part of no part

  (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 ...

  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...

  Yesterday, government ministers gathered before the country in yet another carefully managed press conference. Meeting as a security and governance cluster, they attempted to reassure the public that the state does not support violence against foreign nationals and that government merely seeks to ensure peaceful protest, lawful conduct and public order. But the problem facing South Africa today is not simply whether government formally condemns violence. The deeper problem is that many of the same political actors now expressing concern helped create the political atmosphere that made this moment possible. For years, political leaders across the spectrum have increasingly relied on the language of fear, invasion, illegality and criminality when speaking about migrants, informal workers and poor Black Africans. Public frustration over unemployment, collapsing municipalities, crime and economic decline has repeatedly been redirected toward vulnerable outsiders rather than t...