Mining, Memory and Manufactured Unity A Critique of the SACP’s “Conference of the Left” and the Erasure of Mining from Contemporary Left Politics

 

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 the actual programme of action, campaign priorities, organisational structures and political strategy that follow.

There is: no mining working group, no reference to mining-affected communities, no discussion of extractivism, no confrontation with the Minerals-Energy Complex, no critique of the failures of Social and Labour Plans, no discussion of mine closure, environmental destruction, labour broking, mine violence or displacement, and no serious engagement with the political economy of mineral extraction in contemporary South Africa.

While South Africa’s economy has undergone important changes since the democratic transition, including financialisation, deindustrialisation and the expansion of services, extractive accumulation remains structurally central to the organisation of economic and political power. The Minerals-Energy Complex has not disappeared; it has been reconfigured through global finance, logistics, energy transitions, subcontracting and elite incorporation into extractive accumulation.

This omission is not politically neutral.

For those rooted in mining-affected communities and working-class struggles, the exclusion of mining from the centre of contemporary left politics raises profound questions about political honesty, historical accountability and the direction of the South African Communist Party itself.

This contribution argues that the marginalisation of mining within the Conference of the Left reflects not merely an oversight, but a broader political and ideological crisis within sections of the liberation movement and the SACP in particular. It reflects the extent to which a party historically associated with some of the sharpest analyses of racial capitalism, monopoly capital and the Minerals-Energy Complex has become increasingly detached from the lived realities of extractive violence and accumulation in post-apartheid South Africa.

The question confronting us is therefore not simply whether the SACP continues to use the language of radical politics. The question is whether it is prepared to confront the real structures of accumulation, extraction and elite power that continue to shape the lives of workers and poor communities in South Africa.

The Historical Centrality of Mining in South African Capitalism

Any serious Marxist analysis of South Africa has historically recognised mining as foundational to the development of racial capitalism. Mining was never simply another economic sector. It shaped South Africa and the Southern Africa Region using the migrant labour system, underpinned by territorial dispossession which led to the destruction of African agrarian economies, and which foregrounded the architecture of apartheid and its urban segregation, labour repression, state violence, and the formation of monopoly capital itself.

The South African Communist Party once understood this clearly.

Historically, SACP political economy located mining capital, monopoly finance, cheap black labour and the apartheid state at the centre of South African capitalism. The relationship between extraction, energy, finance and racial domination formed a core pillar of communist analysis during the anti-apartheid struggle and strongly overlapped with what later became theorised as the Minerals-Energy Complex.

Mining was not peripheral to the liberation struggle. Historically, the South African left understood mining capital, monopoly finance, cheap black labour and state power as central to the organisation of racial capitalism and the material foundations of apartheid itself. Mining was therefore critical to understanding: exploitation, class formation, territorial dispossession, labour control, imperialism, and the national question in South Africa.

The relationship between extraction, energy, finance and state power formed a central pillar of anti-apartheid political economy and strongly informed broader analyses of monopoly capital and racial accumulation during the liberation struggle.

Against this historical background, the near absence of mining and extractive accumulation within the current Conference of the Left documents becomes politically revealing. A process that speaks extensively about inequality, austerity, democracy and working-class struggle simultaneously avoids meaningful

engagement with the extractive foundations of South African capitalism and the lived realities of mining-affected communities.

The draft resolution acknowledges mining only once, in passing, as part of a broader list of sectors where ownership remains concentrated. After that, mining disappears almost entirely. This absence becomes even more striking when one considers that the document repeatedly refers to “the commanding heights of the economy,” “social ownership,” “anti-capitalism,” “working-class power,” and “transformation of ownership.”

Yet nowhere does it directly confront the extractive foundations of South African capitalism itself. The omission is therefore not accidental in its political effects.

The Erasure of Mining-Affected Communities

The Conference of the Left repeatedly frames itself as a vehicle for rebuilding working-class and popular power. Yet the communities most directly confronting the violence of extractive capitalism remain structurally absent from the process itself.

Mining-affected communities continue to experience land dispossession, poisoned water systems, ecological destruction, abandoned mines, gendered violence, labour precarity, police repression, mass unemployment, the criminalisation of artisanal miners, and systematic exclusion from decisions concerning land and mineral wealth.

Communities continue to endure what MACUA & WAMUA have correctly described as “development fraud,” “crumbs capture,” “false benevolence,” and a “false benevolence economy.”

These are not secondary contradictions. They are central features of contemporary accumulation. Yet the Conference of the Left contains no strategic programme on mineral governance, no demand for Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), no engagement with the crisis surrounding the MPRDA amendments, no analysis of mining-linked corruption, no framework for community ownership or democratic mineral governance, and no meaningful place for mining-affected communities within its organisational priorities.

Even the section on “Climate, Energy Sovereignty and a Worker-Led Just Transition” avoids directly confronting mining despite the fact that the energy transition itself is inseparable from extraction, coal dependency, platinum economies, critical minerals and mining labour regimes.

The effect is politically dangerous.

By shifting attention away from extraction and accumulation toward downstream questions such as service delivery, affordability, governance and institutional accountability, the Conference of the Left risks treating the consequences of

exploitation while avoiding meaningful confrontation with the structures that continue to produce exploitation, inequality and concentrated power in South Africa.

While issues such as poverty, unemployment and collapsing public services are real and urgent, they cannot be separated from the underlying economic model through which wealth, land, political influence and economic power continue to be organised and reproduced.

Mining remains central to this system. Extraction continues to shape patterns of accumulation, finance, energy production, infrastructure development, logistics networks, labour regimes and territorial development, while simultaneously driving ecological destruction, dispossession and extreme inequality. The extractive economy remains one of the primary sites through which immense wealth is concentrated in the hands of political and corporate elites while mining-affected communities continue to experience underdevelopment, environmental degradation, unemployment and exclusion from decisions over land and mineral wealth. In this sense, mining is not simply one sector among many; it remains deeply embedded in the material foundations of inequality and economic power in South Africa.

A politics that focuses primarily on redistribution, governance reform or poverty alleviation without confronting the extractive foundations of accumulation risks reducing structural exploitation to a question of management. Any Left project that avoids direct engagement with mining, mineral governance and extractive accumulation therefore risks becoming an anti-poverty politics without becoming a genuinely transformative politics rooted in the lived struggles of workers, mining-affected communities and the poor.

The Crisis of Political Accountability

The concerns surrounding the Conference of the Left are not merely theoretical. They are historical. Many of the organisations and leaders now presenting themselves as champions of working-class unity have, over decades, participated in or defended governments that implemented GEAR, neoliberal macroeconomic restructuring, privatisation, austerity, labour flexibilisation, and extractive economic models that deepened inequality and underdevelopment in mining-affected communities.

These concerns are not unique to MACUA & WAMUA. Across the broader left, multiple organisations have raised similar criticisms. SAFTU’s Political and Ideological Commission stated clearly that the SACP:“acted as a political shield and junior partner to successive ANC-led governments that implemented neoliberalism, austerity, privatisation, labour market attacks and anti-working-class policies.”

ZASO similarly argued that:“genuine left renewal requires an honest reckoning with the recent past.”

Richard Pithouse questioned the political coherence of a process willing to collaborate with forces associated with xenophobia, authoritarian populism and political opportunism.

Even within debates among independent left intellectuals and activists, the same themes recur repeatedly:

• the degeneration of working-class independence,

• elite incorporation,

• bureaucratisation,

• and the collapse of political accountability.

The issue therefore extends beyond a single conference.The deeper concern is whether the SACP seeks genuine working-class renewal, or whether the current process represents an attempt to reposition itself politically amid the decline of ANC legitimacy and the fragmentation of the post-apartheid political settlement.

Manufactured Unity and Elite Reconfiguration

The Conference of the Left repeatedly invokes the language of “unity.” Yet unity without political clarity can easily become a mechanism for suppressing contradiction rather than confronting it. Real working-class unity cannot be manufactured through conference branding, elite negotiations, symbolic declarations, or carefully managed ideological ambiguity.

It must emerge organically from shared struggle, democratic accountability and grassroots organising rooted in material conditions.This is precisely why many grassroots formations, social movements and independent left organisations have either distanced themselves from the conference or openly rejected it.

The process appears increasingly top-down. Largely convened through party and institutional networks, heavily pre-structured organisationally, and politically managed from above.

Meanwhile, many of the communities and formations most directly confronting extractive capitalism remain marginal to the process itself. The contradiction becomes especially sharp around mining. A serious confrontation with mining would inevitably require confronting politically connected elites, state-corporate relationships, corruption within mineral governance, failures of the post-apartheid regulatory regime, and the class interests embedded within sections of the ex-liberation movement itself.

That confrontation would destabilise the broad coalition the conference seeks to assemble. The omission of mining therefore functions politically as a stabilising silence. Whether deliberate or not, it has the effect of diverting attention away from

the extractive foundations of South African capitalism and the unresolved contradictions of the post-apartheid settlement.

Mining, Marikana and Historical Memory

For mining-affected communities, these questions are not abstract ideological disputes. Communities remember Marikana, Stilfontein, police repression, abandoned promises, environmental destruction, and the repeated betrayal of working-class struggles by political elites claiming to speak in their name.

The Marikana massacre, and the events at Stilfontein, remain among the clearest expressions of the post-apartheid state’s willingness to defend extractive accumulation and entrenched economic interests through repression and violence against workers and poor communities, processes in which sections of the liberation movement, including the SACP, were politically complicit through silence, alignment with state power, or failure to confront the underlying structures of extraction and inequality.

Yet there is little indication within the Conference of the Left process of serious political reckoning with that history. There can be no genuine rebuilding of Left politics without confronting state violence against workers, complicity in extractive accumulation, and the failures of the liberation movement itself.

Without that reckoning, calls for “working-class unity” risk becoming detached from the historical memory of communities that continue to bear the costs of extraction and abandonment.

Communities remember.

Conclusion: Nothing About Us, Without Us

South Africa urgently requires the rebuilding of democratic, militant and independent working-class power rooted in the lived struggles of workers, poor communities and those excluded from meaningful economic and political participation. However, such a rebuilding cannot emerge through abstraction, historical amnesia, elite-managed unity processes or the rebranding of old political projects under new slogans. It requires an honest confrontation with the material foundations of exploitation and inequality that continue to shape South African society.

Any serious progressive project must therefore engage directly with the realities of mining, extraction, ecological destruction, land dispossession and the ongoing concentration of economic power within the extractive economy. It must confront the enduring influence of the interconnected systems of mining, finance, energy and

political power that continue to organise accumulation and inequality in South Africa. Above all, it must place mining-affected communities, workers and the poor at the centre of political struggle rather than treating them as symbolic constituencies to be spoken for from above.

Any serious effort to rebuild working-class and popular power must also confront the uncomfortable realities of institutional incorporation, bureaucratic degeneration, elite accommodation and the political failures of sections of the liberation movement itself.

Over time, many organisations that once emerged from popular struggle became increasingly absorbed into state structures and elite political arrangements, often losing meaningful accountability to the communities and workers they claimed to represent. Without an honest reckoning with these contradictions, the language of “left renewal” risks becoming little more than the reorganisation and repositioning of old political elites under new slogans and platforms.

The path forward cannot be built through elite-managed conferences, symbolic declarations or political branding alone. It requires the rebuilding of democratic solidarity and grassroots power from below, in communities, workplaces, informal settlements, rural struggles, women’s movements, environmental justice campaigns and mining-affected communities themselves. Genuine working-class unity cannot simply be declared into existence from above or negotiated through leadership forums disconnected from everyday struggle. It must be built patiently through collective struggle, democratic participation, political accountability, material solidarity and sustained organising rooted in the lived realities of the poor and working class.

Nothing about us, without us.