A general election is due in South Africa in 2024. It will be the seventh since the hated apartheid system of racial oppression and segregation was dismantled. Across South African society it is viewed as a virtual certainty that the African National Congress (ANC) will lose its majority for the first time since 1994. This will open a new era of capitalist coalitions which promises to deepen the instability of South African capitalism which has already plunged society into multiple crises. Any combination of the opposition capitalist political parties, either propping-up a minority ANC-government, or uniting to push-out the ANC (a so-called “Moonshot Pact”), will be fragile and unstable. The experience of coalition governments at local government level, especially since 2016, has already produced chaos. In other words, the ruling capitalist class faces a crisis of political representation.
Unfortunately, efforts to create a political alternative in the form of a mass workers’ party, emerging from sections of the trade union movement, which would allow the working class to fill the political vacuum, have stalled.
Weizmann Hamilton, general secretary of the Marxist Workers Party (CWI in South Africa) was recently interviewed on South African radio. In the interview he analyses the political crisis facing the ruling class and the prospects for the workers movement. Read more of the CWI’s analysis for South Africa’s 2024 elections here.
Listen to Weizmann’s radio interview here.
