Democratic Praxis, Manufactured Unity and the Crisis of Left Renewal Part 3 of a Critique of the Conference of the Left

 

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 could have sought to rebuild its legitimacy through a renewed engagement with working-class demands and progressive social forces. Instead, it chose to seek stability through alliances with sections of capital and parties situated to its right.

The result has been a Government of National Unity increasingly shaped by forces committed to fiscal austerity, market orthodoxy, privatisation, securitisation and forms of economic management that offer little prospect of addressing the structural conditions confronting the majority of South Africans.

At the same time, South Africa is not immune from broader international developments. Across much of the world, the crisis of neoliberalism has not produced a coherent progressive alternative. Instead, it has frequently generated new forms of reactionary politics characterised by nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, chauvinism and the scapegoating of vulnerable populations. From Europe and the United States to Latin America, Asia and Africa, growing sections of the political establishment have responded to social crisis not by confronting capital, but by redirecting public anger toward migrants, minorities and other marginalised groups.

South Africa increasingly exhibits similar tendencies. As economic conditions deteriorate and social frustrations deepen, political discourse is becoming saturated with anti-migrant narratives, law-and-order populism and exclusionary forms of nationalism that seek to divide the very constituencies most affected by inequality and exploitation.

These developments are themselves rooted in a deeper crisis of contemporary capitalism.

The long-term tendencies identified by Marx remain increasingly visible. Capital continues to pursue productivity gains while relentlessly reducing its dependence on labour. Yet labour remains the primary source of surplus value. This contradiction has intensified under conditions of automation, digitisation and artificial intelligence. As new technologies expand the capacity of capital to displace workers, entire sectors of society face growing precarity, unemployment and exclusion from stable forms of social reproduction.

The result is a system increasingly capable of producing enormous wealth while simultaneously undermining the social conditions upon which that wealth ultimately depends. In place of the developmental promises once associated with industrial capitalism, we increasingly confront what Marx described as the tendency toward vulgar capitalism: a system concerned less with productive development than with speculation, rent extraction, financialisation and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

It is within this broader context of political realignment, reactionary resurgence and deepening capitalist crisis that the Conference of the Left must be understood.

In this respect, the impulse toward greater cooperation, solidarity and coordination among progressive forces should be welcomed. South Africa desperately requires stronger forms of collective organisation capable of confronting capital, inequality and social exclusion.

Yet the question confronting us is not whether unity is desirable.

The question is what kind of unity is being proposed, whose interests it ultimately serves, and whether the political practices through which it is being constructed are capable of producing the democratic renewal that they promise.

History teaches us that not every project undertaken in the name of unity advances the interests of the working class. Broad coalitions, popular fronts and liberation alliances have often played important roles in advancing struggles against oppression. Yet history also teaches that unity can become a vehicle through which political elites reposition themselves, suppress legitimate criticism, dilute democratic accountability and reproduce existing power relations under new organisational forms.

The challenge is therefore not simply to unite. The challenge is to build forms of unity capable of deepening democracy, strengthening grassroots power and expanding the capacity of ordinary people to exercise meaningful control over the conditions of their lives.

It is precisely here that significant contradictions emerge within the Conference of the Left process.

The Reckoning That Never Came

Perhaps the most troubling silence within the Conference of the Left was not the omission of mining, nor even the accommodation of deeply contradictory political forces. It was the absence of any serious reckoning with the failures of sections of the liberation movement itself.

Throughout the conference process, several contributors raised questions concerning the historical role played by the SACP and other alliance formations during some of the most significant moments of working-class struggle and state violence in the democratic era. Yet these questions were largely left unanswered. The conference repeatedly invoked unity, renewal and working-class power, but showed little willingness to engage honestly with the crises of political accountability that continue to haunt large sections of the Left.

This silence matters.

For mining-affected communities, workers and the poor, the question is not simply whether organisations continue to speak the language of socialism, working-class struggle or popular power. The question is whether their political practice aligns with those claims.

Throughout the history of working-class movements, revolutionary politics has never been measured solely by declarations, resolutions or ideological self-descriptions. It has been measured by praxis: by the concrete relationship between political principles and political action.

This is particularly important in moments when workers and communities come into direct conflict with the state, capital and entrenched economic interests. Such moments reveal whether organisations are prepared to stand consistently with the oppressed, or whether their commitments become constrained by institutional loyalties, electoral considerations or proximity to power.

For this reason, the question confronting the contemporary Left is not simply whether it proclaims solidarity with the working class. The question is how it acted when workers were gunned down at Marikana, when mining-affected communities challenged extractive power, when poor and marginalised people were criminalised at Stilfontein, and when communities were systematically excluded from decisions concerning land, minerals and development.

A politics in which words and practice diverge inevitably produces hollow outcomes. Democratic slogans without democratic accountability, socialist rhetoric without solidarity in struggle, and declarations of working-class leadership without consistent support for working-class struggles ultimately erode trust and weaken the very movements they claim to advance.

It is precisely because praxis matters that historical accountability matters. The rebuilding of working-class power cannot be founded on selective memory, political convenience or unresolved contradictions. It requires an honest assessment of where organisations stood when history presented them with moments of political choice.

The issue is not perfection. No movement is without error. The issue is whether organisations are prepared to confront those errors openly and learn from them. As Amílcar Cabral reminded revolutionaries, we must "claim no easy victories and tell no lies." Without such honesty, calls for renewal risk becoming little more than rhetoric, and unity itself risks becoming detached from the material realities and struggles of the people in whose name it is proclaimed.

Marikana remains one of the defining political moments of post-apartheid South Africa. The massacre exposed the willingness of the democratic state to deploy violence in defence of an extractive order that remained fundamentally intact after 1994. The events at Stilfontein raised similarly troubling questions about the treatment of poor and marginalised people whose lives exist at the intersection of extraction, abandonment and criminalisation.

In both instances, many communities experienced the response of sections of the liberation movement, including the SACP, not as one of principled solidarity with workers and the poor, but as one of caution, silence, institutional loyalty or alignment with state power. Whether one agrees entirely with that assessment or not, it is a perception that exists widely within mining-affected communities and among significant sections of the organised Left.

If the Conference of the Left seeks to rebuild working-class power, then it must begin by acknowledging where the Left itself failed. It must ask difficult questions about Marikana, Stilfontein, neoliberal restructuring, elite incorporation, bureaucratic degeneration and the distance that has emerged between many political organisations and the communities they claim to represent.

There can be no genuine renewal without reckoning.

There can be no trust without accountability.

And there can be no democratic re-composition of the Left if historical memory is treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a truth to be confronted.

Communities remember. Workers remember. History remembers.

The question is whether the “Left” is prepared to remember as well.

The MKP Contradiction

One of the most striking contradictions within the Conference of the Left was the prominent inclusion of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), a formation whose political trajectory sits uneasily alongside several principles historically associated with socialist, democratic and internationalist politics.

This concern extends beyond partisan disagreement. It concerns the very meaning of “Left” politics itself.

Across the world, the Left has historically defined itself through commitments to democratic participation, international solidarity, opposition to chauvinism and the collective self-emancipation of the oppressed. Whatever differences existed between Marxists, socialists, communists, anarchists, Pan-Africanists and other progressive traditions, there remained a broad recognition that liberation could not be built upon the division of working people against one another.

The inclusion of the MKP therefore exposed unresolved tensions between the Conference’s stated commitment to working-class unity and the political orientations of some of the formations assembled within it. These tensions include nationalism versus internationalism, traditional authority versus democratic participation, strongman politics versus democratic praxis, and anti-migrant mobilisation versus working-class solidarity.

The concern is not the beliefs of individual members, but the political consequences of ambiguity. The issue is more precise: sections of the party’s political base and public ecosystem have been associated with anti-migrant mobilisation, while the party itself has not consistently drawn a clear and principled line against such politics. In a country where migrants are increasingly scapegoated for unemployment, crime, collapsing public services and social insecurity, such ambiguity is politically dangerous.

The problem is sharpened by the broader context in which formations such as March and March have helped normalise anti-migrant sentiment within public discourse. Any willingness by MKP representatives or supporters to engage such formations without openly confronting their xenophobic implications raises serious questions for a conference claiming to rebuild working-class power on the basis of solidarity and internationalism.

The concern is not that the Conference of the Left failed to articulate a principled position on xenophobia. Indeed, the conference declaration correctly recognised that migrants did not create unemployment, inequality, poverty, collapsing public services or the broader social crisis confronting South Africa. It correctly affirmed that the enemy is not the migrant, the informal trader, the unemployed neighbour or the worker from another country, but rather the system that produces dispossession, exclusion and exploitation.

The problem lies elsewhere.

The challenge confronting the Conference of the Left is whether its political practice corresponds with these stated commitments.

At a moment when xenophobia increasingly functions as a political technology for managing social crisis and redirecting anger away from capital and entrenched systems of accumulation, political clarity requires more than progressive declarations. It requires a consistent willingness to confront anti-migrant mobilisation wherever it emerges, including within formations, constituencies and political currents that may otherwise be regarded as allies.

It is precisely here that tensions emerge.

The inclusion of political formations and personalities whose political ecosystems have at times tolerated, amplified or failed to decisively challenge anti-migrant sentiment raises legitimate questions about the relationship between principle and practice. The issue is not whether every member of a particular organisation subscribes to xenophobic views. The issue is whether organisations claiming to rebuild working-class unity have demonstrated the political courage necessary to confront narratives that divide workers, communities and the poor against one another.

For a project seeking to rebuild the Left, this is not a secondary question. Xenophobia fragments the very social forces upon which any democratic working-class project must depend. A politics that identifies the correct enemy in theory but hesitates to confront the practical reproduction of division in its own political environment risks creating a gap between rhetoric and praxis.

History teaches us that such gaps are rarely inconsequential. When political practice fails to match political principle, trust erodes, contradictions deepen and movements increasingly struggle to persuade people that the values they proclaim are genuinely reflected in the way they organise and act.

The challenge confronting the Conference of the Left is therefore not simply whether it can formulate the correct position. The challenge is whether it is prepared to consistently live that position in practice.

The inclusion of MKP also raises a second and related concern: the drift toward authoritarian and traditionalist politics presented in radical language. MKP’s political rhetoric often places heavy emphasis on sovereignty, state power, traditional leadership and national restoration. These questions cannot simply be dismissed, because land, sovereignty and historical dispossession remain central to South Africa’s unresolved liberation struggle. But they must be subjected to democratic scrutiny.

A politics that elevates hereditary authority, charismatic leadership or centralised state power without grounding itself in democratic participation from below cannot

easily be reconciled with the socialist principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.

The point is not to police ideological purity. The point is to ask whether a project claiming to rebuild the Left can accommodate political forces whose practice, alliances and rhetoric risk undermining the very principles of democratic working-class solidarity on which such a project must rest.

Without clarity on these questions, unity risks becoming a container for contradiction rather than a process of political renewal.

The Return of Authoritarian Temptations

Equally troubling is the growing attraction within sections of the contemporary Left toward authoritarian forms of politics presented as anti-imperialist alternatives.

This tendency reflects a broader crisis within contemporary progressive politics. As neoliberalism deepens inequality, weakens democratic institutions and concentrates power in the hands of economic elites, many people understandably seek alternatives to the existing order. Yet opposition to imperialism, Western domination or global capital does not automatically produce emancipatory politics. The rejection of one form of domination does not guarantee the absence of another.

Across the world, there has been a growing tendency within sections of the Left to romanticise military strongmen, celebrate coup-led governments and substitute charismatic authority for democratic participation. In such narratives, sovereignty itself becomes confused with liberation, while state power becomes conflated with popular power.

This stands in direct tension with traditions of socialist democracy stretching from Marx and Luxemburg to Gramsci, Cabral and Fanon.

For Marx, the emancipation of the working class could only be the act of the working class itself. For Luxemburg, socialism without democracy would ultimately undermine the very forces capable of producing genuine liberation. Gramsci's conception of hegemony was never simply about capturing the state. It was about constructing democratic leadership through political education, organisation and consent within civil society. Cabral insisted upon truthfulness, accountability and the continuous political development of the people. Fanon warned that post-colonial liberation could easily degenerate into new forms of elite domination if popular participation was displaced by nationalism, bureaucracy or charismatic authority.

These warnings remain profoundly relevant today.

The challenge confronting South Africa is not simply the question of who exercises power, but how power is exercised and to whom it remains accountable. Working-class power cannot be imposed from above, delegated to

military figures, entrusted to charismatic personalities or secured through appeals to traditional authority. It must be built through democratic participation, political education, collective organisation and popular consent.

This is particularly important in societies marked by deep inequality and exclusion. Where democratic institutions are weak, there is often a temptation to search for decisive leaders capable of bypassing political complexity in the name of national renewal. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that concentrated power, however radical its language, tends to reproduce new forms of hierarchy rather than dismantle them.

The struggle against imperialism therefore cannot become an excuse for abandoning democratic principles. Nor can anti-imperialism become a substitute for democratic transformation. The measure of a genuinely progressive politics is not simply whether it opposes external domination, but whether it expands the capacity of ordinary people to exercise meaningful control over the political, economic and social conditions of their lives.

The choice facing South Africa is not between neoliberalism and authoritarianism. It is between systems of domination, however they may be dressed ideologically, and the difficult but necessary project of building democratic self-government from below.

The Crisis of Credibility

The Conference of the Left repeatedly presented itself as a vehicle for renewal. Yet many of the most visible political figures associated with the process are individuals who have spent decades occupying positions within the very institutions now identified as being in crisis.

This raises an uncomfortable but unavoidable question.

Is the Conference of the Left rebuilding working-class power, or is it facilitating the political reorganisation of sections of the post-apartheid elite displaced by the decline of ANC hegemony?

The prominence of political figures facing serious allegations of corruption, alongside leaders associated with previous failures of governance and accountability, raises legitimate questions about the political credibility of a process claiming moral and political renewal.

The issue is not whether individuals are legally guilty of wrongdoing. The issue is whether a project seeking to restore public trust can do so without first confronting the conditions that produced the crisis of trust in the first place.

Where Was the Solidarity?

For mining-affected communities, solidarity is not measured by conference declarations.

It is measured by who stands with communities when police open fire on workers. It is measured by who resists legislation that strips communities of participation rights. It is measured by who challenges the failures of Social and Labour Plans, environmental destruction, corruption within mineral governance and the systematic exclusion of communities from decisions concerning land and mineral wealth.

Some of the political parties represented at the Conference of the Left have occupied seats in Parliament for years. Yet mining-affected communities continue to face dispossession, exclusion and abandonment.

The question therefore becomes unavoidable:

Where was this unity when communities were fighting alone?

Where was this solidarity when workers were killed, artisanal miners were criminalised and mining-affected communities were excluded from decisions that fundamentally shaped their futures?

Yet the challenge confronting the Conference of the Left is no longer only a question of the past. It is now a question of the future.

The conference repeatedly affirmed the need for working-class unity, democratic participation, popular power and solidarity with the oppressed. These commitments were articulated clearly and forcefully. The question now is whether they will be translated into political practice.

Can mining-affected communities expect to see the EFF, MKP and other formations represented at the Conference consistently champion the demands emerging from grassroots struggles?

Will they support the demands of mining-affected communities for democratic mineral governance, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, meaningful participation in decision-making, community benefit sharing and the socialisation of wealth generated through extraction?

Will they stand with communities confronting environmental destruction, land dispossession and the failures of Social and Labour Plans?

Will they challenge legislative processes that continue to centralise power in the state while marginalising communities?

Will they support the positions advanced by organisations such as MACUA when these questions arise within Parliament, provincial legislatures and public policy processes?

Or will the language of working-class unity once again become detached from the actual demands being advanced by organised working-class and community formations on the ground?

These questions matter because the history of post-apartheid South Africa is littered with examples of political organisations speaking in the name of the poor while governing above their heads. Too often, the agency of workers and communities is displaced by statist approaches in which political parties, governments and leaders claim to know what is best for the people without creating meaningful mechanisms through which the people themselves can exercise power.

A genuinely Left politics cannot simply speak on behalf of the working class. It must be prepared to organise with, listen to and be guided by the organised formations of the working class themselves.

The test of the Conference of the Left will therefore not be the quality of its declarations or the militancy of its rhetoric. It will be whether its participants are prepared to align themselves with the concrete struggles, demands and democratic aspirations of working-class communities when those struggles come into conflict with powerful political, bureaucratic and economic interests.

Only then will we know whether this was the beginning of a genuine process of working-class re-composition, or simply another attempt to reorganise political power from above.

Real unity cannot be manufactured through conference branding, carefully managed declarations or media spectacles.

It must emerge through struggle.

It must be tested in practice.

And it must remain accountable to those in whose name it claims to speak.

Beyond Conferences

The criticisms advanced in this essay should not be read as an argument against cooperation, solidarity or efforts to rebuild collective working-class power. On the contrary, the crises confronting South Africa are too deep and too urgent to permit fragmentation, sectarianism or political isolation.

The rise of reactionary politics, the deepening crisis of capitalism, the growing concentration of wealth and power, ecological collapse, unemployment, xenophobia and the continued marginalisation of working-class communities all point toward the necessity of greater unity, not less.

Yet history also teaches us that not every project undertaken in the name of unity advances the interests of the working class.

The Conference of the Left reflects a contradictory political moment. It contains genuine aspirations for solidarity, renewal and collective action. It has created a space in which important questions concerning capitalism, imperialism, inequality

and social justice can be debated. It has also brought together organisations and individuals whose histories, political practices and strategic orientations raise legitimate concerns regarding democratic accountability, political coherence and commitment to the principles they publicly proclaim.

Both realities exist simultaneously.

To recognise these contradictions is not to reject the possibility of unity. It is to insist that unity itself must be subjected to democratic scrutiny.

For organisations such as MACUA, Abahlali baseMjondolo, SAFTU and countless other grassroots formations organising within communities, workplaces and sites of struggle across the country, the challenge is therefore neither blind endorsement nor cynical dismissal.

It is to remain rooted.

It is to continue building democratic working-class power from below while remaining open to principled collaboration wherever genuine opportunities for collective struggle emerge.

The task is not to ask whether the Conference of the Left is pure enough, radical enough or ideologically coherent enough. The task is to ask whether it is prepared to stand with communities when those communities confront power in its concrete forms: mining corporations, state institutions, environmental destruction, land dispossession, exploitative labour systems, xenophobic mobilisation and the many structures through which inequality is reproduced.

If organisations emerging from the Conference of the Left are prepared to support struggles for democratic mineral governance, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, community participation, environmental justice, migrant rights, economic redistribution and genuine working-class self-organisation, then opportunities for unity in action will undoubtedly exist.

Such unity should be welcomed.

Indeed, it should be actively pursued.

But it must be built through struggle rather than symbolism, through accountability rather than declarations, and through shared practice rather than rhetorical agreement.

The organised poor have learned through bitter experience that political language alone is not enough. Communities have heard the language of liberation, transformation, socialism, development and empowerment for decades. What they increasingly seek is not a new vocabulary but a new political practice.

The fundamental question is therefore not whether organisations speak in the name of the working class.

The question is whether they are prepared to follow where working-class struggles themselves lead.

Ultimately, the future of working-class politics in South Africa will not be determined by conferences alone. It will be determined by the extent to which ordinary people are able to organise themselves, exercise democratic power and assert meaningful control over the conditions of their lives.

The wretched of the earth cannot afford the luxury of political theatre. Their struggles are too immediate, their conditions too urgent and the stakes too high.

For this reason, organised formations of the poor and working class must continue to build independently, think critically and engage strategically. Alliances should be judged neither by slogans nor by personalities, but by whether they materially advance the interests, dignity, power and self-determination of those who continue to bear the heaviest burdens of exploitation and exclusion.

The challenge before us is therefore not simply to unite. It is to build the forms of democratic power capable of transforming society itself. Everything else must be measured against that task.

Nothing about us, without us.