South African Trotskyists’ Open Letter to SRWP

No to Coalitions with Bourgeois Parties!

Forge a Leninist-Trotskyist Party! For a Black-Centered Workers Government!

We print below an April 23 open letter by Spartacist South Africa to the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP), which was launched to run in the May 8 elections to the National Parliament and provincial legislatures. The SRWP seeks to appeal to black workers and others who are bitterly angry that 25 years after the fall of the white-supremacist apartheid system, the ruling bourgeois African National Congress (ANC) has failed to deliver on the promise of equality and decent lives. However, the SRWP has not made clear whether or not it renounces supporting and/or forming coalitions with bourgeois parties, such as the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of Julius Malema, former head of the ANC Youth League. The letter by our South African comrades draws the line for the political independence of the predominantly black working class against all bourgeois parties.

After a convulsive wave of class struggle centered on black workers in the 1980s, and following the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, the white capitalists turned to the ANC and its Tripartite Alliance partners—the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)—to stabilize their rule. The old apartheid system was ended and the ANC was swept into power in the 1994 elections. Since then, the Alliance has presided over neo-apartheid capitalism on behalf of the same white ruling class, with a few black faces added to its roster. The police massacre of 34 black striking platinum miners in Marikana in 2012 was the bloody signature of this system of entrenched poverty, brutal exploitation and violent suppression of the proletariat. The SRWP was initiated by leaders of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), which was expelled from the Tripartite Alliance after refusing to support the ANC in the last national elections (see “Metal Workers Union Drops Electoral Support to ANC,” WV No. 1039, 7 February 2014).

In 1994, as virtually the entire left internationally supported the ANC, we told the truth: a vote for the ANC meant “a vote to perpetuate the racist oppression and superexploitation of the black, coloured (mixed-race) and Indian toilers in a different political form. The workers and all the oppressed must be mobilized independently of the capitalist masters” (WV No. 598, 15 April 1994). The ICL gave critical support to the Workers List Party, a left-reformist outfit whose campaign drew a crude class line against the ANC. As the SSA stresses in its letter, building a revolutionary workers party in opposition to all capitalist parties is key to the fight to overturn neo-apartheid capitalism and finally achieve the national liberation of the black masses.

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For the past few years, we have been following the developments around NUMSA leaving the Tripartite Alliance and laying the groundwork to launch the SRWP. From the beginning, we have openly raised our criticisms of the NUMSA leadership, while noting the potential significance of the decision to withhold support for the ANC. Although the SRWP’s programme does not represent any fundamental break with the Stalinist-derived reformism of the SACP, you appeal to the desire among sections of the working class for a party that represents the proletariat’s class interests against the capitalists. In light of this, and without minimising the fundamental political differences we have with the SRWP, we are considering giving critical support to your party’s campaign in the upcoming elections as a means of expressing class opposition to the ANC, EFF and other bourgeois parties. Necessarily, the basis for any critical support is class independence from bourgeois formations like the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance and the EFF. But your draft election manifesto takes no position on your attitude toward voting for these formations or entering coalitions with them. Where do you stand?

The preamble of the SRWP’s draft election manifesto points out that “the experience of all former imperialist colonies and our post 1994 experience” has demonstrated that “it is impossible to resolve the national, gender, race and class question in South Africa and the rest of the post-colonial world without simultaneously defeating capitalism and imperialism and establishing socialism.” While this is absolutely true, the leadership of NUMSA, including SRWP chairman Irvin Jim, along with the likes of [South African Federation of Trade Unions] SAFTU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, were for decades a loyal pillar of the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance that has administered the neo-apartheid capitalist state—thus perpetuating the superexploitation of the mainly black African proletariat, along with its coloured and Indian components, by a predominantly white capitalist class; national oppression of the black majority; hideous oppression of black women; and all the other evils of “our post 1994 experience.” The betrayals committed by the NUMSA leaders in service of the Tripartite Alliance include knifing workers strikes—from Mercedes-Benz in 1990 to Volkswagen in 2000—and backing Jacob Zuma’s bloodstained presidency for a second time just months after the August 2012 massacre of striking black mineworkers at Marikana. Marikana shows that cops have no place in the workers movement.

Together with our comrades of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), Spartacist/South Africa has consistently opposed voting for the ANC, EFF or any other bourgeois parties, or giving any political support to the ANC/SACP/COSATU Tripartite Alliance—a nationalist popular front that serves to subordinate the working class to its class enemy. This principled position flows from the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution, expressed in South Africa by our call for a black-centred workers government. The bourgeois-nationalist forces of dependent countries are incapable of solving any of the fundamental problems posed by imperialist domination because of their subordination to imperialist capital and mortal fear of their own proletariat. Only working-class power can resolve these problems, posing the need for socialist measures and the extension of proletarian revolution to the advanced capitalist countries. This is counterposed to the schema of “two-stage revolution” (a.k.a. the “National Democratic Revolution”) which has been pushed by the SACP to alibi the Tripartite Alliance.

We have consistently opposed voting for workers parties that are part of the popular front. Opposition to popular fronts is the tradition of Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin, whose intransigent opposition to the Provisional Government (the popular front of its day) following the February 1917 revolution was decisive for setting the Bolshevik Party on a course toward the working-class seizure of power in October.

Despite the fact that the SRWP claims to stand in the Leninist tradition, on the critical issue of coalitions with bourgeois parties, and in particular with the ANC and EFF, it is evasive. While the EFF uses left-sounding populist rhetoric, both of these are bourgeois-nationalist parties that represent the class enemy. In November 2018, Business Day reported that Zanoxolo Wayile, then interim chair of the SRWP, “said the party would not rule out possibly working with parties with the same ideological outlook, such as the EFF, but has not yet entertained such discussions” (“Numsa Workers’ Party Hopes to Shake Up the Left in SA,” businesslive.co.za). A December 2018 document on the SRWP’s attitude towards the 2019 national elections states, “We only consider alliances with organizations of workers, small farmers and the poor, not any capitalist or reformist parties,” without naming these parties. As already mentioned, the SRWP’s draft election manifesto makes no mention at all of the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance or the EFF, much less stating the SRWP’s attitude toward them.

The question of the political organisation of the proletariat, independent from and in opposition to all capitalist parties, is central for genuine communists who would fight for socialist revolution in South Africa. So, comrades, where do you stand: would you vote for, or form coalitions with, the ANC or EFF? This is a question of vital importance to all class-conscious workers. For our part, we are prepared to give critical support to your campaign, and would call on such workers to vote for the SRWP while maintaining our own Leninist-Trotskyist banner, but only if your answer is a clear “no.”