A Love Letter to the Many, Arguments for Transformative Left Politics in South Africa

R450.00

With its impressive tradition of left politics, South Africa was the hope of the world. At the heart of post-apartheid politics 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 South Africa’s democracy-making project has gone horribly wrong. This has been happening over three decades through deep globalisation and inordinate power given to business to prevail over everything. A criminalised market democracy, predicated on an unviable society of deepening inequality, climate disasters and eroding state capacity, is now moving further to the extreme right. These conjuncturally situated writings highlight the pushback against the neoliberal turn, Zumafication, emergent neofascism, the fraud of the National Democratic Revolution and the normalisation of the dangerous climate contradiction. This collection contributes to explaining the degeneration of national liberation politics and the polycrisis of post-apartheid democracy.

Globally and within South Africa, old left politics (revolutionary nationalist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist and social democratic) has failed. The world historical defeats of Soviet socialism, social democracy and revolutionary nationalism also became South African left defeats. These writings, grounded in a consistent transformative intellectual praxis and against the grain of defeat, affirm the necessity of left renewal. Its praxis-centred arguments document 27 years of working with grassroots forces and the global left to reconstruct the left imaginary beyond the traditional left binary of reform versus revolution. The experimental epistemology at work in these writings provides critical decolonial resources for a new transformative left politics, informed by an ethics of care, while pointing to new horizons for further elaboration.

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Additional information
Weight 032 kg
Dimensions 235 × 155 × 25 mm
Author

Author Information

Dr Vishwas Satgar is an Associate Professor of International
Relations, editor of the Democratic Marxism (DM) series and
principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies at Wits
University. An activist for over four decades, he was part of
anti-apartheid mass politics in the 1980s through the Natal
Indian Congress and a student leader. He worked on labour
market reform for COSATU’s think tank NALEDI (1995–1999),
pioneered post-apartheid cooperative development in township
communities through the Cooperative and Policy Alternative
Centre, was the Gauteng Secretary of the SACP (2001–2007)
and co-founded the Vukani-Sidikiwe Campaign, #ZumaMustGo,
the Higher Education Crisis process, Climate Justice Charter
Movement and South African Food Sovereignty Campaign. He
has received several awards including from the Universities of
South Africa and the Human Sciences Research Council for his
academic contribution to social justice. He lives with ‘long Covid
19’ challenges.

ISBN

9781431434824

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