Rethinking the Left

“This was the period of confusion, disintegration and vacillation”[1] wrote Vladimir Lenin of what he described as the Third Period of the historical development of Russian Social Democracy.   He could very well have been writing about South Africa today.

South Africa finds itself at a period of its own historical development in which the fundamental contradictions of society threaten to render deep and lasting scars on the psyche of the populace while denuding the state of even the pretence of democratic institutions as various factions’ battle to capture the state as its chief spoil.

The gradual unbundling of the ANC as the hegemonic core to which the broad undefined Left, and the populace as a majority looked to for direction, guidance and leadership, has reached its historical dead end.

The ANC and South Africa are not unique in this experience and indeed we are following a path which Karl Marx first pointed to in 1852 and which has proven to be a consistent measure of the historical development of modern states everywhere.

Karl Marx, both as a scientist and revolutionary, applied his philosophy of dialectical materialism to the experiences of France during the period of 1848 – 1851, where in short period of three years, “France showed, in a swift, sharp, concentrated form, all those processes of development which are inherent in the whole capitalist world.”[2]

During this remarkable period, in which the nascent capitalist state of France was described by Engels as “the centre of Feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model country...(which) shattered feudalism and established the unadulterated rule of the bourgeoisie in a more classical form than any other European country”[3],   experienced  on the one hand the development of “parliamentary power” and on the other the struggle for power between various competing factions and parties for control of the spoils of the state and its culmination in the “perfecting and strengthening of the executive power.”[4]

This historical experience which Marx so closely studied and during which the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte was achieved through first the use of democratic means as he “perfected parliamentary power so that (he) could overthrow it”, bears significant resemblance to our own experience in South Africa today.

The unassuming rise of Jacob Zuma to a position where the Parliamentary majority are literally unable to hold the President to account has allowed the President to consolidate an increasing centralised control over the state and the party.

In the ANC`s latest policy discussion documents the "Legislative and Governance" policy proposals seek a new and enlarged role for the presidency.  In other words, the policy proposals aim to concentrate and centralise power in the Presidency.  These are not coincidental policy shifts, but bear the hallmarks of developmental trajectories of all capitalist states generally and pose a significant challenge to those on the “left” and the populace in general who harbour any hopes of maintaining democratic values, never mind deepening democratic processes.

It was precisely this development that caught Marx`s attention and which underpinned his central thesis on the theory of the state. It is also perhaps this thesis which has baffled and confused the broad left in South Africa and which uncertainty has resulted in “confusion, disintegration and vacillation”.

The confusion and vacillation became acutely evident during the recent Zuma Must Fall Marches organised initially by broadly left liberal bourgeoisie non-governmental organisations such as Section 27 and TAC who have argued that the task of the Left is to struggle for social justice[5], uniting all social classes and strata around the central question of human rights.

The response of the more traditional left formations was far from homogenous and vacillated from immediate participation to the need to obtain mandates and peripheral support to the outright refusal to march under the same banner as Capital and Bourgeois elements.

A statement sent via email by Zwelinzima Vavi in which he confirms that despite broad agreement among 13 unions that  “there is however an important divergence on the issue of how we should relate with the capture or hollowing out of the state by a gang of crony capitalists and actions of Zuma(sic)”.

NUMSA for its part has released a statement which affirms its own position in which it views the current “crises” as “nothing more than a fight amongst greedy capitalists, who are battling each other for control over government and its budget… NUMSA, however, is not part of any of the political parties and organisations that are calling for mass protests against Zuma or for Pravin”[6]

Outside of these formations, and among the general public and especially among long term activists and the politically ambitious, the extent of the confusion was palpable with unrestrained conflicts emerging on social media whether for or against the coalition of working class and bourgeoisie elements.

This moment of intellectual crises has more than any other moment post 1994 perhaps best brought to the fore the historical dilemma faced by the Left in South Africa. Up to this point the question of Parliamentarianism was an unquestionably legitimate option and any talk of a more radical class based struggle was generally side-lined to the radical fringes of the “ultra-left” with the centre of the political paradigm existing in the realm of social compacts and multi-class coalitions as articulated by Mark Heywood and others.  

It is thus at this juncture an opportune moment to unpack Marx`s theory of the state, the lessons he learned during the period of 1849 to 1851 and attempt to relate these insights to our current conjunction of State Capture, the erosion of liberal representative democracy and the need for the working class left to realign itself to its historical mission.

Class Society and the State as a Fundamental Contradiction

Radical economic transformation, Inclusive economies and slogans promoting socialism, are rife in the public discourse at the present conjunction. This is partly because of the historical work undertaken by socialists to imbue the national struggle with a socialist tinge but also because opportunists of all hues need desperately to deceive the masses into believing that their interests coincide with the political elites and bourgeoisie classes.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. “Socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds”. [7]

Lenin, in his attempt to articulate why it is important for any Marxist to understand the gravity and import of Marxist dialectical and historical materialism, warns that attempts to turn Marx`s insights into harmless doctrinaire slogans that “omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary soul” of its teaching , is aimed at precisely what appears to be the now de rigueur  call by some to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie while at the same time “emasculating,  vulgarising  and blunting their revolutionary edge”.

Thus taking the time to understand the real teachings of Marx are critical for any radical approach to the struggle of the working and unemployed masses of our county and should underpin any formation that seeks to act as an independent working class formation.

Underpinning the Marxist theory of the state is the unescapable realisation that the existence of the state is the result of the irreconcilable differences between the two classes, namely the bourgeoisie and the working classes. Friedrich Engels summarises this conclusion as follows:

“The state is by no means a power imposed on society from the outside…[r]ather it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, may not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power apparently standing above society becomes necessary, whose purpose is to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of order: and this power arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly separating itself from it, is the state.”[8]

It is at this point that many disagreements emerge between those who hold that the state is, based on the reading above, an organ for reconciling the classes. Their logic then follows that our task must be to bring together these various forces in concert in order to drive social compacts and coalitions which will reduce the antagonisms and lead to a socially just outcome.

Of course, as Lenin warned, we should be cautious about blunting the revolutionary soul of this seminal thesis.  Marx and Engels were emphatic that the state, far from being the force that reconciles the antagonisms of society, the state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another.

This emphatic and direct conclusion, Marx draws from his experience of the French Revolutionary struggles during 1849 – 1851. As outlined above, Marx saw in this period the workings of capitalist states in general and the conclusion he draws is “definite, practical and palpable” and culminates in the foundational thesis of his theory of the state.

“Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary Republic found itself compelled to strengthen with its repressive measures, the resources and the centralisation of the government power. All revolutions brought this machine to greater perfection, instead of breaking it up. The parties which alternatively contend for supremacy looked on the capture of this vast state edifice as the chief spoils of the victor.”[9]

It is the fight about the spoils of the state that continues to illuminate contestation around the state and not the more radical question posed by Marx and Lenin, namely that of “breaking up the state”.

During the period that Marx surveyed the French Revolutions and the Period in which Lenin remarks on the Russian state during 1917 and which we may even compare to South Africa today, where “the game that went on of changing the combination of persons forming the…government was, in essence, only the expression of this division and re-division of the spoils, which was going on high and low, throughout the country, throughout the central and local government.”[10]

It is this ongoing re-division of the spoils, or what NUMSA calls “nothing more than a fight amongst greedy capitalists, who are battling each other for control over government and its budget”, about which Lenin points out that “the longer the process of re-apportioning the bureaucratic apparatus among the various bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties…goes on, the more clearly the oppressed classes with the proletariat at their head, realise that they are irreconcilably hostile to the whole of bourgeoisie society.”[11]

The parliamentary honeymoon period in South Africa may still not have reached this point exactly, but the signs of disillusionment and rejection of the entire liberal parliamentary system are becoming more evident, as the material conditions, brought about by the deepening crises of global capitalism, intensifies the growing inequality gap.

The growing tendency of “parliamentary cretinism” that Marx warned against has become increasingly apparent even to the uninformed. The growing gap between the rich and well-heeled political classes  and the masses, together with the sterile debates in parliament that are increasingly poignant for their lack of impact on the material conditions of the poor and unemployed, cannot remain unchallenged for very long. The growing discontent among the masses cannot be held in abeyance for much longer especially as the growth of mass social movements agitates for social and economic change for their constituents. Increasingly these social movements are encouraged to seek relief and audience through parliamentary/official channels and increasingly they are faced with the daunting reality that parliamentarians are hardly interested in changing or challenging the status quo and are more concerned with preserving their own position of privilege through acquiescence and supplication before the Political elites.

Today socialists are talking of a new conjuncture in Europe (the home of parliamentary democracy and the key reference point of our own system), where the rise of the Right has evoked new fears of Fascist turns. Notwithstanding the impacts of neoliberal policies on the welfare of the European middle and working classes and the ever widening inequality gap exacerbated by neoliberal economics, the paternalism of the left parliamentary parties in Europe and the fundamental inadequacies of representative parliamentary democracy has denuded the general trust of the public in the system as a whole and opened up the space for demagogues and charlatans.

The political space in Europe, which not so long ago could be described as determinately liberal and even left of centre has been dangerously soured by the failure of social democratic parliamentary parties to maintain any semblance of anti-capitalist politics. Instead the social democratic parties of Europe have changed their orientation from one of transforming capitalism to better managing capitalism. This hypocritical turn and the continued precarious nature of employment and wellbeing in Europe has not gone unnoticed by the labouring classes and their sense of disconnect from the ruling elites have engendered and allowed the emergence of the right to take centre stage in the European political cauldron, while moving the entire centre of political gravity towards the right.

In South Africa, our own growing disconnect from the ruling elites continue to manifest in the reduced voter turnouts and the growth of liberal right wing elements such as Herman Mashaba of the Democratic alliance who was most recently connected to inflaming xenophobic violence in Johannesburg. The turn to right wing reaction has also been used as a convenient foil for Zuma to excuse the mounting criticism of his leadership and presidency and to maintain the support of rural traditional communities.

The question thus which seems to bedevil the way forward for the left in South Africa, is, what our relationship should be to the state and Parliamentary democracy and what should an anti-capitalist struggle look like in practice? 

 What is to be done?

“My reply to the question: what is to be done? Can be put briefly: Liquidate the Third Period”, is how Lenin ends his treatise on the challenges facing his own party and struggle in the period leading up to the Russian revolution. In other words, end the confusion, by providing clear political leadership, end the disintegration by building independent working class formations and by so doing overcome the vacillation that inevitably accompanies the preceding conditions.

In short outline, Lenin`s fundamental demand is to “always differentiate between two modalities of popular and class struggle: one that remains within the logic of the reproduction of capital and the other which builds the organisational, cultural and political conditions to get out of it.”[12]

In Marxist terms, the organisational, cultural and political conditions that portend the socialist future stands or falls on the development and deepening of democracy.  What Engels calls “complete democracy”, implies not only the rule by the majority, namely the proletariat, but also a democracy which goes beyond representative democracy and implies a level of popular participation that is inimical to the bourgeois liberal representative democracy held up today as the pinnacle of democracy in the West.

The distance that the state establishes between itself and the populace stands at the centre of the ongoing crises of corruption that has infested the entire liberal democratic edifice. As Lenin reminds us; “the omnipotence of wealth is thus more secure in a democratic republic, since it does not depend on the poor political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, therefore once capital has gained control of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely so firmly that no change either of persons, or institutions, or parties in the bourgeoisie republic can shake it”.

The challenges posed to the South African Left is clearly delineated as either the path of least resistance which remains within the logic of capitalism, both economic and political, through pursuit of solutions and outcomes that are firmly fixed and contained within the paradigm of capitalist accumulation and hierarchy, through the development and support of political elites who will play musical chairs with the spoils of the state and which offers only the promise of better managing capitalism, or the path less travelled in which the forces of the left, painstakingly and methodically build the mass movements  and independent workers party, which can present radical alternatives and the opportunity to break the political power of the dominant classes.  

This recurrence of the problem of classes and the state also reminds us that choosing the path less travelled implies implicitly that the overcoming of the capitalist logic involves ruptures, or a series of ruptures that belies the imposing narrative of the advocates of reconciliation between the classes who seek to replace "dialectics for eclecticism". Who seek to reduce what is an historical class struggle to constitutional challenges and parliamentary musical chairs.

These alternatives paths would necessarily include on the one hand popular grassroots institutions with forms of self-government/organisation where direct democracy is allowed to grow and be nurtured and on the other coordinated action aimed at the conquest and redetermination of state power from elite management to popular control. Measures to discipline the state and political elites by reducing salaries of members of Parliament to working wages are some of the radical measures that need to be considered as part of the effort to radically democratise the state and bring it under popular (proletariat) control.

A reconfiguration of the current party political system which denies local communities the right to recall representatives or for representatives to be directly accountable to the people  is also urgently necessary in order to break the top down political elite control of the current parliamentary system which has nurtured and encouraged the deep rot of corruption in the state. This understanding of the factors that feed corruption such as the concentration of power in hierarchical forms without proper popular accountability mechanisms are critical areas of further engagement if we are to find a way to end

Stamping off the well-trodden path of parliamentary cretinism in which political elites are shuffled around in a game of musical chairs must be an immediate goal of any popular conquest of the state.

One of the key learnings one is able to take from Lenin, both in his writing and in his life practice, is that “in all the crucial moments of his activity, Lenin is alone and in the minority, is often taken to be almost mad, is a menace for all those who stay on well-trodden paths …exactly because he never defends any political solution for its own sake, does not ever accommodate himself to any of the organisations that he himself has built, nor gains any sort of personal position, but judges everything in terms of the requirements of popular emancipation.”[13]

Thus the importance of bringing this type of demand to the forefront of any political movement should be judged not on its popular appeal, but on its ability to advance the cause of popular emancipation.

Separating out those paths which seek to better manage capitalism from those that seek to subvert it are possibly the most important challenges for the left today. Yet the historical baggage of Stalinist mistakes should be left at the gate as the left start to realise that new coalitions of working class formations are critical if we are to move the struggle beyond its current impasse and centralisation of state power.

In order to bring the various strands of Marxist thought to coalesce around a common agenda it will be critical for us to consider the advice of Engels about internal party debate; “No Party can live and prosper unless moderate and extreme tendencies grow up and even combat each one another within its ranks”.  Engels prefigures what we might today call pluralism.

The left in South Africa has always been fractured, but recent events in which some element of non-partisanship has emerged and become a praxis that has been able to advance critical struggles both in the educational front and on the political front as broad coalitions converge on the need to remove Zuma from office. The efforts by NUMSA to convene Left forces around the building of a new party has been commendable but has faltered lately as momentum is lost and old fissures emerge.

Yet the task of building an independent workers party, open to plural strands and factions but united around a common programme is urgently necessary and imminently possible and must be informed by the basic Marxist insistence that communists aren’t sectarian towards the workers movement and that “Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.”[14]

The high levels of distortion of the socialist vision cannot continue to go unchallenged and must be halted from becoming the common sense of the new epoch. To this end an independent workers party, able to unite the various factions of worker formations is absolutely necessary, not only to build common programmes of action but also to sustain and develop the belief in the possibility of a socialist transition. In this sense the important reminder by Georg Luckács is critical for us at this stage; “Because it is the party`s function to prepare the revolution, it is – simultaneously and equally – both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement.”[15]

As Jodi Dean explains, this simple yet powerful statement aims at reminding us that often the difference between action and inaction is not one of knowledge but one of belief; “an event becomes possible only in making itself possible”.[16]

The Party becomes possible only in making itself possible and a Socialist transition will only be possible if we make it possible.

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[1] What is to be Done? V.I.Lenin 2013 Martino Publishing Pg 167

[2] State and Revolution. V.I. Lenin 2011 Martino Publishing Pg 29

[3] F.Engels. Introduction to the Third Edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

[4] State and Revolution. V.I.Lenin 2011 Martino Publications Pg 29

[5] Mark Heywood. Seize Power the Role of the Constitution in uniting a struggle for social justice in South Africa. Chapter 9 of Capitalisms Crises Class struggles in South Africa and the World.

[6] NUmsa Statement: http://www.numsa.org.za/article/numsa-statement-crisis-facing-country/

[7] State and Revolution. V.I.Lenin. Preface to the first edition. 2011

[8] F.Engles, The origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. As quoted by V.I.Lenin in State and Revolution. 2011

[9] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,

[10] V.I Lenin, State and Revolution pg 27.

[11] Ibid

[12] Mimmo Porcaro, Occupy Lenin, Socialist Register 2013

[13] Ibid

[14] The Communist Manifesto

[15] Georg Lukácks, Lenin: The Unity of his Thought as quoted by Jodi Dean in the Socialist Register 2017

[16] Jean-Pierre Dupuy`s Notion of Projected Time as quoted by Jodi Dean in the Socialist Register 2017