Empty promises: the ANC’s failure to deliver freedom in South Africa

South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza in 2023 stirred an enormous wave of support within the international Palestine solidarity movement.^[1] That the US secretary of state denounced the case as “meritless” and “galling” only confirmed support for the country’s African National Congress (ANC) government. The ANC’s action seemed to confirm the special place South Africa has in the hearts of progressive people worldwide who recall its decades-long struggle to smash apartheid, the system of white supremacy that prevailed for most of the twentieth century founded on the form that capitalism took in this country. The government itself evoked this memory, with Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor stating:

South Africa has a moral responsibility to always stand with the oppressed because we come from a history of struggle, a history of striving for freedom, a history of believing that everybody deserves human dignity, justice and freedom; this is the only reason that we have taken this major step as South Africa.^[2]

Fine words.

However, the notion that the ANC government represents a shining example of moral courage and support for the oppressed is belied by its actions at home. This was proven just a few months later when the ANC registered a dramatic loss in support at the May 2024 election, its vote tumbling from 57 percent in 2019 to just 40 percent. The ANC formed a coalition government with the Democratic Alliance (DA), Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), Patriotic Alliance and the Freedom Front Plus, none of which could be labelled progressive.^[3]

The 2024 election marks a further step in the erosion of the ANC’s hegemony among those it once led in the struggle against apartheid and its aftermath. This is the result of its failure to confront the injustices of apartheid. While living standards for most of the oppressed black population rose in the first decade or two after the fall of apartheid, this process has since gone into reverse.

The failure of the ANC government to deliver for the mass of black people should not have been a surprise. Its rhetoric may have changed over the decades, but it has always been a party committed to capitalism. The transition to democracy in South Africa transformed the political shell, enshrined in what the ANC boasts as one of the most democratic constitutions in the world, but it left the basic economic structure intact, fixing grinding poverty and mass unemployment in place.

How apartheid in South Africa was smashed has lessons for freedom struggles today, not least for Palestine. The South African experience shows us that unless capitalism is overthrown, the outcome barely challenges the conditions of life for the working class and poor. The fight must be for socialism if justice is to prevail.

In the first half of this article, I will explain how the ANC steered the mass struggle of the 1980s into negotiations over constitutional reform that eliminated the apartheid superstructure but kept the fundamentals of South African capitalism intact. The second half will examine what this meant for the capitalists, middle class and working class since the advent of democracy.

I The transition

The balance of forces in the mid-1980s^[4]

During the 1980s, the working class in South Africa was on the march. New independent and non-racial unions were striking in massive numbers. The township youth were attacking the police and security forces, weakening the grip of the National Party (NP) government led by President PW Botha. The government faced a systemic crisis in the structures of apartheid, which meant that the apartheid regime could not continue to rule in the same old way. Nor was the working class willing to accept being ruled in that manner.

The apartheid government tried various methods to defeat the insurgency. It did its best to foster a network of collaborators among the non-white population. It also started modest reforms in the apartheid system of managing the working class, granting skilled black workers residency rights in the cities and making space for registered trade unions organised on a non-racial basis, hoping they might abandon demands for broader political transformation.

These manoeuvres failed. The black youth and workers rallied to the ANC and United Democratic Front (UDF) call to make the country ungovernable. The independent trade unions that registered with the government used the legal space opened to draw in still wider layers of the working class and organise them in militant strikes. The reforms failed because they attempted to make only minor adjustments to apartheid at a time when South Africa’s economy increasingly relied on black labour, and black workers and students were becoming unwilling to accept their inferior position.

The regime struck back in 1986 after two years of mass strikes and township revolts. It declared two successive states of emergency, the second much more brutal than the first, resulting in an estimated 30,000 people being detained under emergency regulations. It also imposed numerous bans on oppositional groups, including the ANC-led umbrella organisation, the UDF.^[5] In response, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) mobilised two national stay-aways in 1988, each involving three million.^[6] The government fought back, raiding Cosatu offices and imposing still wider bans, taking thousands more out of action. Legal repression was accompanied by vigilante attacks, break-ins, firebombing, assassinations and kidnapping in a trend that was only to accelerate in the following years. The government’s repression was, for a time, successful. Democratic structures of resistance were destroyed in some areas and in others severely damaged. The result by early 1989 was “a mood of political quiescence”, according to Eddie Webster and Maggie Friedman.^[7] The regime had survived, but its reliance on states of emergency revealed its instability and the potential for fresh explosions of popular struggle. The status quo could not continue.

The other factor weighing on the apartheid regime in the mid-1980s was economic stagnation. The declining fortunes of the mining sector were key. For much of the twentieth century, government repression of black mineworkers, in particular gold miners whose labour underpinned the country’s economy, kept wages low. The high profits extracted from mining drew in foreign investment and multimillion-dollar loans from the World Bank and Western banks, which were used to power the country’s racially defined state capitalist development model, including infrastructure and manufacturing. In the late 1960s, the goldfields reached peak production, but in the following 15 years, the country experienced two sharp recessions triggered by falling gold prices. The economy pulled out of recession in 1983, but national output stagnated for the following decade, and the rand dropped from US$1.28 to 38 US cents between 1980 and 1990. The government responded with free-market reforms, eroding the old Afrikaner state capitalist edifice.

Here, the political and economic crises intertwined. Mass sackings in the state-owned enterprises squeezed not just the white working and middle classes but also skilled black workers whose loyalty the regime had hoped to win. The project of creating an aspirational and loyal black working class was stillborn. Recognising that their investments were now at risk from the rebellious working class and growing economic difficulties, Western investors began to revisit their support for apartheid. Starting in 1983, when the IMF cut loans to South Africa, the big New York and London banks began to withdraw steadily, forcing the government to temporarily suspend debt repayments.

In September 1985, open divisions emerged within South Africa’s ruling class when Gavin Relly, the chief executive of Anglo-American, the country’s corporate behemoth, met with ANC leadership in Zambia, accompanied by other business leaders and newspaper editors. Relly was pleased with what he found, telling reporters that the ANC appeared “less militant than expected” and that there was a shared understanding of the need for a “cohesive and sensible” future for South Africa.^[8]

Hoping to secure their interests regardless of whether apartheid continued or ended, South African capitalists began building relationships with the ANC. Their main goal was to persuade the ANC to drop its support for nationalisation and instead embrace a neoliberal approach. These overtures were reciprocated, resulting in the creation of the Consultative Business Movement to strengthen ties between business and the ANC.

While the business community supported the government’s state of emergency, they sought political solutions that would eliminate the need for such crisis measures. Representative of the Federated Chamber of Industries, Bokkie Botha, told the South African Labour Bulletin in early 1988:

There is no doubt from a businessman’s point of view you cannot operate in an unrest situation. It’s disruptive. So there is a belief that we need to contain unrest [but] at the same time you have to find a solution that allows people to talk… We are extremely concerned that the real voice of the people is being restricted, and the result is to develop a new underground.^[9]

These were the circumstances driving the apartheid regime to consider more substantial reforms that ultimately led to its dissolution.

The National Party government flip-flopped between repression and reform in response to changing circumstances as debates raged between the “conservative” and “liberal” factions. Two things definitively tilted the balance towards reform. The first was a leadership change in January 1989 when Botha suffered a stroke, allowing FW De Klerk, regarded as a reformer within the NP, to take over as president. One of his first acts was to release five of those imprisoned alongside Nelson Mandela in 1962. This gave hope to the struggle organisations inside South Africa, which had been in such deep despondency only months earlier. Cosatu and the UDF organised open defiance of apartheid laws, including a three-million-strong stay-away against proposed elections for a fake tricameral parliament.

The second major event was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, which reshaped both local and global politics. For decades, the ruling classes in Britain and the US had seen South Africa as a reliable stronghold of Western imperialism in a region where Soviet- and Chinese-backed anti-colonial movements were making ground. However, with the collapse of the USSR, South Africa no longer served this geopolitical role, and the United States pushed the NP government to open negotiations with the ANC to try to stabilise the situation.

The ANC also faced an impasse. Its strategy of armed struggle had failed to undermine the apartheid state. It could not have been otherwise. South Africa was unlike Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) or Angola, where guerrilla forces could establish liberated areas and launch raids on rural centres. South Africa had a modern urban economy, and its military, the South African Defence Forces (SADF), was strong and united, relying on conscripted white servicemen. Even though white farmers were a minority, they controlled the rural black population and acted as reservists for a vast military network. The ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), could not set up guerrilla bases inside South Africa and could only carry out small-scale sabotage operations that netted few results.

Lacking internal bases, MK relied on neighbouring newly independent governments, but by the mid-1980s, the apartheid regime had struck deals with those states, most notably Mozambique, the only country from which MK had launched attacks on South Africa. These deals shut down MK bases and cut off their weapon supply. Meanwhile, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev reduced Russia’s support for the ANC, including military aid, and encouraged the ANC to negotiate with the apartheid regime.

At home, the attempt to make South Africa ungovernable in the townships had been battered by savage states of emergency. The defeat of the 1987 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) strike, the biggest strike to date, dampened militancy in the trade unions.

Before moving forward, it is important to understand that while the ANC publicly emphasised armed struggle as a key part of its fight against apartheid – attracting some of the most determined young fighters – none of its leaders believed that armed struggle could overthrow the regime. The guerrilla campaign was merely a tactic to pressure the government into negotiating. This became clear in 1988–89 when the ANC released the Constitutional Guidelines and the Harare Declaration. These outlined the ANC’s commitment to a negotiated transition to democracy that would preserve the dominance of big business. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave leaders of the South African Communist Party (SACP) the political cover they needed to abandon the goal of socialism in South Africa, even as a distant possibility.

Nature of the ANC – historic overview

The fact that the ANC and its alliance partner, the SACP, were not interested in socialism in South Africa might challenge the assumptions of some readers. Many ANC leaders were SACP members and occasionally declared their support for socialism, especially when speaking to working-class audiences. The apartheid regime and its international supporters had always described the ANC as a communist threat.

However, the ANC was never interested in socialist transformation in South Africa. It had always been a pro-capitalist organisation. The early ANC leaders were very moderate in their approach. Influenced by their Christian education, they aimed to convince the British that property-owning and educated Africans should be included in South African society. They aimed to widen the limited voting rights available to property-owning black Africans in the Cape. They sent delegations to London to urge the British government to repeal the Natives Land Act, which allocated the black population just 13 percent of the land. The British were unmoved. As a result, the ANC leaders became disheartened, and the organisation began to fall apart in the 1920s. In the 1930s, ANC leaders ignored the growing unrest among the black working class, whose demands conflicted with their desire for modest changes to civil rights. During World War II, the ANC backed the British government and the Smuts coalition government in Pretoria which mobilised more than 300,000 South Africans for the war effort, including more than 100,000 black people, Coloureds and Indians.^[10]

The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), as it was then known, was in thrall to Moscow in the 1930s. It propounded a Stalinist popular front strategy in which all social classes, except the most reactionary, could unite to fight for national liberation, the first stage of what was deemed a two-stage revolution, with the latter stage the eventual triumph of socialism. The corollary was that working-class interests were set aside in favour of those amenable to the party’s putative allies, including “progressive” white labour, “liberal” British and international capital and African nationalists.

The CPSA followed every twist and turn coming out of Moscow. On the outbreak of World War II, the CPSA opposed it and attacked the Smuts government for its support for Britain, which was in line with Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler. Only following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 did the party switch to supporting the British war effort, arguing that it was now a war for democracy against fascism. The party now did its best, not always successfully, to rein in strikes.

Black workers continued to fight, however, even during wartime. After the war ended, 70,000 gold mine workers on the Witwatersrand struck. The Smuts government violently crushed the strike, killing 13 workers, injuring 1,250 and arresting over 1,000. The strike brought home to the South African ruling class, both English-speaking and Afrikaners, the need to suppress black labour. They embraced even harsher measures to control the movement of black labour and limit the development of a settled black urban working class, which would have posed a major threat. In the 1948 election, the pro-apartheid National Party and its allies, benefiting from a highly gerrymandered whites-only election, defeated the Smuts coalition government, mobilising its support base among white farmers.

The defeat of the miners’ strike was a decisive setback that weakened the whole labour movement – white and black – and severely limited the mass resistance to the imposition of formal apartheid after 1948.

With the confidence of the black working class hit hard, African nationalism received a boost. This was the program of black professionals and small capitalists frustrated by their political and economic marginalisation by the apartheid regime and who were prepared to support more confrontational tactics than the ANC had pursued hitherto. This was the context in which the ANC Youth League, led by Mandela, Anton Lembede, Robert Sobukwe, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, won control of the ANC in 1949, forcing out the old guard. In place of polite petitioning, they argued for direct action and mass mobilisation, including active boycotts, stay-aways, civil disobedience and non-cooperation. These tactics enthused many black people threatened by the NP government’s increasingly draconian restrictions.

African nationalism served a useful purpose for the ANC since it could inspire the majority of poor and oppressed black South Africans to join the fight against apartheid while limiting their demands for full social, economic, and political freedom that could have undermined the ANC’s efforts to secure power for themselves, and the layer of middle-class black professionals and black capitalists they represented. This dual orientation overlapped with that of the predominantly white Communist Party. The party had been banned by the National Party government in 1950 and voted to dissolve but then reformed as an underground organisation, the SACP, in 1953. Black Communists had been active in the ANC since the 1930s, but the SACP now threw itself more deeply behind the ANC, which it determined to be the leading force of the national democratic revolution.^[11] The SACP brought with it not just a Stalinist theoretical apparatus to justify class collaboration but also Stalinist organisational methods to what had been rather ramshackle ANC structures. In 1955, the party recruited Sisulu, and in 1960, Mandela. Soon after joining, both were elected or drafted onto the SACP central committee.

The 1955 Freedom Charter, largely written by the SACP’s Rusty Bernstein, embodied the delicate balancing act attempted by the ANC and its Communist supporters. The Charter was the work of the newly formed Congress Alliance, comprising the ANC and the heavily Communist-influenced white Congress of Democrats, the South African Coloured Organisation, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Council of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the predominantly white Federation of South African Women.

Stating that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it” and calling for “a democratic state, based on the will of the people”, the Charter set out a list of demands:

the people shall govern

all national groups shall have equal rights

the people shall share in the country’s wealth

the land shall be shared among those who work it

all shall be equal before the law

all shall enjoy equal human rights

there shall be work and security

the doors of learning and culture shall be opened

there shall be houses, security and comfort

there shall be peace and friendship.

There was enough in the Charter to appeal to the black working class and poor farmers. But it was also helpfully ambiguous. The demand that “the people shall share in the country’s wealth” could be understood by the ANC’s working-class supporters and capitalist opponents as tantamount to wholesale nationalisation. At the same time, for African nationalists, it could mean a post-apartheid state overseeing a mixed economy in which both state and private capital played a role.^[12] But the ANC leadership was never in doubt about its real purpose. Mandela explained in 1956 that the ANC’s goal was to empower a new black bourgeoisie that would prosper once the white capitalists were expropriated:

The breaking up and democratisation of these [bank, mining and land] monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own, in their own name and right, mines and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.^[13]

Workers’ power was not on the agenda, Mandela made clear:

The Charter does not contemplate such profound [socialist] economic and political challenges. Its declaration “The People Shall Govern” visualises the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of the country, be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty-bourgeoisie.^[14]

During the 1950s, the ANC leadership embarked on tightly controlled demonstrations, passive resistance, stay-aways, and strikes to force the National Party government to open talks. The government flatly rebuffed them and, in 1956, charged 156 Congress Alliance leaders and activists with treason, tying them up in court cases for years before they were finally acquitted in 1961.

The ANC also faced pressure on another flank from the newly formed Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). Robert Sobukwe, one of the country’s best-known black leaders, split from the ANC in 1959 and took many of the ANC’s leading cadres to form the PAC. The new organisation argued for a more thoroughgoing African nationalist program, an end to working with communists from white, Indian and Coloured backgrounds and a more confrontational approach to the authorities. Following the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, in which the security forces killed 69 protesters demanding an end to the pass laws that prevented free movement of black people, the PAC started to prepare for armed struggle and drew young militants to its ranks attracted by its radical rhetoric.

In December 1960, a meeting of SACP leaders, including Mandela, having assured itself of Soviet and Chinese support in the form of weapons and training, adopted the armed struggle tactic and instructed the central committee to prepare for the use of force. The first communist sabotage unit was formed in the first half of 1961, and in December 1961 the organisation, now named MK, launched sabotage actions in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. Initially refusing to endorse the SACP initiative, the ANC officially recognised MK as its armed wing in 1962.

The sabotage campaign represented a sharp turn by the SACP and ANC, but it amounted to little more than pinpricks in the machinery of apartheid. It gave the regime an excuse to clamp down harder on internal dissent. MK had hardly been established when, in July 1963, almost the entire leadership of the ANC and MK were arrested at MK headquarters in Rivonia, with most sentenced to life imprisonment.

The shift to armed struggle and the violent repression by the apartheid regime had several long-lasting effects on the ANC’s actions in the following decades. First, it forced the ANC to move its operations outside South Africa, with Oliver Tambo establishing a headquarters in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Second, by strengthening the ANC’s ties to the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, it raised the SACP’s profile.

The SACP 1962 document, “The Road to South African Freedom”, set out the party’s pseudo-socialist theoretical underpinning. The party characterised apartheid as “colonialism of a special type” (CST). This theory claimed that two separate modes of production existed side by side in South Africa: a modern capitalist white economy and a semi-feudal black economy. According to this view, black South Africa was a colony of its white oppressors. Colonial oppression, not capitalism, was the enemy and must be overthrown through a national democratic revolution led by the multi-class liberation movement. The working class, the SACP to the fore, was held up as the critical revolutionary force pushing national liberation and eventually leading the fight for socialism, but workers must understand that this latter stage would come many years after the former.

CST was bunkum, no more than a smokescreen for the SACP’s counter-revolutionary project. South Africa was an integrated capitalist economy, and black labour was fundamental to its operation. There was no reason for any uprising by black workers to halt once having smashed the legal structures of apartheid; the fight against racial oppression and the struggle for working-class emancipation could, under the right leadership, be one and the same.

The SACP’s counter-revolutionary character explains why it talked a great deal about the working class in the 1960s and 1970s but did little to organise working-class struggle. Instead, it gave left-wing cover to the ANC that primarily represented the interests of the black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. In 1969, the ideological continuity between the two organisations was confirmed when the ANC adopted much of the SACP’s “The Road to South African Freedom”, including CST, in its platform.

As the ANC’s operations shifted beyond South Africa’s borders and its ties to the Soviet Bloc deepened, its leaders increasingly relied on international diplomacy to pressure the apartheid regime. In 1961–62, Mandela and fellow MK leader Joe Slovo visited East Germany, Algeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia to seek support for their cause.

Secretly hatched military operations involving small numbers of fighters sidelined mass action. SACP member and MK leader Ben Turok later noted of the turn to armed struggle:

Sabotage had the effect of isolating the organised movement from the mass who felt unable to join in this new phase or even to defend the actionists when they were seized… The sabotage campaign failed on the main count – it did not raise the level of action of the masses themselves… they were left on the threshold, frustrated bystanders of a battle being waged on their behalf.^[15]

The ANC’s turn to armed struggle, combined with the growing influence of Stalinism, reinforced an authoritarian culture within the organisation, where internal disagreements were often resolved through imprisoning opponents in harsh camp prisons or even executing them.

The ANC’s external orientation explains why the ANC had little political impact inside South Africa during the 1960s, even as the apartheid regime forcibly drove millions of black residents from the cities and arrested those who resisted. So it was that when internal struggles resurfaced after a decade of inactivity, the ANC was caught unprepared. The first breakthrough came with the 1973 Durban strikes and the rise of independent trade unions, which formed the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in 1979. Fosatu brought together a new working-class vanguard of workers in metal and engineering, automotive, paper and wood, rubber, chemicals, glass, food, transport, stevedoring, and textiles and clothing. The leaders, veteran unionists, younger workers and student activists were radical syndicalists. Having witnessed the subordination of trade unions by other bourgeois and petty bourgeois African liberation movements, Fosatu’s leaders understood the importance of maintaining political independence from the ANC.

The ANC and SACP greeted the new unions with hostility. They accused them of collaborating with apartheid because they used the regime’s legal mechanisms for collective bargaining to organise strikes and secure higher wages and better conditions for workers. Their main objection was that the new unions represented a challenge to the ANC’s authority over the black working class.

The ANC was also caught off guard by the rising militancy among black students and intellectuals in the 1970s, reflected in the growing popularity of the Black Consciousness movement. The ANC was initially absent from the 1976 Soweto uprising when the township’s school students protested being compelled to learn in Afrikaans and were met with brutal repression by the security forces, Inkatha thugs and black vigilante groups sponsored by the authorities. Hundreds were killed over the following 12 months. Although Black Consciousness did not form a stable political organisation, its central slogan, “Black man, you are on your own!” resonated deeply with the students in Soweto, who felt that no one would save them but themselves.

While the ANC could not initially respond positively to these developments, the party eventually caught up. Without any opposition from an organised revolutionary party, the ANC eventually regained the influence it had lost in the 1960s. After the township revolts in Soweto and the Cape Flats were brutally suppressed, thousands of radicalised school students fled the country to join MK camps in Zambia. With “Marxism” linked to the Stalinist politics of the SACP, the chance to bring Black Consciousness supporters into genuine revolutionary politics was missed.

The next generation of township students was energised by the UDF’s 1984 call to make South Africa ungovernable. They took to the streets, targeting security forces and township councillors seen as puppets and informers. However, these, too, lacked any political leadership independent of the ANC. Within a few years, the UDF came under the ANC’s control and was dissolved in 1991 after a period of inactivity, marking the ANC’s decision to prioritise negotiations over mass struggle.

The same process of absorption took place with the independent unions. The syndicalist union leaders rejected forming a radical working-class political party to challenge the Congress Alliance. This, however, only allowed the latter to impose its political project on them. This became clear with the township stay-aways in the 1980s organised under the auspices of the United Democratic Front. The Fosatu unions alternated between abstaining from the stay-aways because they did not involve on-the-job struggles and simply tailing the ANC. The relationship between the independent unions and the ANC was still unresolved in 1985 when Fosatu unions dissolved the federation to become founding members of Cosatu. Within two years, however, the Cosatu leaders joined the Congress Alliance, acknowledging the leading role of the ANC in the name of the national democratic revolution.

By the late 1980s, the ANC had firmly established itself as the uncontested leader of the anti-apartheid movement. For those disappointed with the ANC’s limited goals, the SACP offered a left-sounding rationale. Many believed the SACP might push for socialism and joined the party on that basis, but that was never its plan.

Contested transition

The period between Mandela’s release from jail and the ANC’s election victory is sometimes described as a “managed transition”, when the National Party and ANC smoothly transitioned South Africa from apartheid to democracy. However, this oversimplifies the reality. The transition was far from smooth, and the outcome was uncertain. Neither the National Party nor the ANC initially expected the process to result in a full parliamentary democracy, a relatively liberal constitution, or the eventual dissolution of the National Party.^[16]

The transition to democracy went further than either party anticipated, mainly due to pressure from below. The 1986 State of Emergency demonstrated that the internal security apparatus remained intact and could still strike hard against the movement. The working class lacked revolutionary leadership and did not establish any organs of workers’ power. However, if the working class could not seize power, it played an important role at critical moments, pushing the transition forward, strengthening the ANC’s negotiating position and forcing the National Party to make more concessions.

In February 1990, President De Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC and other illegal political organisations, and Mandela was released from prison. In May, a four-year process of discussions began between the two adversaries, a precondition of which was the ANC’s acceptance of a negotiated settlement. In August, the ANC unilaterally suspended armed struggle without receiving any concessions, to the dismay of Cosatu and the SACP, partners in what was now dubbed the Tripartite Alliance.

At the same time, the government increased its support for the right-wing Zulu nationalist Inkatha led by KwaZulu Bantustan chief executive Mangosuthu Buthelezi as part of its strategy to weaken the ANC.^[17]Inkatha launched violent attacks on ANC strongholds in Johannesburg’s townships and hostels, trying to extend its influence into the Transvaal. While the ANC verbally supported communities defending themselves against Inkatha, it did not organise self-defence efforts. Only Cosatu took action, mobilising three million people for a stay-away protest against the violence in July 1990.

In February 1991, after declaring it “the year of mass action for people’s power”, the ANC organised large marches in Cape Town and Pretoria during the opening of the white Parliament. However, these actions were mainly used to strengthen the ANC’s negotiating position. The National Party, committed to retaining as much as possible of apartheid structures and fearing loss of support to white parties further to its right, was slow to make concessions. Meanwhile, Inkatha’s attacks grew more intense. Only the revelation that the government had been funding Inkatha, enabling it to carry out murderous attacks on ANC supporters, pushed the government back in the face of public outrage at its duplicity. This led to a peace accord meant to disarm Inkatha, but the group ignored the agreement, and the violence continued.

It was not until November 1991 that the violence eased temporarily, when Cosatu organised a two-day stay-away involving three million people to protest the introduction of a Value Added Tax (VAT). Although the stay-away momentarily halted the violence, it did not signal an alternative to the ongoing negotiations. It served more to show the government that it could not unilaterally impose significant economic changes without facing resistance.

Negotiations started in December 1991 with the first Conference for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), a process heavily stacked against the anti-apartheid movement with just three delegations out of 19. In August 1992, Cosatu called a nationwide stay-away. This was a tremendous success, with four million staying away from work and school. This forced the NP to back down on its initial resistance. It conceded a sovereign constituent assembly and elections by the end of 1993 and an interim government to oversee them, even if, in the following months, it did its best to limit these concessions as much as it could.

The ANC negotiators needed episodes of mass action to break NP foot-dragging, but they were also acutely aware that as a government-in-waiting, they were to inherit a South Africa where none of the vast inequalities and oppressions had been resolved and where workers had shown they were prepared to fight for their rights. Mass action could be turned on, but for their futures, it must also be turned off when necessary. Thus, the ANC argued that rolling mass action was

not a programme for insurrection. … There is a growing realisation that this task [of reconstruction] belongs to all South Africans. After all, a climate of fear, uncertainty and a lack of investor confidence affects ordinary people’s lives as much as it undermines productivity and disrupts the whole economy.^[18]

The SACP agreed. The priority was to win control of the state as a platform to fight for further gradual advances, aka the national democratic revolution, even if that meant power-sharing. Not everyone in the Tripartite Alliance was convinced. The ANC Youth League argued:

A study of the short record of negotiations does not give evidence that we have made any gains by making compromises… There is more evidence that the breakthroughs we have made so far have been the result of unrelenting struggles.^[19]

The importance of mass struggle was reinforced following the assassination of popular SACP and MK leader Chris Hani in April 1993. In the months leading up to the murder, negotiations between the ANC and NP government had stalled, with no concrete steps to prepare for democratic elections. Impatience with the negotiations within the ANC’s constituency was building. Hani’s murder by a far-right assassin, provided with a gun by a Conservative Party MP, blew the lid off the pressure cooker. Big protests erupted in townships and urban centres across the country. Thousands took to the streets, with many demonstrations turning violent as frustrations boiled over. Black youths blamed their leaders for allowing them to be led like lambs to the slaughter; “Give us guns”, they cried. Fearing that the explosion of anger might derail negotiations, Mandela stepped in, using his immense authority to appeal for “unity” and patience. To get to the head of the movement, the ANC called two stay-aways that were overwhelmingly observed in all the big cities, each accompanied by giant marches. On the day of Hani’s funeral, tens of thousands of mourners attended, along with similar numbers elsewhere attending local events around the country. The ANC managed to steer its supporters off the streets and, in doing so, saved the negotiations. In return, the government was forced to set a date for the election one year hence.

As the April 1994 election approached, a new wave of mass struggle erupted. Right-wing Bantustan leaders, whom the apartheid regime had supported for decades, resisted the integration of their territories into a united, democratic South Africa. In Bophuthatswana, a mass uprising put an end to one such holdout. When leader Lucas Mangope refused to give up power, thousands of civilians flooded the streets of Mafikeng, destroying symbols of Bantustan authority. Even the police mutinied and joined the protests. Mangope called on white far-right militias for help. The militias rushed in, shooting protesters and bystanders. But the crowds, along with the rebellious police, fought back, eventually driving the militias out, wounding and killing many of them. Mangope was forced to flee the capital.

When people in other Bantustans saw what happened in Bophuthatswana, they launched similar protests, and their leaders quickly gave up resisting reintegration. Although ANC activists were involved in these protests, the ANC leadership, worried about reviving the rebellious spirit of 1984, worked to calm things down. The ANC made a deal in KwaZulu, where Buthelezi threatened to boycott the election. They agreed to leave the Bantustan state and police force untouched – despite Buthelezi using them to attack ANC supporters in Natal and Transvaal – as the price for his cooperation in the new political order.

Finally, the dawn of a new age arrived when, after decades of struggle, the ANC won the May 1994 election, only narrowly missing a two-thirds majority that would have allowed it to change the interim constitution. It also won control of seven of the nine provinces. As part of the transition agreed by the ANC, the National Party and IFP joined it in a government of national unity, with De Klerk serving as vice president and Buthelezi as Home Affairs minister until 1996, when a new constitution was adopted.^[20] The central state and regional governments reflected the apartheid legacy – managers and professionals running the public service were predominantly white. Likewise the SADF and state security forces, while MK veterans were, for the most part, simply abandoned.

If the ANC agreed to a string of political concessions that propped up the NP and IFP and afforded them a role far beyond their popular support, it also showed its willingness to placate local and international capitalists in the transition years. The Freedom Charter affirmed that “the people shall share in the country’s wealth”, and the ANC occasionally spoke about nationalising the big industries. But, starting in the late 1980s, as the prospect of a negotiated transition became reality, the ANC quickly confirmed its loyalty to the basic principles of capitalism.

Throughout the long years of struggle, the ANC never developed a clear economic plan, and neither did its allies, the SACP and Cosatu. This created a gap that others moved to fill. Groups like Cosatu-linked Economic Trends and Industrial Strategy research teams, the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG), and international bodies such as the London-based Economic Research on South Africa and the Centre for Research into Economics and Finance in Southern Africa stepped in. These groups explored different models, looking to Japan and South Korea for industrial and trade policies and Scandinavia for Keynesian welfare policies. Meanwhile, business aggressively lobbied the ANC to adopt their preferred policies.

These discussions led to the creation of the Transitional Executive Council, which included the government and the ANC, and the National Economic Forum, involving government, business, and labour. As the ANC moved closer to taking office and thus responsibility for managing South African capitalism, its economic policy drifted steadily to the right. It agreed to honour the country’s $25 billion foreign debt and maintain the central bank’s independence. In December 1993, it endorsed the NP government’s decision to take out a $850m loan from the IMF with harsh conditions. It foreswore serious land reform. It enshrined property rights into the constitution and assured the capitalists that nationalisation was not part of its agenda. It also approved swingeing GATT tariff cuts that were to gut the manufacturing industry.

In 1992, with the country suffering a grinding recession, the ANC released its “Ready to Govern” document, which became the foundation for its 1994 election manifesto, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). There was nothing socialist about the RDP; it was designed to manage South Africa’s capitalist system. Economic growth was expected to result from redistribution, creating a more stable domestic consumer base and making the economy less reliant on gold. The RDP did not aim to shift the balance of power between the working class and the capitalist class – capitalism was accepted as the default system. The RDP aimed to strengthen South Africa’s position in that system.

The ANC’s role became one of facilitating the changes that South African and international capitalists wanted but that the discredited National Party could not deliver. The SACP reassured those seeking deeper change by promising that the ANC in power would serve as a stepping stone for a more radical transformation. However, as events unfolded, it became clear that the ANC’s victory was not the beginning of a move away from capitalism but rather its guarantor.

II The ANC record in office

Capitalists and middle class: change and continuity

Apartheid bequeathed South Africa appalling inequality. Racial disparities were enormous. Whites’ average per capita income was double that of Indians, five times that of Coloureds and 7.5 times that of black people. While 62 percent of black people fell below a poverty line set at R250 pcm (in 1996 rands), only 3 percent of whites did.^[21] The vast majority of black people were working class or rural poor. The black middle class, comprising teachers, nurses, priests, police, shopkeepers, taxi owners and a few professionals, constituted just 3 percent of the black population.^[22] Black people were almost absent in government or public sector roles of any significance (outside the Bantustans), and few black people were company directors. Expectations were high among the millions who voted for the ANC in 1994 that democracy would lift the people out of poverty. This section will outline the main outcomes of three decades of ANC rule.

The most striking development of post-apartheid South Africa is that the upper reaches of the state apparatus have been transformed. The five presidents since 1994 have all been black.^[23] Of the 34 ministers in the current government of national unity, all but six are black, and of the directors-general, all but one. All but one provincial premier is black, and black politicians now dominate legislatures in every province except the Western Cape. The upper ranks of the judicial system, including the chief justice, are black. The national police commissioner and all provincial police commissioners are black. Every one of the chiefs of the defence forces is black. Black vice chancellors lead the country’s top universities. The head of the state broadcasting corporation is black, as is every member of the SABC board. The ANC’s historic mission to raise black South Africans to leadership roles in the state apparatus has been fulfilled.

The ANC has tried to use state power to create a black capitalist class. As the National Party did with Afrikaners in earlier decades, the ANC has appointed loyalists to lead state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and parastatals. Keeping most parastatals in government hands has allowed the ANC to allocate jobs, management positions, investment and procurement opportunities to favoured insiders, which Roger Southall calls a “party-state bourgeoisie”.^[24] Corruption, particularly in government outsourcing and procurement, is endemic and referred to as “tenderpreneurship” providing ample opportunity for organised crime to leech off the public purse.

Progress in building a black capitalist class in the private sector has been slower. Through black economic empowerment (BEE), the ANC has pushed white-run corporations, especially large mining companies, to appoint black board members, lend money to black businesspeople to buy shares, and give contracts to black-owned companies.^[25] Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Mandela’s deputy minister for trade and industry, set the tone early on by saying that “Blacks should not be ashamed to be ‘filthy rich’”.

BEE gained momentum under President Thabo Mbeki. In 1998, the new president created the BEE Commission, chaired by Cyril Ramaphosa, the former NUM leader and ANC secretary-general turned businessman. Its task was, as Mbeki put it, “promoting the formation of a Black Bourgeoisie which will itself be committed and contribute to BEE”.^[26] Corporations were eager to comply, seeing BEE as a way to gain favour with the government and influence policy. Key beneficiaries included Saki Macozoma, Patrice Motsepe, Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale, three of whom were on the ANC national executive. These new black capitalists acquired equity stakes worth billions of rands in South Africa’s top communications, banking, industrial and natural resources companies.

For those in the ANC’s inner circle, BEE was a win-win. A small layer of black businesspeople became extremely wealthy, corporations secured favourable government contracts, and the ANC used BEE to raise funds for the party. There was an obvious tension, however. The big capitalists may have welcomed a few appointments to company boards and an offloading of what were often marginal parts of their businesses to black businesspeople. However, they strongly opposed a wholesale transfer of ownership of the type occurring in neighbouring Zimbabwe. And so, in 2002, when Mlambo-Ngcuka, now mines and energy minister, proposed black ownership of mining companies be lifted to 51 percent within ten years, the capitalists reacted, wiping billions of rands off the value of South Africa’s mining stocks. The minister capitulated, halving the target and giving the mining companies veto powers over implementation.

The failure of BEE to spread money beyond a well-connected few sparked the most serious faction fight in the ANC’s history, as Jacob Zuma rallied those in the party cadres demanding their share of the loot against Mbeki, whom they denounced as a slave to neoliberalism and “white monopoly capital”. If the private sector would not deal them in, the SOEs must. Cynically holding the banner of “radical economic transformation” (RET) aloft, Zuma defeated Mbeki in the contest for ANC president at the party’s 2007 conference and assumed the national presidency in 2009. Once president, Zuma set in train a wholesale transfer of national wealth to his supporters. SOE managers bent procurement rules to favour the well-connected. Zuma’s relations with the wealthy Gupta family were only the most high-profile case. With the economy stagnating after 2014, open looting of public enterprises and kickbacks from private capitalists became the surest route to large fortunes. Scandal after scandal followed, involving thousands of ANC insiders and multinational business consultancies. The Gupta empire finally blew up when tens of thousands of private emails were leaked to investigative journalists. The Guptas fled to Dubai, and in 2018 Zuma was ousted as president by his long-serving deputy, Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa promised a break from the corruption that marked his predecessor’s reign. But he did not have clean hands himself. He had amassed an enormous fortune as a politically connected business executive whose businesses were revealed as illicitly removing funds from the country. In 2012, as a director and significant shareholder of mining giant Lonmin, Ramaphosa pressured the police to take action that led to the murder of 34 striking mineworkers at the Marikana platinum mine in North West Province.

Ramaphosa’s actions at Marikana confirm that black capitalists treat their workforces no better than their white predecessors. They have adopted the same methods to extract more value from their workers, using labour brokers to outsource employment and squeeze wages and conditions. One recent review concludes: “In practice, the main benefits of BEE programs in the mining industry went to a relatively small group of private black investors rather than communities, workers, or emerging new businesses”.^[27]

Further down the class hierarchy, the ANC has also used state power to promote a black middle class. The apartheid regime started this process hoping to divide the freedom fight but had little success outside the Bantustans. It is only since the fall of apartheid that a substantial black middle class has emerged, with Southall arguing that: “the party-state has become a – if not the – fulcrum around which upward social mobility and chances for ‘private accumulation’ revolve for historically disadvantaged segments of the population”.^[28]

Affirmative action programs have significantly increased educational opportunities in state secondary schools and higher education, particularly the well-resourced historically white institutions. In addition, equity employment programs in government, the professions, big corporations and the media have resulted in a degree of deracialisation in workplaces. Black people now constitute a much bigger share of the middle class. In 2016, 59 percent of the top income quintile were black, up from 34 percent in 2001, and the figure is likely higher today.^[29] Many university-educated black professionals have moved into previously all-white suburbs in the big cities.^[30] The growing prosperity of the black middle class helps explain the marked growth of wage inequality within the black population since 1994.

Then there are the black business and trading bourgeoisie in medium and small companies, sometimes merging with the lumpenproletariat and organised crime sector, as is evident in the taxi and construction sectors, traditional strongholds of the black petty bourgeoisie.

The ANC has sought to use the growing black middle class as a buffer to protect it from the working class. For many years, the middle class complied. From 1994 to 2009, support for the ANC increased among black business owners and professionals.^[31] In more recent elections, however, black middle-class support for the ANC has declined, but no other party has been able to capitalise on this. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has tried to attract this group, hoping that their rising affluence would shift their political loyalties. However, the DA’s mostly white, conservative support base has discouraged many black middle-class voters from jumping ship to join the DA. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), with its focus on the black poor, has not appealed to this group either. Other smaller parties have tried and scored derisory votes or failed to repeat initial success in subsequent elections, quickly fading to nothing. Those dissatisfied with the ANC have tended simply not to vote rather than rally behind a rival party.^[32]

While the racial makeup of the political leadership and many professions has changed significantly since 1994, wealth and capital remain concentrated among a small number of white-owned conglomerates and family businesses.^[33] By 2020, no black-owned companies were among the top firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), and very few black-owned businesses had grown significantly. BEE has mostly not been an entry point for a black bourgeoise to start the process of capital accumulation but is mainly about sharing rents, along with targets in skills development, management and procurement among the politically connected. This has reinforced the existing economic structure rather than changed it.

That so much of the country’s economic base remains in the same hands as in the days of apartheid is the product of the ANC’s commitment to capitalism. While it uses patronage to build a layer of loyalists and uses these connections to loot the SOEs for its purposes, the ANC also seeks the support of local and international big business. Investment in the productive sector is already very low, and the ANC fears that any more substantial redistribution will lead to massive capital flight.

The ANC’s support for big business was apparent in 1996 when it abandoned the RDP and introduced a new plan, the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Program (GEAR). This promised cuts to the budget deficit, lower tariffs and corporate taxes, privatisation, further loosening foreign exchange controls, lower public sector wages and reduced inflation. GEAR signalled to financial markets and the ANC base that the government would not pursue progressive reforms.

A critical decision in 1999 allowed major companies to move their financial headquarters overseas. Anglo-American, De Beers and Gencor (a predecessor of BHP Billiton) shifted listings to London and Melbourne, becoming global players while shedding local operations and causing significant job losses. Other capitalists followed suit, acquiring properties abroad and merging with global giants. While shareholders benefited, the South African Treasury suffered as these firms minimised tax liabilities and paid foreign shareholders in hard currency, worsening the current account deficit.

The South African economy grew fairly steadily from 1994 until 2008 when it slumped dramatically during the global financial crisis. Economic growth has been feeble in the 15 years since, and per capita GDP is now lower than in 2012. Private investment has dwindled and state-owned enterprises have accrued substantial debts. Lack of basic infrastructure maintenance is causing recurrent power outages, water shortages and service disruptions. Mafia-like groups demanding “protection” money and waging violent turf wars are widespread in mining, construction and the taxi industry. Productivity is flat. Government debt has risen to 72 percent of GDP from 28 percent in 2008, and the rand has dropped from 28 US cents in 1994 to just 6 US cents today.

Despite economic stagnation, the South African capitalist class has retained its wealth, with the JSE share index soaring from 20,000 in 2009 to 85,000 today. The concentration of wealth at the top has become even more acute, with the richest 10 percent owning 86 percent of total wealth, while the top 0.01 percent hold more than the bottom 90 percent of the population.^[34]

The apartheid regime and its capitalist support base were notoriously corrupt. Little has changed. Based on its biennial global survey of economic crime, Price Waterhouse Coopers consistently rates corporate South Africa as the “world leader in economic crime, including money-laundering, bribery and corruption, procurement fraud, asset misappropriation, accounting fraud, and cybercrime”.^[35]

The working class and poor

If the capitalists have fared reasonably well, the working class and poor have not. The country’s Bill of Rights guarantees the right to health care, food, water, social security, education and adequate housing. What is the reality?

Unemployment now stands at 33 percent (43 percent if those who have given up looking are included), up from 25 percent in 2014. Sixty percent of 15-24-year-olds available to work are unemployed. Three-quarters of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more.^[36] Racial divisions persist: unemployment for whites is 9 percent, for Indians/Asians, 13 percent, for Coloureds, 23 percent, but for black people, 37 percent are jobless.

The main growth in jobs since 1994 has polarised between skilled and well-paid jobs in finance and business services and low-paid and low-skilled service jobs, such as security guards, care workers, domestic workers, office and hotel cleaners or construction labourers. Many such workers are without long-term contracts or benefits.

The government’s chief response to the unemployment crisis has been a public works program providing temporary work placements for the unemployed and a wage subsidy scheme encouraging bosses to take on young workers. The latter covered one million workers in 2015–16. This was a drop in the ocean compared to the eight million looking for work and is little more than a handout to employers.

In 1994, Cosatu was still a major force, reflected in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights and the government’s early labour laws, the Labour Relations Act of 1995 and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act of 1997. These laws governed workers’ rights and gave unions greater power to negotiate collective agreements. In 1999, minimum wage laws were introduced for low-wage sectors with little union coverage, beginning with contract cleaners, domestic workers and farm workers and expanding to the wholesale and retail sector, private security and the taxi and hospitality industries. By 2007, these laws had grown to cover five million workers. In 2019, a national minimum wage of R20 per hour was introduced, a substantial increase on the sectoral rates it superseded, and covering nearly half of all workers

However, millions, including domestic workers, farmworkers and workers in the informal sector, lack the ability to enforce these rights. Forty-three percent of workers earn below the mandated minimum, 44 percent lack paid sick leave, and one-fifth work more hours than the legal weekly limit.^[37]Despite wage improvements at the bottom, the dominant trend in the past 30 years has been the top 10 percent pulling ahead, squeezing the share of total income accounted for by the bottom half.^[38]

The ANC government has implemented social programs to assist the poor, including home building and expanded access to water, electricity, education and health services. Household electricity access grew from 62 percent in 1994 to 87 percent in 2014, while piped water access increased from 4.5 million households in 2002 to 7.7 million in 2018. Over three million homes were built between 1994 and 2018. Financial support was extended, with monthly grants now covering half the population. A child support grant was introduced in 1998, and the Social Relief of Distress grant, launched as a temporary measure in 2020, has been made permanent. By the end of 2020, 23 million beneficiaries were receiving cash transfers, up from three million in 1995.^[39]These measures have reduced absolute poverty and household hunger.^[40]

Despite these measures, millions of black South Africans still live in poor conditions, with inadequate sanitation, healthcare and education, the quality of which is going backwards. About 2.2 million households, or 12.5 million people, live in informal settlements, shanty towns built on the outskirts of the cities and townships, with houses made of tin sheets and plastic tarpaulins. Rural areas, home to nearly half the country’s children, face the worst conditions. Public services remain skewed toward the affluent, with well-funded schools in wealthy areas, while schools in poorer areas are underfunded, leading to high rates of illiteracy and innumeracy. The healthcare system is divided, with a comprehensive but costly private sector and an overburdened, inconsistent public sector.^[41] The poor face higher rates of injury, mental illness, disease and mortality. Tuberculosis is widespread.^[42]

South Africa produces and imports enough food to feed its population, but nearly a quarter of people live below the food poverty line.^[43] Malnourishment affects a quarter of children under five, contributing to severe stunting. High unemployment, poor services and unhealthy diets contribute to obesity, with two-thirds of women and one-third of men being overweight, the highest rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Poor housing conditions put five to six million children at risk of gastrointestinal infections.

In the 1990s and 2000s, South Africa faced a severe HIV/AIDS epidemic, worsened by HIV denialism under Mbeki, which caused over 330,000 deaths from 1998 to 2008. While Mbeki’s successor, Zuma, expanded access to antiretroviral drugs, AIDS still accounted for nearly 20 percent of deaths in 2017, especially among poor black South Africans. Life expectancy for black South Africans remains about ten years lower than for whites.^[44]

The government’s financial assistance program covers half the population but is extremely stingy. Unemployment insurance covers just 60 percent of the labour force for a limited time. Most benefits are means-tested, reaching only those with the lowest incomes.^[45]The median monthly wage for semi-skilled workers is R5,500 (A$470) and for elementary workers R3,500 (A$300), but the Social Relief of Distress Grant is only R370 (A$31). Monthly child support grants are R500 (A$42) but cut out for those earning more than R625 (A$53) a month. Many poor people rely on loan sharks to survive, with women facing the worst financial insecurity and high rates of domestic violence.

The expansion of social programs, cash transfers and installation of piped water and electricity have lifted living standards, but this has not significantly alleviated inequality of wealth or income since 1994, and inequality remains the most extreme in the developed world.

Although inequality between the races is lower now than in 1994, race is still a significant determinant of access to income, housing, public services, transport, schools, employment, safety and opportunities.^[46] Median earnings for black people are 6 percent behind earnings for Coloureds, but 69 percent lower than Indians’ and 78 percent lower than whites’.^[47] Black people still suffer high levels of deprivation, and the spatial geography of apartheid remains – the deepest poverty and deprivation remain in the areas that were the Bantustans and townships under apartheid.

Foreign policy

Early in the ANC’s period in power, Mandela stated that the government’s “engagement in international affairs” would be guided by several core principles, including “the centrality of human rights, the promotion of democracy and…the peaceful resolution of disputes between states”.^[48] Zuma claimed in 2017 that the ANC is the party of the “global anti-imperialist movement”.^[49] This rhetoric, however, is far removed from the government’s practice, its submission to the ICJ concerning Israel’s war crimes notwithstanding.

While South Africa does not follow the US blindly – for example, refusing to impose sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine – it nonetheless defends the Western imperialist world order. South Africa plays leadership roles in the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. It has hosted major forums of these bodies and, in Patrick Bond’s account, remains “the continent’s most dynamic site for elite networking”.

Bond has described the ANC government’s foreign policy as embodying “the dialectic of vague anti-imperialist rhetoric and concrete sub-imperialist practice”.^[50] This was obvious in 2003 when the US invaded Iraq, claiming it would bring freedom to the oppressed Iraqis. Mandela opposed the US invasion, saying: “If there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States of America”. This had little effect on government policy, however. Within weeks, three Iraq-bound US warships had docked and refuelled in Durban, and South Africa’s state-owned arms manufacturer Denel had sold $160 million worth of weapons systems to the British army and US Marines. A few months later, President Mbeki hosted a visit to Pretoria by US President George W Bush. In May 2004, Mandela phoned the US president to re-establish good relations, explaining: “The United States is the most powerful state in the world, and it is not good to remain in tension with the most powerful state”.

The ANC government may oppose Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but it has joined the US and European powers in voting down attempts at the UN General Assembly to introduce reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid. It also rejects moves to cancel massive debts of the Global South owed to Western banks.

As one of the biggest powers on the continent, South Africa continues to throw its weight around. It is home to one-half of Africa’s largest firms, is the single biggest foreign investor, and has one of the most sophisticated militaries. It has used its economic and military clout to promote South African commercial and military interests and the broader US imperialist-dominated world system. This is apparent with the 15-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), the destination for most South African foreign investment. This free trade bloc is promoted as a means to stimulate mutually beneficial trade, investment and national development. However, as the most industrially advanced nation, South Africa benefits disproportionately from trade and investment liberalisation. It attracts resources from across the region, threatening the economies of its neighbours. Far from equalising the region’s economies, SADC further deepens the core-periphery dynamic.

That South Africa might contribute to peace on the continent is also belied by its role as an arms exporter. It has sold hundreds of millions of rands worth of arms and armoured vehicles to conflict zones with human rights violations. The country also hosts the biennial Africa Aerospace and Defence Show, one of the largest arms fairs globally, attracting hundreds of defence companies.

South Africa’s direct military interventions in Africa include a significant deployment to Lesotho in 1998, where 600 defence force personnel suppressed riots following a contested election, reinforcing South Africa’s regional dominance and protecting mining interests. In 2007, it supported the authoritarian regime in the Central African Republic to safeguard mining investments. In 2013, South Africa joined UN peacekeeping in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where South African companies had extensive mining and oil interests, including a concession granted to a nephew of President Zuma. In 2021, responding to French requests, the ANC sent 1,500 troops to Mozambique to protect TotalEnergies’ LNG facility from insurgency.

While promoting an “African Agenda,” the government harshly treats irregular immigrants from neighbouring countries, conducting raids that result in mass deportations and allowing police harassment of migrants on the streets and in detention centres.

Working class resistance, repression and reaction^[51]

The paradox of the democratic transition was that because mass action contributed to the establishment of democracy, the new ANC government came to power with more legitimacy than if it had emerged solely from high-level negotiations without pressure from below.^[52] This did not mean, however, that its supporters were simply prepared to sit back and wait for the government to deliver.

The grinding poverty experienced by most black South Africans has fuelled decades of protest. Between 1997 and 2013, police records show an average of 5,000 protest events annually, with a steady increase from 2004 onwards.^[53] There have been a range of targets. In the late 1990s, thousands of protests broke out in the townships opposing the introduction of user-pays water and electricity metering in poor areas and the subsequent water and power cut-offs for those unable to afford their bills.^[54] Such protests have included boycotts, marches, submission of memoranda of grievances, mass community meetings, barricading roads, burning tyres, toyi-toying, street fights with the police, burning of municipal buildings and councillors’ houses, and land occupations. These have compelled local municipalities, starting in 2001, to provide free basic services for low-income residents.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Treatment Action Campaign mobilised thousands of predominantly black women to demand generic anti-retroviral drugs when AIDS transmission was ripping through the black population. President Mbeki was eventually forced to provide the drugs. The outcome was a massive jump in life expectancy.

The Zuma presidency sparked years of protest against his administration and its corrupt relations with the Gupta faction of the state. Critical targets included the imposition of tolls on Gauteng freeways and the ongoing service delivery crisis. Zuma was eventually forced out.

In 2015, tens of thousands of university students demonstrated and occupied university buildings to protest against fee hikes. Activists also incorporated a demand that the outsourced and low-paid blue-collar campus workforce be brought back in-house. The students and workers won, with the Zuma government first freezing fees and then introducing free tertiary education covering 90 percent of the student body. University administrations assumed responsibility for the grounds staff, cleaners, security staff, porters and hospitality workers.

Workers have struck and marched on the streets to press their demands, primarily for higher wages but also against privatisation, mass redundancies and hostile labour legislation. There have been several strike surges in the past couple of decades.^[55] The first was in 2007, driven by the largest public service strike in South African history as ten unions with over 300,000 workers struck for 25 days. That year also saw several significant strikes in the rubber, metal and glass sectors, including the motor vehicle and engineering industries, and a spate of wildcat strikes in construction organised by independent worker committees. Foreshadowing the later upsurge in the sector, platinum miners also struck for 25 days. This wave of strikes helped shake up national politics, undermining Mbeki and paving the way for Zuma, who was regarded by Cosatu as more labour-friendly.

In 2010, with massive public spending underway leading up to the soccer World Cup, strikes peaked again, with 21 million strike days. Leading the way was a four-week strike by one million public sector workers, involving more than a dozen unions representing teachers, police, nurses, customs officials and office workers. Workers in publicly owned ports, pipelines, freight rail and passenger rail transport struck for and won big wage rises.

2012 saw two notable strikes. Platinum exports have become a major source of foreign exchange in recent decades, so when skilled rock drillers at Lonmin’s mine at Marikana in North West Province struck for a R12,500 (A$1,066) monthly wage, substantially above the R7,000 median wage for the industry, and formed an independent workers’ committee to run the strike, they drew national attention.^[56] The issue at hand was not just the financial cost of lost production to the company and government but the threat the strike posed to the system of industry-wide bargaining established in the 1990s. This corporatist system offered the NUM leadership and shaft stewards a privileged and well-remunerated role as representatives of mineworkers, in return for which they policed strikes. The wildcat strike by Marikana miners, some NUM members, others members of the new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) that stood outside the Tripartite Alliance, threatened the NUM leaders’ grip over the industry.

Management, the NUM and government ministers moved to smash the strike. The NUM denounced the strike and the workers’ committee. Lonmin refused to meet with the Marikana workers’ committee, stating that it would only negotiate with the NUM. Ramaphosa, at this stage a Lonmin director, urged the police minister to come down hard on the strikers and described the strike as “a criminal act”. The stage was now set for a massacre. On 11 August, as mineworkers marched to the NUM office at the mine site to demand support, a line of 15–20 NUM leaders and shaft stewards fired at the workers, killing one. Several days of confrontation followed until, on 16 August, police and security forces, using armoured vehicles and helicopters, shot at a crowd of 3,000 mineworkers assembled at their strike camp, killing 34, many of them trying to flee.

Marikana was the bloodiest massacre by the state since Soweto, only this time, it was carried out with the blessing of the ANC government. In the aftermath, it was expected the mineworkers would return to work defeated. But they fought on, eventually forcing the company to concede substantial pay increases. The Marikana victory triggered a massive wave of unprotected strikes led by worker committees which spread from platinum mining into gold and onto other minerals.

The other notable strike of 2012 was a strike by farm workers in the Western Cape. In response to wage cuts by farmers used to ruling the workforce with an iron fist, a group of female seasonal workers struck to demand R4,500 per month. The strike then spread from farm to farm until it drew in 11,000 farm workers and encompassed 25 rural towns, becoming what Eddie Cottle calls “a social uprising of the rural working class”.^[57] The strike united permanent, casual and seasonal workers and was led by an informal organisation of farm workers, the first of its kind. Given its unprecedented nature, the strike garnered national headlines and forced the government to lift the official daily minimum wage for farm workers by 52 percent and, some time later, to extend minimum wages to a much wider section of the workforce, domestic workers included.

In 2014, platinum miners again came to the fore, with 70,000 mineworkers striking for five months, costing the platinum producers R24 billion in lost revenue. The miners eventually won a R1,000 monthly pay increase. The NUM, ANC and SACP again opposed the platinum miners. The platinum strike was followed by a four-week strike by NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers) members in the steel and engineering sectors, with the workers extracting a big pay rise from the bosses.

The ANC government has done its best to dampen protests by offering community and student leaders grants and jobs in the ANC apparatus. They have been helped by the SACP and Cosatu, who have given the ANC government left cover. Since 1994, Cosatu has regularly registered opposition to the government’s neoliberal measures or anti-labour legislation. It has organised national days of action with mass rallies in the big cities and repeatedly threatened to pull out of the Tripartite Alliance. However, the lure of jobs in the party and state apparatus and identification with the ANC’s political project have prevented any schism (with an important exception we will deal with below). The NUM, in particular, Cosatu’s largest affiliate, has been a conveyor belt for union leaders to progress to senior roles in provincial and national politics. The growth of public sector employment has bolstered the rolls and treasuries of the public sector unions, and these unions have been important government supporters.

While support for the government has yielded rewards for many union leaders, it has also helped hollow out grassroots union structures, a pale shadow of their state before 1994. Using the language of the national democratic revolution, the Congress Alliance helped steer the anti-apartheid struggle into reformist channels; the Tripartite Alliance plays this role today.

The growing gap between the official political structures and the working class helps explain the weakening of the hold of Cosatu and its constituent unions over the working class, evident in the emergence of independent worker organisations already touched on. These have sprung up in response to immediate needs when existing unions have not responded. However, in most cases, these have not survived long past the strikes they were set up to lead.

Cosatu has also experienced a major split. In 2014, the federation expelled the 350,000-strong NUMSA for refusing to back the ANC at the 2014 national elections. In 2017, NUMSA and a few smaller unions launched a rival federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU). However, SAFTU has not pulled out any other big unions from Cosatu’s ranks and is very much dominated by NUMSA. It is also wracked by faction-fighting, limiting its effectiveness. In 2018, NUMSA announced the formation of a Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) to challenge the ANC at the 2019 national election. However, the SRWP was a top-down initiative, reflecting a persistent Stalinist political outlook in the NUMSA leadership, and NUMSA failed to build it. The SRWP received fewer than 25,000 votes (0.1 percent of votes cast) in the 2019 election and soon after was quietly disbanded.

Another feature of class struggle in South Africa is the high incidence of unprotected strikes, where the workers or unions have not followed the official industrial relations procedures. In the past five years, between one-half and two-thirds of strikes have been unprotected, leading employers to bemoan the “lawlessness” of South African workers.^[58] The attempt to pacify the working class by channelling disputes through the industrial relations machinery has only been partially successful.

Concessions and cooption have not been the ANC’s only responses to mass protest. The ANC has also regularly denounced protests, sometimes referring to them as the work of foreign intelligence agencies collaborating with white intellectuals and opposition parties to destabilise South Africa’s democracy. State security bodies regularly gather electronic and human intelligence on activists and groups planning protests. Local councils routinely misuse their powers to obstruct protests, framing them as a threat to public order, and then deploy police against those who assemble. And, as Marikana demonstrated, police attacks on worker and community mobilisations have resulted in fatalities.^[59]

The social struggles that repeatedly break out in South Africa have their limits. Many are short and limited in scope, disappearing once the immediate issues of municipal corruption, service delivery failure, incompetent administrators or lack of consultation are addressed. Some result from turf wars between prominent individuals with fiefdoms to protect and who use struggles to bid for more funding, whether government or NGOs. There is little cross-fertilisation of community and labour struggles. Protests led by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) suffer the usual problems associated with this model: the dominance of professional organisers who steer the campaigns towards elite lobbying, the single-minded focus on the specific grievance and locality and the lack of interest in generalising the struggle.^[60]

The situation is pregnant not just with the possibility of radical resistance but also of political reaction. Xenophobia is a running sore. Right-wing forces have seized on anger at housing shortages, lack of jobs, poor local facilities or overcrowding to attack immigrants, including shopkeepers and street hawkers from elsewhere in Africa or from South Asia. In 2008, repeated xenophobic attacks over several weeks left at least 64 dead and 70,000 people displaced in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In 2015, racist violence, which started in KwaZulu-Natal, erupted nationwide, resulting in at least seven deaths and displacing about 5,000 migrants and refugees. In 2019, the country experienced another wave of attacks against African foreign nationals.^[61]

Anger and frustration have also been turned against informal settlements set up by impoverished rural migrants on the fringes of townships, with mobs destroying their makeshift homes. Ethnic divisions and reactionary moral codes are being promoted by traditional leaders working with the ANC’s blessing. The ANC once condemned many of them as apartheid collaborators, but as part of the negotiation compromises, agreed to preserve many of their privileges in the country’s new constitution. These leaders have done their best to stoke ethnic and clan divisions to secure their authority. Ethnic identity has been used to promote reactionary attitudes towards women, LGBTI people and migrants, as have conservative evangelical churches which are drawing big followings in the townships and rural areas.

In 2021, Zuma’s supporters triggered days of rioting and looting in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal following the Constitutional Court’s decision to jail Zuma for 15 months for contempt of court after refusing to appear before the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture that Zuma had set up in the dying days of his presidency. The 2021 riots were the most widespread and bloodiest example of disorder yet, resulting in more than 350 deaths. They also illustrated two sides of the current situation – the deadly factionalism within the ANC and the potential for revolt grounded in the widespread poverty of the masses.

Political consequences

Pessimism is pervasive in South Africa today. The sense that the country is “going in the wrong direction” is almost universal.^[62] Two-thirds of the population are dissatisfied with the way democracy works. Nearly three-quarters think that the country’s economic condition is bad and getting worse. Almost one-half say the same about their living conditions. Unsurprisingly, dissatisfaction with the state of things is significantly higher among those in poverty and those with little formal education. While the media focuses on crime, two-thirds or more of the population believe that unemployment is the country’s most important problem, followed at some distance by electricity cuts, corruption, the cost of living and poverty. Ninety percent think that the government is failing to manage the economy successfully, whether that is keeping prices stable, creating jobs or narrowing income gaps.

The 2024 election showed that the ANC has seriously undermined its popular support. This was most obvious in the townships where the ANC once regularly recorded a vote of 90 percent or more. In Soweto and Tembisa, outside Johannesburg, and Khayelitsha on the dusty and impoverished Cape Flats, the party’s vote share dropped to 50 percent. In Umlazi, a township of 400,000 on the outskirts of Durban, the ANC vote plummeted to just 13 percent. The ANC’s falling vote share does not fully capture the drubbing suffered by the governing party since millions of registered voters stayed away from the polling booths and millions more, particularly young South Africans disillusioned with what was on offer, did not register to vote. Just 6.5 million out of an eligible voting age population of 42 million voted for the ANC in the 2024 election, down from 10 million in 2019, despite the population having grown by three million.

The ANC’s electoral support is dwindling, but it is not about to collapse. It retains the support of the capitalist class insofar as it is the only party able to govern the country. Even now, it retains credibility with the black population in a way that the Democratic Alliance does not. The ANC, therefore, is more effective in suppressing working-class struggle than the DA. The ANC can also rely on the loyalty of the extensive party-state bourgeoisie it has built up over three decades, which owes its privileges to the ANC’s continued hold on power.

If the ANC is no champion for the working class, this is also true of its rivals for the black vote. The biggest beneficiary of the ANC’s falling support at the election was the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, led by Zuma and launched only weeks before. MK very quickly drew to its ranks entire branches of the ANC apparatus in KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s regional stronghold. It used this machinery to win 4.6 million votes (14.6 percent), only narrowly falling short of winning a majority in the province. This was the most dramatic electoral breakthrough for any party since the advent of democracy. The EFF, who had hoped to capitalise on falling ANC support, lost votes to MK but still scored 9.5 percent of the total. The IFP reversed its long-term decline since the 1990s, winning 3.9 percent of the national vote but 16 percent in KwaZulu-Natal. The Patriotic Alliance won 680,000 votes, only 2.1 percent of the national tally, but received 18 percent in voting districts dominated by Coloured voters.^[63]

None of these parties has anything to offer the black and Coloured working class. The MK Party is a right-wing populist organisation combining demands for the expropriation of land without compensation and nationalisation of the mines, banks and insurance companies with Zulu chauvinism and support for an upper house comprising kings, queens and other traditional leaders. It is backed by conservative evangelical churches because it attacks LGBTI and women’s rights in the name of upholding “African moral values” and supports compulsory military service to cultivate discipline and patriotism. It is essentially Zuma’s faction of the ANC in exile, comprising those, gangsters included, who had benefited from his RET agenda while president and now impatient to get their snouts back in the trough. The Patriotic Alliance is also far-right and runs on a reactionary social program aimed at the Coloured population. The IFP leadership promotes the party as the voice of the KwaZulu-Natal “traditional leadership”. The strong votes recorded for these parties show the dangers facing the South African working class when there is no significant left-wing political alternative to fight for working-class interests.

The EFF pitches itself as a party of the left. It was founded in 2013 by former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, who had been expelled the previous year. It draws support from young black people angry about the ANC’s failure to lift the lot of so many poor South Africans and championed the cause of the Marikana miners. At the 2014 national election, the EFF picked up over one million votes (6.4 percent). In the 2019 election, it fared even better as frustration with the ANC grew, scoring nearly two million votes (10.8 percent). It has pushed aside the ANC to win control of student unions at ten higher education institutions. The EFF describes itself as “Marxist-Leninist” and African nationalist, identifying the radical intellectual Frantz Fanon and former Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara as its ideological inspirations. Like MK, the EFF demands the expropriation and redistribution of land, the nationalisation of the big mining companies and the banks, and also a doubling of social payments and the minimum wage.

While describing itself as leftist, the EFF has no orientation to working-class politics. It backs strikes but does not build trade unions or working-class organisations of any kind. It supports Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also supports the Chinese Communist Party. Like all the parties represented in the parliament, the EFF leaders stand accused of financial corruption. It is run by a command structure on militaristic lines and is dominated by Malema. It has a mixed record on racism, at times opposing anti-immigrant racism and at other times vilifying Indian South Africans. And while it draws a vote from those angry at the lack of socio-economic progress since the fall of apartheid, it has, like the ANC, formed parliamentary blocs in municipal government with the Democratic Alliance. Having failed to form a coalition government with the ANC after the 2024 election, it has now joined MK in an oppositional Progressive Caucus, united by their mutual commitment to RET. While it is not fascist, as many South African liberals and the SACP describe it, it is in no way a socialist party and will be an obstacle if such is to be built.

Conclusion

The ANC and SACP have betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the millions of black South Africans who fought for decades to bring down apartheid. The Stalinist strategy of the two-stage revolution was a cynical cover for the Congress Alliance’s actual project, which was to bring a new black ruling class to power. That has been achieved, but this has done nothing to transform the situation for the working class. The black ruling class superintends a capitalist system marked by continuities with that which existed before 1994. The bulk of property still lies in the hands of a wealthy minority, mostly still white, with whom the black ruling class shares the spoils of exploitation of land and labour of the mass of South Africans.

As guardians of the state apparatus, the black ruling class now stands in opposition to the black working class in the same way as its Afrikaner and British predecessors. It is black-run courts, black police and security ministers, black generals and police commissioners and often black bosses, all backed by black-run media, that confront workers in struggle today.

The fate of the South African struggle to smash apartheid has an important lesson for us today. Stalinism steered the South African struggle into a dead end. Unless capitalism is overthrown, the same evils will continue. Revolutionaries need to create a new socialist current, one that builds on the authentic Marxist tradition before Stalinism sabotaged it. A tough road lies ahead, but a start must be made. Crucial to the success of a revival of socialism in South Africa is a strategy that puts the fight for socialism at the forefront, not as some distant “second stage” of revolution. Our contribution to this project in Australia is to build the forces for socialism where we are. A revival of genuine socialist politics and organisation, wherever it takes place, can inspire the South African working class to again take up the fight for real liberation.

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