Love Letter to the Many

South Africa was the hope of the leftist world when it emerged from apartheid in 1994. It had an impressive and rich tradition of left politics. At the heart of post-apartheid democracy-making was a revolutionary nationalist ANC, the oldest Communist Party in Africa, the SACP, and one of the most militant labour union federations in the world, COSATU. Yet, today South Africa finds itself at a crossroads. It can either devour itself through inequality engendered social conflict; plunge further into racial polarisation due to the resurgence of exclusionary nationalist and neo-fascist politics; or risk being overcome with failure as socio-ecological systems collapse and the country gets overwhelmed by the many persistent crises. Many are deeply concerned about what South Africa has become and where it is headed. This book explains through a political economy/ecology analysis why and how the degeneration, delegitimation and crisis of national liberation politics has happened. Moreover, Left politics have failed. The world historical defeats of Soviet socialism, social democracy and revolutionary nationalism also became defeats for the South African left. This was not inevitable. At the same time, neoliberal dogma’s primacy of the sovereignty of capital and markets, over the state, people and nature, has also not worked. The grand and deep criminalized experiment has reached its limits. Its product: a hollow and criminalized market democracy predicated on an unviable society while producing a dialectic of reaction; the new extreme right. In these informed writings there is pushback against the neoliberal turn, Zumafication, emergent neofascism, the fraud of the National Democratic Revolution and the normalisation of the dangerous climate contradiction. At the same time there is a consistent transformative intellectual praxis, against the grain of defeat, that embraces the opportunity of left renewal initially inside the SACP but extending beyond. These arguments document 27 years of working with trade unions, township communities, waste pickers, unemployed peoples’ movements, informal traders, social movements and the global left to reconstruct the left imaginary beyond the traditional left, reform versus revolution, binary. These writings provide critical resources for transformative left politics and points to new frontiers for further elaboration. Finally, this volume curates a small part of post-apartheid history. It adds to the invisible archive of the left and takes its readers into a world that has been feared, misunderstood or caricatured. This volume is a contribution to decolonial South African thought. It is shared as a gift to the many, specifically to the next generation, so that they continue to struggle for and build an emancipated country and world in the present, before it is too late. Through a self-reflexive transformative politics, informed by an ethics of care, another future is possible.

Vishwas Satgar is an Associate Professor of International Relations, editor of the Democratic Marxism series and principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene at the University of the Witwatersrand. As an award winning scholar and veteran activist he has spent decades working on systemic alternatives such as cooperatives, solidarity economies, food sovereignty, the commons, climate justice and contributing to left renewal.