The Conference of the Left hosted by the South African Communist Party (SACP) over the weekend was a bold move in the game now being played to realign our politics as the hegemony of the ANC collapses. However, it failed to achieve its goal.
Along with a few tiny and irrelevant sects brought in to make up the numbers, it did manage to bring together the political forces that emerged from the old “radical economic transformation” (RET) faction of the ANC.
The EFF, Jacob Zuma’s MK party, the ATM and Ace Magashule’s ACT were all there. Irvin Jim from the metalworkers’ union Numsa, who has moved towards RET politics in recent years, was also in attendance.
The conference has caused a large and raw rupture within the Left. The mass-based democratic organisations of the Left, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo, Mining Affected Communities United in Action and the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu), along with various NGOs and intellectuals, stayed away on principle.
Their central reason for rejecting the conference was the inclusion of MK which, along with its leader’s history of extreme corruption and far-right positions on many social issues, has been closely associated with the xenophobic hate group March and March. A number of senior SACP figures privately expressed similar concerns. A number of Left organisations also complained that they had been listed on the programme without having been consulted.
The many requests for transparency around the funding of the conference were refused but, correctly or incorrectly, there seems to be a shared understanding across the Left that the money came from the same sources that fund Jim’s apparent “luxury lifestyle”. Unless there is clarity on the funding this understanding will inevitably be taken as fact.
There is now a clear and bitter split between the forces of the Left that reject xenophobia and corruption and those happy to ally with xenophobic and corrupt forms of nationalism. People in the former camp were disgusted to see a “Left” conference being addressed by the likes of Tony Yengeni, Magashule and Jim, all of whom are severely compromised.
What has become clear over the past few years is that there is now a fundamental political and ethical divide within what still calls itself the Left. On one side are forces committed to democratic organisation, accountability, nonracialism, internationalism and the defence of public institutions and public goods.
There is now a clear and bitter split between the forces of the Left that reject xenophobia and corruption and those happy to ally with xenophobic and corrupt forms of nationalism.
On the other are forces increasingly organised around patronage, conspiracy, strongman politics and forms of chauvinist nationalism. The latter often presents itself in radical language, but in practice politics becomes centred on access to state resources, political protection networks and personal loyalty to leaders, rather than democratic accountability or mass organisation from below.
The normalisation of xenophobia marks a profound political degeneration. Once migrants are blamed for unemployment, collapsing public services and crime the real sources of the crisis disappear from view: austerity, deindustrialisation, corruption, elite accumulation and state failure. Xenophobia redirects anger downwards towards vulnerable people rather than upwards towards political and economic elites.
No serious Left politics can be built on that basis. Across the world xenophobia has repeatedly functioned as a mechanism through which elites protect themselves from popular anger while societies become more authoritarian and more fragmented.
It’s no secret that the SACP is strongly opposed to the government of national unity (GNU), which is in effect a coalition government with the ANC and DA as key players. It would have preferred an alliance with the EFF and MK. Bringing the EFF and MK party into the Conference of the Left is widely understood as an attempt by the SACP to build a working alliance with these organisations with a view to negotiating a bloc return to, or deal with, the ANC after the next local and national elections. For this project the failing municipal governments in Johannesburg and Gauteng provide a model for the way forward.
From a Left perspective, the GNU has many serious failings. It continues to hold to austerity and conservative macroeconomic policy while driving a number of hard turns to the Right, including on migration, amendments to the laws that give some protection to land rights, and growing support for traditional leaders. It has failed to create jobs, build significant public housing or achieve meaningful land reform.
However, the crisis in Johannesburg offers a warning about where corrupt nationalist and xenophobic populism leads in practice. The city now lurches from one crisis to another while basic governance and services continue to deteriorate. Infrastructure collapses, water systems fail, roads decay and refuse accumulates while politically connected managers receive enormous salaries as public capacity weakens.
Municipal government increasingly appears less an instrument for public administration than a terrain for factional bargaining and patronage accumulation. For the democratic Left this cannot credibly be presented as a progressive alternative to the GNU.
The democratic Left now faces a profound strategic problem. Some organisations retain considerable moral credibility because they have consistently opposed corruption, repression and xenophobia. But moral authority on its own cannot shape state power.
Again and again the democratic Left has hesitated to build an electoral vehicle capable of contesting power at local and national level. The result is a vacuum in which voters, including working-class and poor voters, are left with only two choices: liberal technocracy on the one hand and corrupt and sometimes even criminal nationalist populism on the other.
Again and again the democratic Left has hesitated to build an electoral vehicle capable of contesting power at local and national level.
Internationally there are clear examples showing that another path is possible. Lula da Silva rebuilt the Brazilian Left through broad democratic coalition-building rooted in labour, poor communities and social movements, while maintaining a commitment to public institutions and social redistribution.
In Britain Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski have both rejected xenophobic politics in the face of the rise of Nigel Farage, the drift of the Conservatives towards the Right and the rightward shift imposed on Labour under Keir Starmer.
In New York Zohran Mamdani has rejected Trumpian xenophobia while building support around concrete material questions, including housing, transport and food prices. These projects are different in important ways, but they share an insistence that Left politics must be both democratic and materially grounded.
For the democratic and principled Left a strengthening of the DA’s role in a continuation of the GNU would be a serious setback. But bringing corrupt and sometimes xenophobic nationalists into coalition with the ANC would also be a disaster. Left must be built along the lines of what Da Silva, Corbyn and Polanski have achieved.
There are now two critical questions that confront us. The first pertains to the balance of forces in the ANC: will they lean towards the DA or towards the EFF and MK as ANC support continues to collapse? The second pertains to the democratic Left: will Saftu and others take up the challenge to build a Left party that opposes corruption and xenophobia?
We do also need to know who funded the conference and will fund the work of the collation it has built going forward. If the SACP and its new allies among the corrupt nationalists will not answer that question, investigative journalism must.
• Dr Buccus, a political analyst, is a senior research associate at the Auwal Socioeconomic Research Institute.
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