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The Cracks in the Wall

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  There are moments when a nation reveals something profound about itself, not through the lofty promises contained in its Constitution or the speeches delivered from parliamentary podiums, but through the small decisions that expose what its institutions have come to accept, what they have learned to tolerate, and what no longer troubles their conscience. The past few weeks offered a few moments that helps to reveal the mundane slide into decay. Following a briefing on the plight of former mineworkers, Parliament issued a media statement welcoming the progress made through the Ex-Mine Workers Intervention Project. Faced with evidence of generations of occupational disease, billions of rands in unpaid benefits, and the continuing struggle of former mineworkers and their families to access compensation that should have reached them years ago, Parliament chose not merely to receive the report and note its findings. It went further. It publicly welcomed the outcome. That choice ...
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Democratic Praxis, Manufactured Unity and the Crisis of Left Renewal Part 3 of a Critique of the Conference of the Left

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  Democratic Praxis, Manufactured Unity and the Crisis of Left Renewal Part 3 of a Critique of the Conference of the Left The Conference of the Left emerged from a legitimate recognition that South Africa faces a profound social, economic and political crisis. Widespread unemployment, deepening inequality, ecological destruction, state failure, corruption, the fragmentation of working-class organisation and the declining legitimacy of the post-apartheid political settlement all point to the urgent need for renewed forms of democratic struggle and working-class power. Yet this crisis must also be located within a broader historical and global context. The emergence of the Government of National Unity reflects not only the electoral decline of the ANC, but also the exhaustion of a political project that for decades claimed to represent the aspirations of workers, the poor and the marginalised. Faced with the erosion of its social base, the ANC was presented with a historic choice. It...
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Mobility, Extraction and the Commons: Rethinking Liberation and Working-Class Politics in South Africa

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  (Part 2 of a Critique of the SACP’s “Conference of the Left”) South Africa’s contemporary political crisis cannot be understood simply through the language of corruption, failed governance or incomplete economic transformation. The deeper crisis lies in the unresolved structures of extraction, accumulation and exclusion that survived the democratic transition itself and continue to shape the organisation of wealth, power and everyday life. Much contemporary Left discourse still operates within an assumption that political liberation was fundamentally achieved in 1994, while economic liberation remained incomplete. This framework increasingly obscures the extent to which the post-apartheid settlement left the material foundations of power largely intact. While formal apartheid ended and democratic rights expanded, the structures of land dispossession, extractive accumulation, financial concentration and spatial inequality remained deeply embedded within South African society. The ...
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Mining, Memory and Manufactured Unity A Critique of the SACP’s “Conference of the Left” and the Erasure of Mining from Contemporary Left Politics

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  Mining, Memory and Manufactured Unity A Critique of the SACP’s “Conference of the Left” and the Erasure of Mining from Contemporary Left Politics Introduction The South African Communist Party’s proposed “Conference of the Left” presents itself as a historic attempt to rebuild working-class and popular power in a period of deepening crisis. Its draft resolutions speak of anti-capitalism, social ownership, popular struggle, democratic accountability and opposition to neoliberalism. Yet beneath this language lies a profound and politically revealing silence. Mining…the historic foundation of South African capitalism, racial dispossession, migrant labour, ecological destruction and class exploitation, is almost entirely absent from the strategic architecture of the proposed Council of the Left. While the draft resolution briefly acknowledges that ownership of “land, finance, mining, energy, retail, infrastructure, and productive capacity remains concentrated,” mining disappears from...
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