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Decoding the SACP go-it-alone decision: Just thinking aloud.

In less than 24 months, the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance, a historical coalition that shaped the theoretical dimensions of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle, had transitioned from a dominant force to the brink of a monumental crisis. The significant loss of 68 seats in Parliament, reducing their performance from 57% to 40%, signalled a corresponding reduction in their deployment to state power quotas. The erosion had already begun in local government since 2016, leaving the career aspirations of alliance leaders up in smoke. 

 

As the challenging times of 2016, 2019, 2021, and particularly 2024 brought about livelihood crises sooner and more intensely than anticipated, the calls for reconfiguring the alliance, including the SACP's decision to operate independently, grew louder. The alliance's shape and decision-making structure evolved in line with the loss of political power in all government spheres since 2016. The labour component of the alliance, which expanded in sectors where public policy was influential and shrank where the capital-labour conflict was escalating, meant the worker and working-class substrate in the alliance was not as ideologically concentrated as it should have been. 

 

The melting down of the ANC's leader-of-society status and how its brand was compromised by corruption and state capture allegations revealed imminent stress in the alliance. Even those who saw the turmoil in the liberation movement as part of an established pattern in post-liberation democracies started to contemplate how these states of affairs could impact the stability of the constitutional and democratic order under construction. The spectre of hardcore party politics, rigid regionalism, tribalism, left-right ideological rigidity, and prospects of power sharing were creating increasingly complex civil society movements many levels removed from the underlying national grievances of the majority of South Africans, who are black and African in particular. These factors make the political landscape increasingly fragmented and challenging to navigate. 

 

The inside-the-alliance political rhetoric was already in a prepare-for-the-worst-case scenario mode. The key partners' discussion documents indicated a rising wave of discontent with go-it-alone tendencies taking discourse centre stage. Cassandras, within and outside the alliance, notably from think tanks, warned that the spin doctoring of fissures inside the alliance carries the inconvenient message of a total loss of political power by the African National Congress. This loss of power could lead to a significant shift in the South African political landscape, with potential implications for governance and policy-making. 

 

Blurred by the trappings of state power incumbency and buoyed by their control of patronage dispensing power, those in the alliance's leadership either refused to read or accept the script and signs and stubbornly clung to the belief that the liberation movement was invulnerable. Compounding this was that the structures of the movement were a sprawling mess, and their political mandate processing systems so bizarrely antiquated that no one had until the 2024 May 40% moment realised, or accepted, that its basic units of the organisation, branches, had been losing membership and influence at a rapid clip for more than a decade.

 

The powerful sway leftist politics, the dominant currency of the alliance, had over the pre-1996 Constitution of South Africa is now weakened. The monopoly to represent the poor, the working class, and workers by the alliance has been thinly spread between civil society bodies and legal representatives. The labour relations system has matured into a pro-workers system, and the appeal of unionisation will start to wane. The voter market for the left, which is shrinking, is contested by parties that believe in the need for a second revolution. The left has had a proliferation of newcomers, including those with toxic ideas, that think its rhetoric is a means to acquire power. Given the go-it-alone SACP choice, leftist organisations will be able to call the shots in South African politics as much as the SACP did. The leverage might be gone. 

 

Just thinking 

 

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