IMRAAN BUCCUS: Infighting is hobbling the ability of SA’s left wing to muster support

The SA Communist Party’s (SACP) decision to form a popular left front and contest the local government elections next year is another crack in the once  impregnable ANC fortress.

For the first 30 years of democracy the SACP has played an important role for the ANC by keeping its left flank within the broad church of the governing party. Now that this arrangement is breaking down, the ANC will find it harder to stem its ongoing and increasingly rapid loss of support among the urban poor and the working class. 

With huge unemployment and devastating poverty, SA could hardly be more ripe for building an alliance of left-leaning organisations and even a new left party. However, previous attempts at a popular front and party of the left have all failed, and failed badly. 

Projects such as the Democratic Left Front and the United Front, both attempts by NGOs and academics to build such popular fronts on the left, were complete flops. 

The Workers & Socialist Party (Wasp), a small Trotskyite party, failed dismally in the 2014 elections. The Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party, an independent communist party that emerged from the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), also failed badly in the 2019 elections. 

The SACP will not do any better if, like all of these failed projects, it simply assumes that the working class and poor will automatically rally to its flag. The trust of the people has to be earned. Building a viable left party will require years of careful work to build trust with the organisations and struggles of the working class poor, and learn to develop programmes and campaigns that resonate with popular sentiment. Successful left parties need to speak in the language that resonates with ordinary people.

The SA left is notorious for its arrogance, dogmatism and sectarianism, self-destructive habits that have resulted in 30 years of consistent failure to advance a left project. It is not yet clear if the SACP understands this and will be able to chart a new path or if it will just be the latest group to step forward in supreme confidence that it has all the answers before failing.

What is clear is that the SACP does not have the hold on the unions that it once had. After its unbanning in 1990 the SACP gave political direction to the trade unions. The party saw itself as the brain and the unions as the muscles of the working class. This arrangement began to break down in 2013 when it led the drive for the expulsion of Numsa, the largest and most militant trade union in the country, from the ANC alliance in response to the union’s scathing criticism of Jacob Zuma. 

Recent developments have shown that the party’s control over union federation Cosatu is now also in tatters. In November the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) held an international conference in Johannesburg on democracy. The NED is well documented by many first-class academic studies to have played a leading role in numerous US-backed coups against elected governments. As a result, any direct or indirect collaboration with the NED is a red line for the left around the world.

The entire SA left condemned the NED conference but, despite the SACP’s clear opposition, Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi shocked the left by speaking at the conference. This was the end of Cosatu’s standing as a left federation and a clear indication that the SACP no longer holds significant influence over the union movement.

Now that it has lost its ideological and political control over the union movement the SACP enters this new phase in its life without a strong organisational presence among the poor and working class. It also enters this new phase with the left outside the ANC organisationally, and ideologically divided.

The SA left generally lacks the political maturity that has made successful left projects possible in other countries. It spends far too much time on internecine hostilities at the expense of building a united left project, with each faction imagining it, and it alone, should give leadership. Wasp, Numsa and a network of academics and NGOs have all tried and failed to lead the building of a viable left project. If the SACP does not take a very different approach it will also fail.

Constructive collaboration

Ultimately though, a serious approach to building a left party should not depend on each left organisation taking its turn at an attempt at leadership and then failing. A serious left strategy should try to draw all the mass-based organisations of the left together in a spirit of nonsectarian humility and recognition that no single organisation has all the answers. This would have to include Numsa, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the SACP, and all other unions and smaller grassroots groups that are open to constructive collaboration. 

This is not an easy thing to accomplish. Numsa’s new year message signalled its openness to collaboration with the SACP, but also included Zuma’s MK party in its list of “progressive parties”, something that will be anathema to the SACP and Abahlali baseMjondolo. The SACP’s year-end statement endorsed the clearly rigged elections in Mozambique and Venezuela, something that will be anathema to the democratic left.

The SACP has said that though it will run candidates against the ANC in the local government elections next year, it will retain membership of the ANC. This will not be acceptable to Abahlali baseMjondolo, which flatly refuses to have anything to do with anyone linked to the ANC.

In light of all these differences the most mature and practical solution might be for all the mass-based organisations of the left to meet and work out which issues they can agree on, and collaborate on these issues. The entire left is in support of Palestine, for example, opposed to austerity, agrees on the necessity for a basic income grant, is committed to rapid urban and rural land reform, and is opposed to xenophobia.

An agreement to form a united front on such issues while bracketing areas of disagreement could be a viable way to begin to build a unified left in SA.

• Dr Buccus is a senior research associate at the Auwal Socioeconomic Research Institute.