the general political slogan in the fight against British domination, the slogan of an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic, with full equal rights for all races, black, coloured and white.
What the two-stage theory effectively meant was that the first stage — a native bourgeois republic — would be led by the native bourgeoisie. The Comintern called for the CPSA to work closely with native bourgeoisie movements, such as the ANC, to establish a native republic and thereafter a workers’ and peasants’ republic.
The Comintern’s resolution on the native republic split the leadership of the CPSA. Many of them disagreed with the thesis’s two-stage theory, arguing that there was no need for a bourgeois stage towards a socialist republic. Eddie Roux argued that in South Africa, where there was no native bourgeois class and virtually all the natives were workers, there was no need for the bourgeois stage. It would lack people to lead it. If the workers are equipped well enough, we can go straight to a workers’ republic. People like Ruth First and Archie Mafeje also argued that the first stage was unnecessary.
The second argument against the thesis was that slogans like “a native republic” would cause divisions between black and white workers. Many white leaders of the CPSA disagreed with the correct assertion that “South Africa is a black country”. Ndumiso Dladla has argued that what unites all traditions of white thought in South Africa is their denial of the historical political fact that South Africa belongs to its Black indigenous people and that white people’s presence, regardless of their political persuasion, is due to the unjust dispossession of the natives of their land.
The Freedom Charter was adopted by the ANC as its programme at its 1958 annual conference. This allowed the CPSA (by then the SACP) to fully embrace the underlying tactic of the native republic — the creation of a bourgeois democracy that will pave the way for a socialist republic — without accepting its historically correct assertion that South Africa is the inalienable right of the natives. So the two-stage theory was maintained without having to admit to South Africa being a ‘Black man’s country’. This gives the bourgeois class leadership of the first stage. While for the Comintern (the third communist international) in 1928, this bourgeois class was native, for the SACP in 1963, it was a non-racial, national bourgeoisie, but for both, the leadership is bourgeois.
Fanon has warned us about the national bourgeoisie in ‘Pitfalls’. One point made by Fanon is worth emphasising: “In under-developed countries, the bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for its existence and its growth”. By arguing for the establishment of national democracy as a transitional stage to socialism, the SACP made the mistake of working to create the conditions for the existence and growth of the bourgeois class that Fanon warned about. The SACP’s insistence on the sanctity of the Alliance seems to prove that it is not yet willing to admit this mistake.
Tactical alliance or divine right?
It is telling that the SACP acknowledges that, since 1994, the ANC’s policy direction has “failed to dismantle the structural injustices of colonialism of a special type (CST) and has weakened the state’s capacity to lead transformative development”. Yet all of the Alliance partners of the ANC come from the sectors of society that claim an interest in dismantling the structures of injustice of colonialism — labour (through Cosatu), the SACP and civic society (through Sanco). The ANC has, for over 30 years, pursued a policy agenda that is inconsistent with its Alliance partners while advantageous to capital. There is not a single representative of capital in the Alliance as an organised grouping, yet their interests are the ones that always see the light of day.
The SACP does not deny any of this. Yet it still maintains that the ANC’s direction over the last 30 years has resulted from subjective decisions made by different ANC leaders. They do not stem from a structural problem that is caused by the class character of the ANC itself. The SACP seems to believe the conceptually flawed fairytale told by the ANC that it is neither communist nor capitalist.
The ANC’s ideological orientation (or, some say, lack of it) makes it inherently incapable of pushing forward a socialist agenda. And it has never pretended to do that. It is the SACP that, over the years, has pushed a rhetoric that seems to suggest that the ANC can be ‘redeemed’ towards the interests of the working class.
The decision to form the Alliance was a tactical one. The ‘Road to South African Freedom’ document argues that national democracy will create the conditions necessary to fight for the establishment of a socialist republic. The social forces engaged with to bring about national democracy are not necessarily natural allies of socialism, but rather contingent tactical allies. This will bring better conditions for the fight for a socialist republic. After national democracy is achieved, nothing unites the strategic interests of socialists with those of the national bourgeoisie. Therefore, nothing is sacrosanct about the alliance between the ANC and the SACP. It is simply a tactical alliance which has run its course.
For some reason, however, the SACP refuses to acknowledge this fact. It is as if the SACP believes that the ANC is capable of one day delivering a socialist republic. What the SACP has effectively done over the past 30 years of South African Democracy is to outsource its historic responsibility — to bring about a socialist republic – to the ANC that is inherently incapable of assuming this responsibility. This also hinders the SACP from making an ideological distinction between itself and the ANC in what it fights for.
The political nature of the working class
The second major problem facing the SACP as it looks to implement its ‘go-it-alone’ resolution is who it mobilises, and under what political identity it mobilises them. The obvious and easy answer to that question is ‘the working class’. However, it becomes a bit tricky if working-class people do not recognise themselves as primarily working class. Put differently, the question is, is the South African working class a class in-itself or a class-for-itself?
If one looks at the union space as an indicator of the state of organised labour, the situation is frightening. Only 22% of employed people in South Africa are members of a trade union. Even those who do not necessarily identify themselves as part of a broad proletariat whose interests are intricately intertwined. Some workers join the union just for the benefits that union representation gives in the workplace. They are not necessarily concerned with the situation of fellow workers in the factory next door.
Take NUMSA’s 2019 SRWP experiment. In 2018, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) launched the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) as a workers’ party. Numsa had over 300 000 members, yet its workers’ party, the SRWP, managed only 24,439 votes in the 2019 elections and failed to secure a single seat in the National Assembly. Similarly, the mass killing of workers demanding a living wage in 2012 in Marikana failed to inspire a nationwide mass protest of workers after the massacre of one of their fellow workers.
Meanwhile, organisations mobilising within the working class but across different social categories are flourishing. Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance secured 330,425 votes, translating to nine seats in the National Assembly. They are part of the Government of National Unity, while campaigning under the #Abahambe rhetoric. The Cape Coloured Congress, an offspring of the Gatvol Capetonians Movement, secured two seats in the National Assembly, campaigning under the theme of coloured nationalism. Other movements that are gaining traction in working-class communities include Jacinta Zuma’s March and #OperationDudula, which mobilise working-class communities against African foreign nationals.
Establishing working-class identity
The point of this is not to suggest that raising class consciousness amongst the proletariat is an impossibility. The point is that to do that would require, to a large extent, asking people to subordinate their multiple social and political identities (their gender, their religion, their sexual orientation, their race) under their identity as working-class. While the working-class identity has not disappeared, it is not the dominant one that moves individuals into action or informs their political action.
The SACP, with its decision to go it alone, seems to suggest that it is confident that it can do within a year what it has failed to do since its inception —raise class consciousness so that the working class recognises itself as a class, and that the individual interests of the subjects within this class are intricately interlinked with the interests of the class as a whole. Yet the party even failed to build strong class solidarity when the students in the university presented a clear opportunity during the #FeesMustFall protest of 2016, which was, in the main, a protest of working-class students.
The party can manoeuvre its way out of this problem by building a network of communities beyond a politics organised exclusively around the working class — solidarity with feminist, racial justice, and environmental justice movements. This, however, is a long-term strategy, and the SACP has not done well in building solidarity outside of the identity of the working class. In the South African political terrain today, this also means that the SACP will have to navigate how to deal with the interests of ‘coloured’ working class communities without falling into the trap of reactionary coloured nationalism —the reactionary politics of #Abahambe and “Put South Africans First”.
For the SACP to make significant headway with its go-it-alone resolution, it will need to clarify its relationship with the bourgeois-oriented movement, the ANC, and break loose from its Alliance with it. At the same time, it needs to keep the door open for contingent possibilities of working together on issues that are of interest to the working class and go beyond mobilising under the identity of the working class alone. The party must realise that for the working class “to work on the mass terrain, it must abandon its class ghetto and transform itself into the articulator of multiplicity of antagonisms and demands stretching beyond itself” (Laclau & Mouffe). Failure to do that will result in the SACP’s attempt being another failed South African experiment with a workers’ party. It will end up with the SACP, with its tail between its legs, going back into the ANC Alliance with significantly less influence, as the ANC will now have realised that the SACP has far less influence than has been thought up to this point.
Lindokuhle Patiwe is a Cape Town-based social justice activist and independent researcher. He currently serves as the Cape Metro Regional Secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). He writes in his personal capacity.
