What the Leninist Faction Rejects

The following motion was adopted at the Fifth National Conference of SSA, December 2015, with all members of the Leninist Faction voting against.

The racial hierarchy built into South African capitalism is still firmly in place. This country after more than 20 years of ANC-led Tripartite Alliance rule remains a neo-apartheid capitalist society, with a near-complete overlap of race and class. While the rigid legal segregation characteristic of the apartheid regime is gone, the economic basis of the old apartheid system remains: the super-exploitation of black labour by the overwhelmingly white capitalist class, now with a few black faces. As stunningly demonstrated by the Marikana massacre, the ANC-led Alliance continues to enforce the system as black frontmen for the white ruling class and its imperialist senior partners. To maintain its rule and prop up neo-apartheid, the Alliance exploits the dominance of nationalist ideology over the black masses and like the apartheid butchers before them, taps into the racial hierarchy—consisting of whites on top, Indians and Coloureds as intermediate layers and blacks at the bottom—to pit different sections of the oppressed against each other. As we have consistently warned, if the struggle for liberation does not find expression along class lines it will lead to inter-ethnic and racial bloodletting, a warning that has already been borne out. The only way out for all the oppressed is the fight for a black-centred workers government as part of the international proletarian revolution. This perspective encapsulating Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution espouses the fact that for the black masses, the proletarian revolution is very much the supreme act of national liberation.