Remember Marikana!
FOR INDEPENDENT WORKING CLASS ORGANISING AND STRUGGLE!
The SACP will host the Conference of the Left (CoL) from the 29th to the 31st of May 2026. It has invited a wide array of organisations and individuals it defines as the left for the purpose of coming up with a programme of action and structure that advances the unity and struggles of left formations. The programme of the conference consists of plenary and thematic sessions on what has been identified as key areas requiring discussion and resolution.
The call has been received with mixed positions ranging from enthusiastic embrace to passionate rejection. Some, like NUMSA and COSATU, genuinely believe that the conference offers an opportunity to advance the interests of the poor masses and provide the necessary political framework for that. At the other end, SAFTU and WASP among others, have rejected the call based on the political record of SACP in the Tripartite Alliance with the ANC and COSATU, specifically the betrayal of Marikana. Occupying the middle ground are those, like SOPA and others, who acknowledge the political betrayals of the SACP but hope to use the opportunity to get to the rank and file of the unions and mass organisations participating.
We say that the CoL is a desperate manoeuvre by the SACP bureaucrats to construct a political platform that best captures the anger of members and working masses against the attacks from the SACP supported ANC government and channel it towards the usual class collaboration. It is also a reflection of the pressure by Chinese imperialism for a political vehicle not dominated by forces aligned with US/western imperialism. The call should be taken as a wake up call to re-focus on the historic task of building an independent and revolutionary political platform of the working class – namely the revolutionary socialist party!
We argue that the position on the CoL taken by the “Marikana” left expressed by SAFTU is correct as far as it goes. It rejects participation in the CoL. The SACP is indicted for its role in the Marikana massacre and for its expulsion of NUMSA for supporting the miners. We think there is no coming back for a leadership of the SACP stained in miners’ blood. The formation of SAFTU marks that historical break and to retreat from Marikana would condemn it in front of the most advanced militant workers and betray generations of workers locked into the statisation of the unions under the control of the SACP.
In contrast, the NUMSA statement fails to give a balance sheet of the SRWP experience as well as transcend the politics of the Charter. Beyond the betrayals of SACP and its attempt to unite the ‘left’ in order to bureaucratically lock it into the state apparatus, NUMSA begins with its ‘minimum program’ of demands to meet the immediate needs of workers. These include those that drove the struggle of the miners in 2012 and now reflects the needs of all workers in SA. This ‘minimum’ program was essentially the same as that motivating the formation of the SRWP in 2019.
We argue that the SRWP failed not because it was a party, but because NUMSA failed to base it on more than a ‘minimum’ program of immediate demands and general calls for socialism in the future – the mini-max program. The bureaucracy also prevented the rank and file from active participation resulting in a hollowed party without a base. However, today NUMSA fails to recognise that the deepening of the crisis and the end of bourgeois democracy demands drawing the correct conclusion that “embeds” the socialist demands for a workers’ state to expropriate (nationalisation without compensation) capitalism. To be able to advance this position NUMSA needs to make the historic break from the Stalinist two-stage ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution followed by a socialist revolution to recognise the necessity for a combined or permanent revolution as advocated by both Lenin and Trotsky.
Yet that break will not be complete without two further vital developments. First, to invoke permanent revolution and apply it correctly, comrades must understand that the revolutionary party is not the enemy of the unions but the voice of the unions. Unions, popular organisations, etc etc express the day to day level of reality in contesting wages, prices and profits, while the party addresses the fundamental reality of who produces the wealth, who lives off it, and how to end the ‘wage system’. Unions need the party to elevate the trade union consciousness to a revolutionary consciousness. Both are dialectically fused in the class struggle based on the transitional method. Trade union consciousness recognises the necessity of transforming the relations of production only when the party raises the socialist demands for smashing the bourgeois state and building a workers’ state.
That is why NUMSA’s break with Stalinist stagism must include the revolutionary party to transform the ‘minimum’ program into the transitional program for the workers’ state that is necessary to win even the most immediate demands. Workers mobilise to win immediate demands of jobs, wages, health and education, and in fighting against the bosses’ armed reaction, learn that it is necessary to fight for political and socialist demands. The acts of striking, armed self-defence and applying workers’ democracy advances and prepares consciousness for the struggle for power which makes the socialist demands of smashing the state and expropriating capital, possible and actual.
Second, the revolutionary party is not merely a national party. Its program of class war and revolution must be internationalist. It is one thing to recognise that national chauvinism is exploited by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class. It is another to understand that chauvinism must end in fascism and the destruction of the working class unless it is defeated by an international party. The crisis in South Africa is part of the universal terminal crisis of capital being imposed on workers everywhere. National liberation cannot be won short of defeating imperialism in the West and in the East, and the transitional program makes clear that a united Africa, Europe, Asia, Latin America and finally globally, will be possible only when workers’ unite internationally to make the world socialist revolution.
For a revolutionary party based on the trade unions in Southern Africa, and in the United Socialist States of Africa!
For a New World Party of Socialist Revolution!
RWG-Z/ILTT
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