decolonial education. All these created a
massive new space for the Left to grow.
However, this required the adoption
of a non-sectarian, democratic and broad
political orientation. This would have
recognised that all these initiatives were
relatively weak and at a formative stage
in terms of political definition. None were
hegemonic inside the workers movement,
never mind society. These initiatives
needed the support and solidarity of each
of these different movements.
In other words, a united front
orientation and tactic was required to
ensure the sum became greater than the
individual parts. It’s in this context that
the Numsa Special Congress resolutions
for a United Front of trade unions and
social movements held promise, as did the
resolution to explore the development of a
movement for socialism.
The United Front responded to the
need for campaigns and to strengthen the
existing grassroots struggles of working
class movements. This was especially
around the provision of decent services and
the EFF’s demand for the redistribution
of wealth. With the emergence of the
#FeesMustFall movement, action by
labour in support of their demand for
free decolonial education could have
achieved a rare win against
neoliberalism. Its significance
would have been similar
to TAC’s victories for the
provision of HIV-AIDS
treatment.
The need for non-
sectarian politics
It also required an open,
anti-capitalist politics,
which recognised the need
to question the dogma
of Marxism-Leninism,
problematising practices
of substitutionism and
bureaucratisation. In other
words, a renewal of Marxism
as an emancipatory vision, as
well as an open and evolving
body of thought.
Both the EFF- and
Numsa-led political
initiatives did exactly this in their initial
phase. The EFF engaged with various
components of the Left in discussion on
Fanonism. It involved them in formulating
its election programme. For its part,
Numsa undertook not just engagement
with different components of the Left in SA
but also internationally. It undertook visits
to learn from international experience in
building new Left parties.
The rest, as they say, is history. We
disappeared down the rabbit hole of the
dogmatic, sectarian, undemocratic politics
of the National Democratic Revolution,
into sterile debates about whether the NDR
was on or off track. And we arrived where
we are now. An increasingly divided trade
union movement. A weak but surviving
network of community organisations. And
a lack of any credible political party of the
Left.What do we prioritise?
Firstly, as we have said in previous
issues of Amandla!, we need to start the
long, painful process of re-building the
trade union movement from the ground
up. There will be rebellions against the
bureaucracies which now run the unions.
We need to have resources in place to
support them wherever and whenever
they erupt. We need to have a set of clear
class struggle principles that will guard as
much as possible against the same kind of
degeneration happening again.
Secondly, we ned to continue the
work of building both the strength and
organisational capacity of community
organisations and also strengthening their
capacity to network with each other. We
must pay attention to material issues at a
municipal level, where they affect people’sdaily lives. We must become the leadership
that is capable of delivering what the
corrupt municipal politicians are unable to
deliver.
Thirdly, politically, we need to engage
in a systematic review of post-apartheid
Congress politics, and in particular the
sectarian politics of the NDR and all
that entails. The progress represented
by the “Numsa Moment” was derailed
by precisely those politics. We urgentlyneed dialogue between those who may be
emerging battered from those politics,
and the heavy defeats and chaos they have
given birth to, and those who come from
different political traditions. We must draw
the lessons from this experience on class
independence and united front politics
and move towards developing a mass
movement for socialism that can begin to
contest politically at all levels.
Fourthly, we need to continue the
work of struggling for the peril of the
climate crisis to be taken seriously. The
contradictions need to become clearer
between the division of the world into
capitalist nation-states and a global set of
solutions to the crisis. Because there is only
a global solution.
Fifthly, in a country in which a
key manifestation of the crisis of social
disintegration lies in Gender Based
Violence, we must consistently struggle
to weave feminist threads through all the
work we do as political activists.
And finally, we need to capture
the essence of the current phase of the
struggle in a programme that neither
jumps straight to socialist demands nor
simply lists every immediate demand in
an endless shopping list. It must centre on
a concise programme of demands that areachievable reforms but which capture an
anti-capitalist dynamic.
Such demands might include a
Basic Income Grant and a Wealth tax.
Whatever those demands are, they need to
be thrashed out in representative forums
and become the basis for regrouping and
rebuilding.A united front orientation and tactic was required to ensure the sum became
greater than the individual parts. It’s in this context that the Numsa Special Congress
resolutions for a United Front of trade unions and social movements held promise.