The US Attitude to the ICC Has Always Been Defined by Self-Interest

Washington’s approach to the court has largely been tied to a broader assessment of U.S. foreign policy goals and the anticipated costs and benefits that supporting the court could bring.

By Andrea Furger

May 26, 2024

Source: The Conversation


The International Criminal Court is pictured in The Hague, Netherlands. (Photo: Vysotsky/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)

This week, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or ICC, applied for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in connection with the ongoing war in Gaza.

The reaction of the United States, Israel’s main backer, was swift. U.S. President Joe Biden condemned the prosecutor’s action against Israel’s leaders as “outrageous” and accused the ICC of drawing false moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel.

While it is not yet clear if the ICC’s judges will decide to issue the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the Biden administration has already hinted at the possibility of imposing U.S. sanctions against ICC officials.


The U.S.’ apparent about-face when the court targeted its ally is nothing new. Nor is it surprising.

Yet, just a year ago, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for alleged international crimes in the Ukraine war, U.S. officials were full of praise for the court. Biden welcomed the action, calling it “justified.”

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in fact, the U.S. has continually displayed its support for the ICC. One top U.S. official, the ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, said the ICC “occupies an important place in the ecosystem of international justice.”

The U.S.’ apparent about-face when the court targeted its ally is nothing new. Nor is it surprising.

Rather, this vacillating approach is merely symptomatic of the U.S.’ complicated relationship with the ICC since its creation in 1998. Its hostile reaction to the Israel-Palestine situation will certainly have been expected by court officials.
Wariness From the Court’s Inception

I worked for many years as a cooperation advisor at the ICC’s office of the prosecutor. During that time, Washington’s position towards the court shifted several times—it supported the court at certain times and criticized it at others.

This has largely been tied to a broader assessment of U.S. foreign policy goals and the anticipated costs and benefits that supporting the court could bring.

The U.S. was initially a keen supporter of the creation of a permanent international criminal court and was an active participant in the ICC treaty negotiations in the 1990s.


This law also allowed the U.S. president to use “all means necessary”—a phrase understood to include armed force—to free American officials or servicemembers should they ever be detained for prosecution in The Hague, the seat of the ICC.

But it ultimately voted against the Rome Statute that created the court in 1998 due to concerns with the court’s jurisdictional framework. The U.S. feared it could allow for the prosecution of Americans without U.S. consent.

Although the U.S. still signed the Rome Statute, President George W. Bush later effectively unsigned it, saying the U.S. would not ratify the document and had no legal obligations to it.

The U.S. remains a non-member state to the ICC today.

Once the ICC was created, the U.S. adopted laws to restrict its interactions with the new court. Most importantly, it passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002 (ASPA) that prohibited providing any support to the ICC.

This law also allowed the U.S. president to use “all means necessary”—a phrase understood to include armed force—to free American officials or servicemembers should they ever be detained for prosecution in The Hague, the seat of the ICC. This earned it the nickname of “ The Hague Invasion Act.”

That same year, however, an amendment was passed to the law allowing exceptions for when the U.S. could assist international courts to bring to justice:


Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosovic, Osama bin Laden, other members of al Qaeda, leaders of Islamic Jihad, and other foreign nationals.

The amendment created significant flexibility, demonstrating that the U.S. was ready to assist international justice efforts as long as they targeted designated U.S “enemies” or other foreign nationals.
U.S. Support in African Cases

The U.S. soon adopted a pragmatic approach toward the court, supporting its activities depending on the circumstances and its interests.

In 2005, Washington allowed a United Nations Security Council referral to the ICC in relation to possible genocide and war crimes committed in Darfur, Sudan. The conflict was among the U.S.’ top foreign policy priorities in Africa at the time.

Later, the Obama administration formally adopted a “case-by-case” strategy to cooperate with the ICC when it aligned with U.S. interests.

Under this policy, the U.S. played an important role in the 2011 referral of alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Libya to the ICC. This was, again, in line with U.S. foreign policy interests.

U.S. diplomats also provided vital support in the arrest of Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda, who was later sentenced to 30 years in prison by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And the U.S. assisted with the arrest of Dominic Ongwen of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who was later sentenced to 25 years.
Another Falling Out Over Afghanistan

The relationship between the U.S. and the court soon soured again, though, during the Trump administration.

This was in part because of developments in the ICC’s investigation into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan, which marked the first time the court probed possible crimes committed by U.S. forces.

In 2020, ICC judges authorized an investigation into U.S., Afghan, and Taliban forces. Soon after, the U.S. imposed sanctions on the ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and another senior ICC official.


This week’s request for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders demonstrates yet another shift in the U.S. approach to the court.

After some delays, the investigation is continuing again, with a focus solely on crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and Islamic State Khorasan Province. Other aspects of the investigation have been “deprioritized,” an implicit reference to the U.S. and its allies.

Soon after taking office, the Biden administration lifted the sanctions against the ICC officials, returning to a seemingly more collaborative period in U.S.-ICC relations.

These relations became closer following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the adoption of new laws that broadened the possibilities of U.S. cooperation with the court. The goals of the U.S. and ICC had seemingly aligned again, at least for the time being.

But this week’s request for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders demonstrates yet another shift in the U.S. approach to the court. It continues the pattern of the U.S. supporting the court when it suits it, prioritising its own foreign policy goals over wider international criminal justice efforts.

Call for the ICC to Investigate Ursula von der

 

Leyen for Complicity in War Crimes and

 

Genocide

BY GENEVA INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 MAY 27, 2024
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Call to the International Criminal Court to investigate on Ursula von der Leyen for complicity in war crimes and genocide committed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Gaza

27 May 2024, Geneva. On May 22, 2024, the Geneva International Peace Research Institute (GIPRI), the Collectif de Juristes pour le Respect des Engagements Internationaux de la France (CJRF) and a group of international concerned citizens, submitted a legal brief to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan requesting the opening of an investigation against Ursula von der Leyen for complicity in war crimes and genocide against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including the Gaza Strip.

This legal brief, endorsed by various human rights groups and prominent academics and experts in international criminal law, calls the Prosecutor to initiate investigations on the basis of the information provided against Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen. The latter has been repeatedly informed of violations of international humanitarian law committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, particularly in the Gaza Strip, through reports from international organizations and foreign governments. This is evidenced by a letter sent to her on February 14, 2024, by the President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, and the then Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar. 1

Mrs Ursula von der Leyen is responsible for aiding and abetting the commission of crimes and violations of international humanitarian law, within the meaning of Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Mrs von der Leyen enjoys no functional immunity before the International Criminal Court by virtue of Article 27 of the Rome Statute.

The President of the European Commission is complicit in violations of Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute by her positive actions (military, political, diplomatic support to Israel) and by her failure to take timely action on behalf of the European Commission to help prevent genocide as required by the 1948 Genocide Convention. Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen cannot deny awareness of the plausibility of these crimes, especially following the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures order of 26 January 2024 in the pending ICJ case South Africa v. Israel. More importantly, Mrs. Von der Leyen has failed to take appropriate action to prevent such crimes, whereas the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Statute of the International Criminal Court make prevention an erga omnes obligation.

For any further information, please contact:

Gilles-Emmanuel Jacquet,
Vice-President of the Geneva International Peace Research Institute (GIPRI), Geneva, Switzerland.
Contact : ge.jacquet@gipri.ch ; +41 78 895 24 40

Collectif de Juristes pour le Respect des Engagements Internationaux de la France (CJRF), Paris, France.
Contact : comite.cjrf@gmail.com

1 Leo Varadkar and Pedro Sánchez, Letter to the President of the Commission of the European Union Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, Oifig an Taoisigh (Office of the Taoiseach) and Gobierno de España – Presidencia del Gobierno, 14/02/2024: https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/presidente/actividades/Documents/2024/Letter-to-Commission-President-Ursula-Von-der-Leyen.pdf

The Geneva International Peace Research Institute (www.gipri.ch) is a non-governmental organization with UN consultative status.  It was founded in 1980 by Professor Roy Adrien Preiswerk, Director of the Institut Universitaire d’Etude du Developpement and Professor at the Institut Universitaire des hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva

GREEN SYNDICALISM

Elizabeth Fiedler Is Uniting Labor and Environmental Leaders

As the new chair of the Pennsylvania House Blue-Green Caucus, Philadelphia socialist Elizabeth Fiedler is bridging a political divide that once seemed impassable: environmental advocates and the building trades.

By Elizabeth Fiedler, Jordan G. Teicher 

May 27, 2024
Source: Jacobin


Pennsylvania state representative Elizabeth Fiedler gives a press conference with labor leaders and members of the Blue-Green Caucus on April 16, 2024, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Elizabeth Fiedler / X)



Robert Bair would probably be the first to admit that his participation in a Pennsylvania House Blue-Green Caucus news conference this month may have once seemed unlikely.

The president of the Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council — an organization representing 130,000 members — Bair has, over the years, found himself at odds with environmental leaders on key legislative issues. But now, at the Pennsylvania capitol building, he found himself standing side by side with representatives of the Sierra Club and Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania.

“People say, ‘Rob, do you have a lot in common with the environmental community?’ Two and a half years ago, I probably said, ‘Eh, maybe not,’” Bair said at the conference. “But then the representative immediately to my left and I decided that to actually get something started, we needed to sit down together and talk about our issues.”

The representative he was referring to was South Philadelphia socialist Elizabeth Fiedler, who became chair of the fifty-five-member caucus last January. Through her role in the caucus, she and Bair have developed a close working relationship. Now, they’re united behind an unprecedented eleven-bill legislative agenda that spans solar energy production, transit funding, and protections against water privatization.

“For so long, we’ve been told environmental and labor groups don’t get along. They don’t really like each other. They don’t talk at all. In this building, we of course know that is not true,” Fiedler said. “We have so much more we can be doing.”

Fiedler spoke with Jacobin about bringing the environmental and labor movements together, and her plan to expand renewable energy production in Pennsylvania.


Jordan G. Teicher

What challenges have existed for those trying to bring labor and environmental groups together in Pennsylvania around renewable energy?


Elizabeth Fiedler

I think that the move to a renewable energy economy in Pennsylvania in some ways is a much greater lift than in other places because of our historical reliance on the fossil fuel industry. It is very deeply rooted in not just the economy of Pennsylvania, but in the culture of many parts of our state. There are people whose families have worked in these industries for generations.

Environmental groups and labor groups weren’t really talking until the Blue-Green Caucus really set out to make that happen. Now I do feel like it’s baby steps, but we are heading in a direction that makes me hopeful.


Jordan G. Teicher

How do you overcome some of the historic distrust between labor and environmental leaders?


Elizabeth Fiedler

I think a lot of it is personal connections, having someone’s cell phone number, having dinner with them. Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree, maybe a little bit of both, but there are pieces that we can work on together.

Those personal connections, I think in many cases were lacking. Building those relationships, both between individuals and organizations, is very intentional work that has been done over the last couple of years. And I’ve really enjoyed it, I think in part because just a couple of years ago, it didn’t seem likely.

In doing this work, it has been important to recognize the urgency of acting swiftly and also, at the same time, recognize that we are talking about the lives and the livelihoods of people. How do we include those people in the renewable energy transition, and how do we do it in a thoughtful way rather than as an afterthought?


Jordan G. Teicher

Robert Bair, the head of the Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council, attributes a lot of his investment in the blue-green agenda to you. How did that relationship develop?


Elizabeth Fiedler

Just over a year ago, he and I started talking about some other renewable energy issues that we respectfully disagreed on, and he made an appointment to meet with me in my office. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was awesome. Really from that first day, we had the most pleasant conversation about the widest spectrum of issues. Since then, I have considered him to be one of my strongest allies in this work.

Just a couple of years ago, being able to say that about the head of the building trades would have been beyond my wildest dreams. Rob is intensely dedicated to making sure his workers have good work. And at the same time, he recognizes that his workers and their families want this to be a healthy and safe planet. And I think he’s really unwilling to accept that only one of those things is possible.


Jordan G. Teicher

The building trades are clearly interested in growing the renewable energy sector in Pennsylvania. But the state is still the country’s second-largest natural gas producer, and unions are bound up in that work. How do you navigate that reality in your position?


Elizabeth Fiedler

Much of the work of the Blue-Green Caucus is really focused on the areas where blue and green agree. We want to throw down hard on those areas, and we want to be as respectful and professional as possible on the issues where we disagree. I think this is one of them.

It’s important to recognize we can’t just shut down an industry. There needs to be a real alternative — not just the promise of an alternative, but real work in solar and wind and other renewable energy industries. People need to be able to feed their families today, tomorrow, and next month. These are people who are deeply invested in making sure that they have work and making sure that they are part of the state’s energy economy. People are very proud of the work that they do. If we can be really intentional and bring them into the conversation, I think it gives us the greatest shot that we possibly have of building the economy that we need.


Jordan G. Teicher

Your “Solar for Schools” legislation is a key part of the blue-green legislative agenda. How did that come together?


Elizabeth Fiedler

Addressing education funding or school facilities was the primary focus of my work for my first couple of terms and it continues to be at the heart of my work. I wanted to bring labor more into those efforts. So, last November, I started talking with the building trades about projects we could work on related to schools.

One of the things that we here in Harrisburg have heard for quite a long time is that schools need billions of dollars to fix their buildings and we just don’t have that sum of money. We’re going to keep pushing to try to get the commonwealth to invest the huge sums of money it should be investing in schools and school buildings. The idea of Solar for Schools really came out of a desire to find tools that we can give school districts directly in the meantime so that they can save money and reinvest those dollars how they see fit.

The legislation would create a state grant program that would help schools across the commonwealth install solar panels. And the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] will pay for 30 to 50 percent of every single one of these Solar for Schools projects. That promise of the federal money from the IRA was really the thing that made us 100 percent certain that this was a very good idea and we’ve got to give it everything we can to make it happen.


Jordan G. Teicher

What got labor leaders excited about Solar for Schools?


Elizabeth Fiedler

There are provisions within the IRA that can make them feel good about the promise of their workers doing these projects. These are labor leaders who want to be part of growing energy in Pennsylvania. So this was a chance to do that and be aligned with education and environmental groups in a way that doesn’t often happen, especially in Pennsylvania.

One of the motivations behind this that I’ve mentioned is saving money, and we definitely see that as a way in which local municipalities could pass down the savings to taxpayers, either in the form of reducing taxes or certainly in the form of not having to raise taxes. So I think for their members, it was just a no-brainer.


Jordan G. Teicher

Pennsylvania is consistently one of the states with the slowest renewable energy growth. How do we change that?


Elizabeth Fiedler

We have a long, long way to go. There’s discussion from both the administration and some of my colleagues about ways in which Pennsylvania can increase the amount of energy we get from renewables. There are a couple of proposals out there, but it’s very much recognized among my colleagues and also the governor’s office that we have an incredibly long way to go, which is frustrating because we don’t have a lot of time. The governor’s own plan would be 30 percent renewable electricity by 2030.

I think there are real signs that the trend of Pennsylvania is renewable energy growth, which in the past has really lagged behind other places. And I think it’s important that as we do these things, we are working hand in hand with labor. One of the things that we hear over and over from workers is, “Oh, they did this energy project here and all the license plates were from out of state.” If we can be really intentional about including these workers, I think that’s only to our benefit as we try to move very quickly.


Jordan G. Teicher

How does your perspective as a socialist inform the work you’re doing in the Blue-Green Caucus?


Elizabeth Fiedler

I think being a socialist means caring about the lives of all people: caring not just that they have their basic needs met, but also free time to be able to spend with their families, enjoy their community, enjoy arts and culture, and just exist as a full person.

That kind of future won’t be possible without taking meaningful climate action. And climate action is not going to be possible without the input of the workers who will make the changes to our infrastructure that we need. That’s what the Blue-Green Caucus is about: it’s bringing workers and environmentalists together to participate in democracy and to find steps forward through legislation. This work is just a start, but eventually, could it look like workers at energy companies making workplace decisions together, or all of us having true public ownership of utilities? I hope so.

Sometimes that big-picture stuff is hard to keep focused on when you’re in the belly of the beast in state government. But that vision is helpful motivation for me at times when I feel frustrated.

Spain’s Vox Party Is the Center of the Global Far Right

Last Sunday, Spain’s Vox party hosted a rally featuring far-right leaders from around the world, including everyone from Marine Le Pen to Javier Milei. It shows how coordinated the movement is becoming — and how Vox is playing a central role.

By Eoghan Gilmartin

May 26, 2024

Source: Tribune

Argentina's far-right president Javier Milei addressed the Vox rally.



Three weeks before the European parliament elections, the global far-right gathered in Madrid last Sunday in an unprecedented display of its international coordination. Hosted by Spain’s neo-Francoist Vox, the three-day event ended in a mass rally with speakers that included France’s Marine Le Pen, Portugal’s André Ventura, Argentine president Javier Milei, Israeli Likud minister Amichai Chikli — as well as via videolink Italian prime minister Giorgia Melonia and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.

The closing event, attended by more than 10,000 people, kicked off with a video denouncing the United Nations’ development goals as an ‘ecofeminist’ conspiracy while distorted images of Bill Gates and Greta Thunberg flickered on screen. If such imagery plays on traditional antisemitic tropes of cosmopolitan elites orchestrating a new world order, it was quickly followed by the ex-Trump official Mercedes Schlapp leading a pro-Zionist chant of ‘Viva España! Viva Israel!’

Indeed, while clear contradictions between the various far-right discourses were on display, the collective animosity towards shared, overlapping enemies and an allegiance to forms of reactionary authoritarianism outweighed any differentiating factors. Vox could both invite neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Pedro Varela and declare Israel ‘an international reference in the fight against Islamic terrorism’, while Milei’s anarcho-libertarianism and Le Pen’s chauvinistic protectionist rhetoric could both be warmly received.

‘We patriots must remain united’, insisted American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp at the rally. ‘We are not going to let George Soros or Biden divide us.’

In this respect, Sunday’s rally was also further proof of Vox’s increasingly central role in linking reactionary political movements from across the world. It not only operates as a key bridge between the European and Latin American far-right but, ahead of the European parliament elections, is also pursuing closer ties between the two major far-right families within the EU: Meloni’s pro-NATO and more traditionalist European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Le Pen’s more pro-Russian and extremist Identity and Democracy grouping.

As polling shows the far-right making significant gains in June’s elections, Vox’s Santiago Abascal is now positioning himself as a central figure within this ‘reactionary international’ — even as his own party has lost ground domestically over the last year. One party official even went so far as to boast that ‘only Vox is capable of holding such a [far-right] gathering.’

An Anti-Communist International

News headlines around the convention have been dominated by the diplomatic row that erupted after Milei called the wife of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez ‘corrupt’ on stage. Yet the Argentinian president’s relationship with Vox predates his entry into frontline politics, having been one of the signatories of the 2020 Madrid Charter alongside the likes of Eduardo Bolsonaro and Peruvian extremist Jose Antonio Kast. This was the founding document of the Vox-led, anti-leftist alliance, the Madrid Forum, which seeks to combat the spread of ‘communist-inspired totalitarian regimes’ in Latin America.

As Podemos founder Miguel Urbán notes in his 2024 book Trumpismos, the Madrid Forum is looking to achieve something distinct from that of CPAC in the United States. Whereas the latter organises periodic events bringing together international right-wing leaders and activists, the Madrid Forum aspires to be a permanent ‘international organisation of far-right parties’, with a yearly plan of action. As Urbán writes, ‘Vox has maintained a frenetic agenda of networking, trips and events with the objective of constructing the first stable framework for the coordination of far-right Latin American forces, one, moreover, which would have [itself] at the centre.’

This cross-border organisation remains somewhat incipient. Yet according to a recent report from the Progressive International, the Madrid Forum’s ‘most important impact’ so far ‘has been its ability to create and mobilise a network…to undermine left-wing governments in the region.’ In this respect, a major investigation by a consortium of Latin American publications found politicians associated with the alliance have engaged in coordinated campaigns aimed at ‘delegitimising the electoral results in several countries’ — working across borders to amplify fake news stories of electoral fraud in Peru, Columbia and Chile and backed up by organised online trolling campaigns.

In reality, the Madrid Forum also forms part of a broader far-right infrastructure of extremist Catholic associations, Latin American exiles, and reactionary think tanks in the Spanish capital , which have also helped turn the city into a key meeting point for authoritarian forces globally. Madrid regional premier Isabel Ayuso, from the radical wing of the conservative Popular Party, has adopted the Cuban exile slogan ‘Liberty or Communism’ while during a month of violent street protests over Sánchez’s reelection last November, the same far-right network and insurrectional rhetoric was mobilised in an attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his parliamentary majority.

Tipping the Balance of Power

Milei carried over these tactics into Vox’s convention as he flew into Spain looking to pick a fight with the country’s centre-left prime minister — even going so far as to denounce Sánchez’s ‘totalitarianism’ and describing him as an ‘arrogant and delirious socialist’ on his return to Buenos Aires. The ensuing diplomatic row, which saw Spain withdraw its ambassador to Argentina, kicked off Vox’s European election campaign with a bang.

Yet Abascal had also hoped to launch the campaign with both Le Pen and Meloni present on stage with him as he sought further protagonism internationally through fostering increased cooperation between two existing wings of the European extreme right. Both Meloni’s post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National are currently leading in the polls in their respective countries, while the combined projected seats of their two EU-wide groupings would make the extreme right the second largest force in the European parliament.

Furthermore with the Greens and Macron’s liberal Renew grouping expected to both suffer heavy losses, the European parliament could potentially have a right-wing majority of MEPs for the first time in its history. This would not necessarily displace the dominant grand coalition of centrist parties but could allow the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) to secure an alternative majority in certain votes — such as those around environmental issues, civil liberties or immigration.

Yet as academic Cas Mudde notes, this historic far-right surge ‘could become a Pyrrhic victory, if [the] parties remain so divided.’ The ECR, which includes Fratelli, Vox and Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête diverges most from Le Pen’s Identity and Democracy group on foreign policy — as well as, as a result of that, on their degree of mainstream respectability. With her strict pro-NATO positioning, Meloni has cultivated closer links with the EPP since becoming prime minister and wants to keep the door open to a pact with Ursula von der Leyen over her re-election as head of the European Commission after June’s elections.

In this respect, her decision not to attend last Sunday’s event in person saw her seeking a difficult balancing act, with her videolink intervention designed to neither shut down Vox’s overtures to Le Pen or align herself with them. ‘We will see what happens after the elections’, one Vox official insisted — with the party seeing itself as best placed to operate as a pivot between the various groupings over the coming term.

In particular, the announcement this Tuesday from Le Pen and Matteo Salvini that their parties would no longer sit in the same group as Germany’s AfD opens up the possibility of a significant realignment on the European far-right after the elections — as does the expected incorporation of Orbán’s Fidesz into ECR.

In any case, the threat of a major far-right advance is clear. ‘We the patriots must occupy Brussels’, proclaimed Orbán in his intervention at Vox’s convention while Chega’s Ventura asserted: ‘Europe is ours. Europe is ours!’ In the wake of the 9 June poll, it will become clear how realistic this prospect is.

The ANC and South Africa’s Radical Left, 30 Years After the First Post-Apartheid Elections: An Interview with Mazibuko Jara

By Mazibuko Jara, Federico Fuentes 

May 27, 2024
Source: LINKS


Mazibuko Jara | Image via LINKS International



On the eve of South Africa’s May 29 general elections, Federico Fuentes spoke to veteran South African socialist Mazibuko Jara about the African National Congress’s (ANC) prospects of holding onto power after 30 years in office, and how some of the new right and left forces are likely to fare.

Many are talking about these elections as the most significant since the first held after the fall of apartheid 30 years ago. Why? What is at stake?

The significance lies in that the ANC may get less than 50% of the vote. If it does, the ANC will follow the trend of liberation movements in southern Africa losing power after 25-30 years in power due to their failure to transform society, and address the grievances and demands of the popular masses through economic redistribution.

For the white liberal parties — and increasingly for Black and white conservative forces — this provides them with an important opportunity to gain power. These forces have already inflicted two defeats on the ANC. In the 2016 and 2021 municipal elections, they won in traditional ANC working-class mainstays. Those elections saw the ANC lose power in every major metropolitan centre and relegated to holding power in the provinces where there is less tradition of radical working-class organisation and the liberal-conservative opposition are weaker.

This advance by the liberal-conservative opposition and weakening of the ANC represents a significant step backwards for Black working class interests. After fighting and winning a protracted, difficult, heroic and valiant struggle to defeat formal apartheid, a liberal-conservative electoral advance will be a historic brake on any forward movement in favour of redistributive popular interests, let alone the longer-term struggle for socialism. A decline of the ANC leading to either an ANC-led or opposition-led coalition would represent a deepening of the neoliberal trajectory the country has been on since the ANC was first elected in 1994. The policies, platforms and rhetoric of the opposition are all geared towards speeding up the country’s neoliberal trajectory. In contrast, the ANC’s neoliberalism is a form of social liberalism that is somewhat more attuned to responding to popular interest because of its working-class base. But it remains an anti-worker and anti-poor neoliberalism, nonetheless.

How are South Africa’s capitalists responding to the possibility of the ANC losing power?

From the mid-to-late ’80s, South Africa’s capitalists were willing to forgo apartheid and seek a more legitimate political manager to run the political system. The ANC became that manager. Through the political compromise of the 1994 deal that ended apartheid, the ANC acquiesced to managing society on the basis of restoring capitalist profitability and capital accumulation, which at the time was constrained by apartheid. The ANC ruled out any significant changes in the economic structure, even if a small niche of Black ANC-aligned political leaders were allowed to become business owners and incorporate themselves as junior compradors into the main capitalist class.

Today, South Africa’s capitalists are ready to consider another political manager. This is in large part because the ANC has proven itself to be quite corrupt. Every state institution has been affected by ANC corruption — state-owned enterprises, municipal councils, development agencies, government departments, etc. This has generated certain negative impacts for capitalists. For example, international authorities have issued warnings about South Africa’s banking system, saying corruption in the public sector has affected its credibility. This affects South Africa’s credibility in international financial transactions given its reliance on financial markets for credit. The publicly-owned but now largely corporatised electricity company Eskom has been unable to provide a stable supply of electricity for the past 15 years. South Africa’s capitalists always relied on three things: cheap minerals, cheap energy and cheap labour. Another important state enterprise, Transnet, which operates rail, ports and pipelines, has been on the brink of collapse for the past 15 years due to corporatisation, mismanagement and corruption. Capitalists need reliable electricity supply and an efficient logistics chain — but with the decline of both Eskom and Transnet, capitalists’ trust in the capacity of the ANC to run a modern capitalist state has significantly declined. There are just a few examples of the impact of ANC corruption, there are many more. For South Africa’s capitalists, these are important concerns.

The capitalists are ready to see another political player coming into power because they know any new political manager will not challenge existing economic policy. But they also know the ANC will still loom large in politics, as polls suggest at worst it will get about 45% of the vote. That means, most likely, a coalition government at the national level and also in some provinces. Capitalists have therefore significantly financed the political campaigns of the liberal-conservative opposition as well as the ANC. We are left with a typical murky capitalist democracy, in which capitalists are seeking to ensure that any political realignment does not alter the accumulation trajectory the country has been on since 1994.

But it is worth noting that while the 1994 political settlement between the ANC and the apartheid government essentially restored profitability, popular demands continued to challenge that consensus in various ways: through the struggles of the new post-apartheid social movements in the late ’90s, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)-led worker strikes against job losses and privatisation in 1999-2004, the Marikana mineworkers strike in 2012, the Fees Must Fall student rebellion in 2015, and many localised and ongoing popular explosions in different parts of the country. We have seen sustained working class discontent. Unfortunately, this discontent has not consolidated itself into any significant alternative left political force. The ANC’s potential loss of power is not going to be matched by the concurrent rise of a left alternative capable of making use of this discontent. That means the political realignment will not be in the interest of popular forces, particularly as South Africa’s capitalists are actively shaping it.

How has the ANC tried to revert this decline in support? Could the ANC mobilise voters through fear of what a liberal-conservative government might mean for working people?

In previous elections, the ANC would proudly say: “If you vote for the Democratic Alliance” — the main white liberal party — “then you will see the return of apartheid.” They would express it as directly and crudely as that. This time around, it is interesting to note that they do not have the confidence or coherence to say that. I think this is partly due to the fact that the liberal-conservative opposition, and the media supporting them, has installed in public discourse the notion that you cannot continue blaming apartheid forever. That message has caught on in a significant way, particularly among younger generations.

The ANC has been trying to say that the ANC’s story has been a good story for everyone. They have pointed to significant changes that have affected people’s lives in the areas of water, electricity, social security grants, housing, infrastructure and education. But all these changes have been significantly hampered by neoliberalism, continuing apartheid geography and corruption. Look at housing: most of the four million houses built since 1994 have been located far away from the centre of the neo-apartheid city, thereby reinforcing poverty in areas away from significant economic zones and major urban centres. Another example is land reform, where the measures have been subjected to the logic of the market without alternative pathways of redistributive agrarian reform. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have used this to attack the ANC and speak out against its neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the liberal-conservative opposition have responded by showing that they can implement the ANC’s neoliberal policy better than the ANC because they appear not to be as nakedly corrupt as the ANC.

Another way the ANC has sought to respond to its decline in support has been through different episodes of what it has called organisational renewal. For example, the last ANC conference in 2022 elected a new National Executive Committee that contains many new and younger faces. I know about 45 of them from our time together in the student and youth movements in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Many of them were quite radical back then: some were in the South African Communist Party (SACP), while others were in the then-radical ANC Youth League. But while they are younger and appear cleaner than the older leaders, they remain within the fold of the ANC and the state. They do not have a vision or strategy that goes beyond the same old politics and strategy of the ANC’s “National Democratic Revolution. What they are ultimately attempting to do is provide a legitimate gloss to the same neoliberal trajectory.

Take for example David Masondo, with whom I served in the national leadership of the Young Communist League. Today, Masondo is SACP Second Deputy General Secretary and an ANC National Executive Committee member. He has also been the Deputy Minister of Finance for the past five years. The Minister of Finance (Enoch Gondongwana) is also a former SACP leader and a former radical leader of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), one of the country’s most militant unions. But the two of them have presided over five years of harsh austerity budgets. Moreover, even some of the new leaders have been implicated in corruption. The most obvious case is President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was unable to account for the $4 million he was holding in foreign currency — illegal due to limits on how much foreign currency an individual can hold — before it was stolen from his home.

All this demonstrates the ANC’s contradiction: this new block of younger leaders has promised to renew the ANC but is perpetuating the same old policies and corruption. A number of us joked that when the ANC government decided to take Israel to the International Court of Justice, many people started to once again feel some sympathy towards the ANC and even considered voting for it. But within weeks, the ANC’s speaker of parliament had to resign over a corruption scandal and those sympathies quickly dissipated. This has been the pattern: attempted renewal; certain positive policy initiatives but subordinated to the dominant neoliberal policy trajectory; and then the ugly face of corruption rears its head.

Also important is that when it comes to cleaning up the state, the ANC have not been able to offer any real program for tackling corruption or confidently building a progressive developmental state agenda. The ANC has failed to take any decisive action against corruption, for example by criminally prosecuting those who have been exposed for corruption by various government Commissions of Inquiry or where evidence has been taken to the police. There has never been a genuine, principled and sustained political push to ensure people were prosecuted.

That is why, despite the attempt to present a cleaner face, corruption is the reason why the ANC’s message falls flat. This incoherence and lack of political will means that today there is not a single ANC candidate who can confidently and publicly say: “Let’s rebuild a public Eskom. Let’s rebuild a public Transnet that is accountable and democratically controlled rather than based on profits.” Whatever they say is half-hearted and unconvincing. This points to how discredited the ANC is in the public eye. Unfortunately, that discrediting of the ANC has also discredited the idea of public ownership as an alternative. Even the SACP and COSATU are no longer consistent, bold, clear or impactful in putting forward alternative perspectives in favour of public ownership.

Overall, the ANC-Communist Party-COSATU alliance has proven incapable of providing strategic answers for society. The result is that the ANC is no longer the glue that can hold society together. It was able to do that under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki — even if they too implemented neoliberal policies — because they were able to project the image of a clean state, even as the seeds of corruption were taking root around them. But the new forces leading the ANC have not been able to do that.

The ANC’s decline seems to have been hastened by former president Jacob Zuma’s decision to split from the party and back the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party. What does MK represent in SA politics?

The MK party originates from a faction within the ANC that referred to itself as the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) forces. Broadly speaking, the RET forces argued for nationalisation but did so from within the logic of state capitalism and often with the aim of resolving their own accumulation problems. For example, when the RET faction argued in favour of nationalising mines, they were promoting the agenda of certain new mine owners, in particular junior ones, that had run into financial crisis due to declining commodity prices. In their cases, nationalisation would have saved them from this crisis. The RET forces never spoke about building state capacity or democratic accountability over public companies. and pointed to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin as leading RET forces globally.

Zuma, himself a former SACP member, pretended he supported the RET agenda. For this, he received support from SACP and COSATU leaders in the period from 2005 to roughly the end of 2020. This meant those forces ended up being implicated in Zuma’s rotten state-capture project, which was riddled with naked corruption. Certain SACP and COSATU veterans were widely discredited as a result, and therefore unable to contribute to the renewal process in the ANC. Subsequent to Zuma’s ANC presidency coming to an end in December 2017 and ultimately being forced to resign as the country’s president in February 2019, the Ramaphosa wing dealt several blows against the RET forces, including expelling the RET-aligned ANC secretary general Ace Magashule last year. His expulsion became a point of mobilisation for some of those who went on to form MK.

What is interesting to note is that, even before it had developed clear political positions, MK was able to obtain mass support in certain parts of the country, in particular the KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces. This was because Zuma’s figure has been able to mobilise public support. But so far, no other senior ANC figure has crossed over to the MK party, unlike the previous split in 2008 that led to the formation of the Congress of the People (COPE). This too, is due to Zuma’s involvement.

MK’s election manifesto is basically a quite confused set of demands. On LGBTQIA+ and sexual rights they are quite conservative, but they also have a mishmash of radical-sounding economic policies, much like that of the RET forces. So, from the perspective of democratic rights, political rights and economic rights, the MK party is a backward step; when it comes to economic policy, it has a confused set of demands that seeks to tap into the still existing radical sentiment within society for radical change.

The MK party has aligned themselves with Zulu tribal chiefs — which are among the most reactionary elements in South Africa society — as well as conservative forces within the church. Overall, the MK party represents both a shift to the right and a response to the emergence of two other right-wing parties: ActionSA, an explicitly neoliberal and xenophobic party, and Patriotic Alliance, a coloured nationalist party (by coloured I am referring to mixed race people within the post-apartheid context). MK is trying to cut off space for ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance. Ultimately, there is nothing progressive in the politics they put forward.

We saw the emergence of two potential left projects out of the “Marikana moment”: the EFF and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP). Could you explain what the Marikana moment was and what these forces represent today?

The Marikana moment refers to the period from late July 2012 to the end of February 2013, which saw two significant strikes. The first involved workers in the platinum belt — largely in Marikana in the North West province — going on a long and difficult mass strike. At its height, about 100,000 mine workers were out on strike across the platinum belt from mid-August to the end-September. Their strike demanded a living wage of 12,500 rand a month, about US$1000 at the time. Concerned by these developments, Ramaphosa, who had financial interests in the mines, made a call to the police minister demanding he put an end to the strike. A day later, 34 mine workers were shot dead by security forces.

The Marikana strike was very significant. It struck at the heart of South African capitalism — the minerals-energy complex — which had not been challenged in such a way since the 1987 miners’ strike. Many workers were not just taking industrial action for the first time, but doing so in defiance of the union bureaucracy and politically challenging ANC hegemony over mine workers. Seeing the democratic state kill 34 workers was both an educational and shocking moment for many people.

The Marikana strike also triggered farm workers — who had historically never gone on strike — to initiate a massive strike wave from mid-November 2012 to the end of February 2013. Invoking the spirit of Marikana, they too demanded a living wage and won a statutory minimum wage. Their strike ultimately led to significant changes in the law regarding farm worker wages. That period also featured an explosion of social protests in working-class communities, similarly evoking the spirit of Marikana. Many new informal communities have been named Marikana.

As this was happening, developments were occurring in the ANC that led to the expulsion of Julius Malema, then president of the ANC Youth League, which had increasingly adopted radical demands including economic freedom and the nationalisation of mines. Following his expulsion, Malema sought to connect with the striking workers and, out of the strike, claimed workers had called on him to form a new political party. This led to the formation of the EFF in July 2013, with Malema explaining that workers wanted economic freedom from the shackles of exploitation.

Despite this, the EFF has not found a way to connect with popular movements or trade unions. Instead, it behaves like any typical political party, with narrow political interests driving its political action. The EFF has built a mass base and an impressive electoral machine by attracting working class youth who are angry with the current situation. But this base is very uneven, the electoral machine is completely controlled from above, and the EFF has not succeeded in building coalitions with mass movements, advancing and winning real reforms and demands, or pushing for systemic transformation.

Take one example: the EFF states that working-class people should occupy land. But it has no tactics to ensure this happens in a consistent way such that it could shift the balance of power. Many communities have occupied lands, but the EFF has offered them no sustained support (such as legal support when the state or private owners attack the occupiers in response) or political strategy. This speaks to a party that seeks to adopt a popular issue and take it to a certain point, but no further. Another example was when students rebelled in 2015 through Fees Must Fall. The EFF was at the heart of that movement, which was impressive. They were pushing for free decolonial education. But since then, they have reverted to typical political party mode, setting up the EFF Students Command to contest students elections while playing no role in sustaining a mass struggle for free decolonial education.

When it comes to organising vulnerable workers, the EFF has done this in ways that serves its narrow political party interests over building workers’ power and a revitalised trade union movement. As unions are quite weak, the EFF will go to a workplace and force the often racist white male managers to be held to account by embarrassing them in front of workers. This is an interesting form of direct action. But the EFF does nothing to help workers organise themselves beyond the EFF’s public drama. Instead, they are left depending on the EFF the next time they have an issue, leaving workers vulnerable and without the ability to organise to challenge employers. In a few instances, this has led to workers being retrenched due to employers exploiting aspects of anti-worker labour laws.

One very interesting political position towards the EFF has emerged from one of the biggest social movements in South Africa: Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means “the residents of the shacks”. It has about 100,000 members, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal but also in a few other provinces. Abahlali baseMjondolo organised a big rally on April 27 — the anniversary of apartheid’s formal end, officially known as Freedom Day. Abahlali baseMjondolo called it “Un-freedom Day”. At the rally, they called on their members and supporters to vote for the EFF. But they also said that they were aware the EFF operates like a political party, meaning they would not go into an alliance with the EFF and were willing to march against them if necessary. The question all this raises is why does the EFF continue to behave like other political parties? The Marikana moment should have influenced its approach towards political organising and new forms of mobilisation. Instead, today it hardly differs from the electoralist logics of the ANC and SACP.

It is also important to note what the EFF did in the 2016 municipal elections. The ANC’s vote dropped to close to 50% and it lost Johannesburg, Tshwane (new name for Pretoria), and Gqeberha (new name for Port Elizabeth), which were traditional ANC working-class bases. As no other party won more than 50%, coalitions were required to form local governments. At that time, the EFF decided to give power to the DA in those cities by voting for DA-led coalition governments. They said they did this to punish the ANC but, ultimately, they gave DA — the representative of white capitalist interests — the power to govern over billions of rands on the basis of their neoliberal program.

In the 2021 municipal elections, they sort of reversed that position by, in many instances, going into power with the ANC. This saw the EFF obtain executive positions for the first time at the municipal level. But they have since used those positions to do the same thing the ANC does: namely, dish out state tenders to people aligned with them. They have not sought to radically democratise those municipalities or engage their mass base; instead, they have been quite managerialist. This is likely to continue if they enter into coalition governments with the ANC, or even the MK party, after these elections.

The other thing that is crucial to mention is their implication in corruption and alliances with capitalists. In terms of corruption, there was a mutual bank built by one of the apartheid homeland governments (the Venda homeland government), called VBS. It has been proven that both the ANC and EFF were involved in taking money from savings that poor and working class people had in VBS for the benefit of EFF and ANC politicians. When confronted about this, the EFF leadership opted to close down internal debate and expel the radicals who questioned what had occurred. The EFF also receives significant support from rogue tobacco capitalists, with EFF leaders proclaiming their close personal friendships with several tobacco moguls. Similarly, the EFF promotes coal as being part of a just energy transition, which many who analyse the financing of political parties say is due to coal interests financing the EFF. NGOs have been pushing for transparency in political party funding, but the EFF has effectively opposed amendments to the law that would allow for this.

For me, all these features suggest that the EFF is not a viable left-wing political party. They may claim to be socialist and follow [Franz] Fanon and even [Karl] Marx, but their political practice is a long way from radical socialist politics. Evidently, they have opted for participation in the typical machinations of political elites over pursuing any kind of radical or socialist politics.

What about the SRWP?

Another important outcome of the Marikana moment had to do with the trade union movement. As you can imagine, the strike shook COSATU, because one of its largest affiliates, the Union of Mineworkers, had been left discredited. The farm workers strike also exposed that COSATU had failed to organise these workers — the most vulnerable section of the working class. This led radical elements within COSATU, in particular NUMSA and eight other unions, to challenge COSATU’s alliance with the party that had been responsible for killing workers: the ANC.

That ultimately led to NUMSA holding a Special Congress at the end of 2013, which voted for NUMSA to, among other things: break with the ANC; lead the process of forming a new trade union confederation outside of COSATU; create a broad United Front between unions and social and community organisations; and explore the possibility of building what it referred to as a “movement for socialism” that could become a mass-based left-wing working class party down the line. But the issue was — to use a religious metaphor — that NUMSA’s break from the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance was merely a denominational break, not a spiritual one. Many NUMSA leaders came from the SACP and had been implicated in the SACP’s support for Zuma. They continued to hold quite Stalinist politics and remained closed to the idea of plurality or new ways of doing politics.

This was confirmed when NUMSA leaders pushed through, in a very crude Stalinist manner, forming a party before engaging other forces or even having a real debate within NUMSA about the proposal. In 2016, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) — the new federation formed by NUMSA and led by a former militant COSATU general secretary — convened its second Working Class Summit. This summit was a significant moment in that it pulled together the new SAFTU affiliates as well as a large number of social movements, NGOs and even progressive elements from the church. At the summit, NUMSA tried to force those present to agree to the immediate formation of a new working-class party, arguing: “If you don’t agree, you are counterrevolutionaries.” In reality, those at the summit were willing to go further than the ANC and SACP, but felt a mass political debate was needed to clarify what would be new about this working-class party.

To all this, we also have to add the dirty hand of financial influences. It is now public information that Roy Singham, a dubious American who made a fortune from IT in the ’80s, became a big financier of NUMSA. This led Singham to have a big influence on formulating NUMSA’s positions, including on speeding up the formation of the SRWP.

In the end, the SRWP was set up in time to contest the 2019 national elections. Despite NUMSA having more than 300,000 members — making it the largest trade union in the country — SRWP candidates only obtained 24,000 votes. That speaks to just how much the idea was imposed without debate and worker conscientisation and mobilisation inside NUMSA. Today, the SRWP is not contesting the elections and there is no information on Facebook, email, WhatsApp or elsewhere about any upcoming SRWP activities. NUMSA has also stopped issuing media statements about the SWRP.

Given the situation you have outlined, what prospects are there for the radical left?

The past 34 years in South Africa has been a protracted moment of utter and complete defeat for the left as a political project. Overcoming this will take serious reflection and self-critique. It will require us to be able to learn anew and develop new ways to rebuild the left in ways that root and ground renewed socialist politics among the mass of poor and working people, far removed from narrow sectarianism or boardroom schemes. This will take time — there is no shortcut solution.

Ultimately, the outcome of the 1994 political compromise set the left back in a big way. A major factor was the role played by the SACP, which outflanked all other left forces in terms of winning over radicalised workers but whose program remained tied to the ANC. No left group was capable of exposing the SACP’s limits nor capitalise on what happened to the SACP over its support for Zuma. The EFF and NUMSA did, but they too ultimately failed in terms of building a mass party of left renewal. The EFF and NUMSA missed out on making the most of the Marikana moment, the Fees Must Fall movement and the ongoing localised popular explosions because of their obvious shortcomings in terms of a scientific analysis of the balance of forces, the absence of a coherent and open-ended left strategy and actual political conduct.

What existed previously was the Democratic Left Front (DLF), whose formation was inspired by the ANC split in 2008. From 2008 to 2011, myself and a good number of comrades initiated the Conference for a Democratic Left, which led to the formation of the DLF in December 2011 — before Marikana. The DLF was an important moment in gathering disparate left forces and connecting them with socialist elements active in popular movements. It did important ideological work and created a certain national presence for a new democratic left politics. What the DLF lacked was a significant break from both the SACP and COSATU. The reason that mattered is that the SACP and COSATU are mass-based organisations. If just 500 people from the SACP and COSATU had joined the DLF, it would have made a significant difference as, despite their limits, they would have brought with them their tradition of mass organising. The DLF suffered from that and struggled to deepen its influence and roots within working class organisations and communities. Old sectarian practices also tainted the DLF. The DLF was later displaced by NUMSA’s United Front, at which point we decided it no longer made sense to exist independently. This was partly because of our weaknesses, but also because of the significance of what NUMSA’s rupture with the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance represented. I think that was the correct decision, despite what happened with NUMSA.

When the NUMSA project failed, the same core forces from the DLF regathered together with new forces both in the SAFTU leadership and some that had emerged from Fees Must Fall in a process called Dialogues for an Anti-Capitalist Future. But even with these newer forces, they still lacked a significant mass base. In the end, impatience led to substitutionism. The Dialogues for an Anti-Capitalist Future process, in my view, was short-circuited into creating what comrades refer to as a “pre-party political formation”: Zabalaza for Socialism (ZASO). These comrades believe there should be a left party in the elections that can claim the working class for itself. I have no problem with the left contesting elections. But no left party can simply stand up and say: “Come to us”. This support has to be won through a range of struggles, battles and other processes that help win over the necessary social forces that could constitute the basis for a party formation down the line. The ZASO comrades are well-meaning and committed socialists, but I think they have miscalculated the level of working class consciousness and the readiness of radicalised elements of the class to construct a party-political formation.

Overall, I see that a major flaw of the left is its lack of patience. As socialists, we need to be much more humble about what we can contribute at a given historical moment. We need to be patient in terms of our analysis and understand the long-term nature of the task at hand. Yes, we have a significant number of popular movements who have different understandings of the capitalist crisis. These movements focus on immediate issues but are keen to explore how their struggles connect with the need to fight capitalism. But while there are forces fighting on the streets, it is also the case that mass anti-capitalist consciousness has declined.

So, what we are left with today are different groupings of left comrades with long histories of involvement in the struggle, sprinkled together with a younger layer of comrades who have emerged in the past 15 years. There are also a myriad of single-issue movements with significant constituencies that are characterised by their unevenness when it comes to challenging neoliberalism and capitalism. Many left comrades today are no longer rooted in working class communities or even in working class organisations. Some are active in their own left groups while others are implanted in radical NGOs, which is a problem — NGOs may do good work supporting social movements and trade unions, but they are ultimately donor dependent, not accountable to working class people and often act in problematic ways that undermine working class independence. Broadly speaking, that is the context facing the left.

The question for me is what can we concretely do, picking up from where we are at. There are five major tasks in this regard: one, building and contributing to the radicalisation of a wide diversity of strong and impactful mass movements (workers, youth, students, women, land, housing, and other single-issue movements), which take up immediate issues and struggles; two, radicalising reforms and mass demands into coherent transformative/transitional demands and mass-rooted alternatives with an anti-capitalist logic; three, strategically contesting common sense and knowledge production including in the cultural and heritage space now completely dominated by conservative forces; four, sustained, deepened and strategic political education, thereby building a massive new layer of capable mass-movement rooted socialist activists to sustain the required political work over the long-term; and five, initiating directional and intentional left dialogue processes to explore new left political formations over time and informed by the four earlier tasks.

A key moment for testing the various ideas on the left will be the 2026 local government elections. Many movements have already begun debating what to do at those elections. The left could really connect with those debates — and both enrich and learn from them — but only if it does so without seeking to control those movements, and in ways that seek to use municipalities as a basis to build popular power.