6 December 2025
The following is a lightly edited transcript of speech by IBT supporter Mandla at a panel discussion held in Johannesburg on 15 November 2025 on “National Liberation, Class Struggle & the Tasks of Revolutionaries”. Also on the panel were the Socialist Party of Azania, the Solidarity Action Committee Collective and Spartacist / South Africa (of which he was formerly a member).
Audio of the speech is available here:
The loss of support in the May 2024 elections by the African National Congress represents the end or death of nationalism in South African politics after a hundred years of dominance from the white Afrikaner to the black petty bourgeoisie. This left a big impasse in South African national politics, especially the liberation of the oppressed masses, after waiting through thirty years of ANC misrule which has left the country in a hole. The country is without a political map going forward. A deadlock between the black masses and the ANC has been reached.
It was in September 1909 that the British king signed the South African Act into law, thus passing political authority over South Africa from the British Parliament to the Parliament of the Union of South Africa which was formed in 1910. South Africa has been under nationalist rule for 115 years, starting with the Afrikaner generals that were accommodationists to British imperialism. I hope you remember General Jan Smuts and General Botha, who were followed by the more anti-British imperialist Afrikaner nationalists from Hertzog to de Klerk in 1994.
In order to achieve these objectives Afrikaner nationalists used the state to develop transportation and communication infrastructure as well as to establish a vast network of state-owned enterprises in broadcasting, armaments, power generation, development, finance, iron and steel, and chemicals. Afrikaner nationalists also facilitated the outgrowth of Afrikaner entrepreneurs, several of whom developed into international brands. While consolidating the cohesion of the Afrikaner population under their leadership, Afrikaner nationalists embarked on a massive drive to disrupt the cohesion of the black community. Their main instruments being the migrant labour system, single sex hostels, forced removals, stripping blacks of whatever assets they had and blocking them from acquiring new ones. The purpose of these measures was to atomise the black population so that it could not resist. All these methods exposed the black population to being exploited as cheap labour. It therefore took the blacks many years before they could recover sufficient cohesion to mount meaningful opposition. This started to happen on a significant scale only in the 1970s and 1980s.
The role of Afrikaner nationalism, however, had a built-in contradiction that ultimately led to its undoing. This was the political and economic oppression of the blacks, which eventually resulted in the endless conflict between the Afrikaner-nationalist controlled state and the black population.
These conflicts, reinforced by interventions by the international community, ultimately led to the birth of South Africa’s democracy in 1994. The National Party dissolved into the ANC and closed shop, as we know. African nationalism took over after that.
Each country’s democracy is a product of that country’s social and economic structures as well as a result of the balance of power of the various social groups in that particular society. South Africa’s black nationalists, while they were an elite, as we have seen, they were never an elite that owned property. This was to be a crucial factor in determining the characteristics of South Africa’s democracy, especially the nature of its internal contradictions.
The new black elite was therefore faced with several questions when it gained control in 1994. Should it use the new-found power to enrich itself? Should it use the new power to enrich the mass of the black people who had been exploited for the best part of a hundred years? Should it do both? What about the South Africa’s rich whites, who the ANC allowed to keep their wealth? Should it be nationalised? Should it be taxed? And to what extent? Those were the questions that were asked by the nationalists when they got into power in 1994.
South Africa’s big business had anticipated all these questions and came up with its own solution. It offered a small part of the assets to the individual leaders of the black resistance movement in return for them leaving the country’s business environment entirely as they found it when they took power in 1994. The leaders found this offer of instant wealth hard to resist. The compassion towards the black nationalist elite by business came to be known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). This was never a policy of the ANC during exile, which was a completely multiracial organisation including Coloured, blacks, whites. They never proposed Black Economic Empowerment as a policy for enrichment. This was handed over to them by the white capitalist rulers of South Africa.
South Africa’s largest companies, notwithstanding their deal with the black nationalists, realised that conflict between the black nationalists and the black masses was inevitable and would probably be even more fierce than the struggle between the black masses and Afrikaner nationalism.
Thus, within five years of black nationalists taking control of the state in 1994, South Africa’s largest companies like Anglo American Corporation, Old Mutual, Billiton, South African Breweries and Dimension Data moved their head offices and their primary listings from Johannesburg to London. So, when the ANC came into power, they moved their assets and started to invest overseas in London.
Anglo American, which once accounted for more than 50 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange market capitalisation and which had had a major presence in almost every sector of the South African economy—gold mining, banking, motor vehicles, agriculture, etc—was left with only four mining interests: platinum, diamonds, coal and iron ore.
What were the risks that came with black nationalist rule that these large corporations identified which led them to migrate from South Africa?
We saw earlier that the Afrikaner nationalist elite, in order to advance its interests as landowners, had to drive South Africa’s industrialisation. The black nationalist petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are not property owners. Their primary interests are not so much to drive further industrialisation as they had nothing to gain from increasing investment.
Their primary interest is to drive the black elite’s private consumption. This poses two major threats to the stability of South Africa. Private consumption will be at the expense of investment, especially of investment in South Africa’s physical infrastructure. Secondly, growing elite private consumption would be in competition with the consumption of the black poor and state employees.
The country ran out of electricity because, despite many warnings that state-owned power company Eskom needed to build more power plants, governments turned a deaf ear. They did not want to make the necessary investment in power generation or to open up power generation to independent power producers. Parastatals have become a cash cow for the black nationalist elite. Here I’m talking about the Eskom parastatal.
In 2008, for several weeks, South Africa was caught up in what came to be known as xenophobic riots, which left more than 60 people dead and thousands uprooted from their homes.
These were manifestations of another decision not to invest, this time in the army.
South Africa thus left its borders uncontrolled to a flood into South Africa’s poor neighborhoods of economic refugees from many parts of Africa. This competition for meagre resources between South Africa’s urban poor and arriving foreign migrants inevitably led to violent conflicts between these two groups.
With the wealth of the whites protected through BEE, the only source for enrichment of the black elite available, besides hard work, that is, were state revenues—that was the only source for enriching the black elite.
This has proven to be the central internal contradiction of the era of black nationalist rule. This contradiction can be summed up as follows: Who gets what share of state revenues between the elite’s private consumption, the poor people’s welfare consumption, investment in social and physical infrastructure, and payments to other claimants such as workers in the public sector?
Competition between these claims on state revenues has become increasingly explosive. South Africa therefore is now entering a new phase of conflict, the conflict between the black nationalist elite and the black masses over how to distribute state revenues between them. This struggle is commonly referred to as a struggle over service delivery.
The July 2021 events, starting and mainly concentrated in and around Durban, but also reaching parts of Gauteng and Mpumalanga, is one example of this. It left between 350 and 400 dead and hardly anybody wrote anything about this.
The class independence of the working class from the bourgeois state and against all its political parties is at a very critical stage because not many options remain.
I strongly questioned the invitation of the EFF to this meeting, as a capitalist party, an enemy of working-class people. We will always talk to rank-and-file members of this organisation, trying to break from nationalism into the struggle of socialism and overthrowing capitalism.
But there is one thing that we’ll never do. We will never give them political support in the form of the vote like the Spartacists did in the last elections, 29 May 2024.
The biggest political sickness of the left is to tail nationalism until it takes them to the grave. The Spartacists that I joined before it became AmaBolsheviki Amnyama told me that you support the nationalists in the fight against apartheid but once the nationalists get into power, they turn around and shoot and kill the working people. You saw what happened in Marikana, amongst the biggest examples. The biggest political sickness of the left is to tail nationalism until the grave.
Nationalism is a bourgeois ideology. What alternatives are there under these circumstances? Fight like hell to build organs of proletarian power, to rule on behalf of the oppressed, therefore creating dual power which counterposes the dictatorship of the proletariat to the capitalist bloodsuckers that are still running this country today.
In the anti-apartheid struggle of the Mass Democratic Movement in the 1980s, the MDM started building area committees as an alternative to the apartheid state. The most complete example of this phenomenon is the soviets or workers’ councils of the Russian workers struggling against the Tsar, the workers led by Lenin and Trotsky. The International Bolshevik Tendency calls for the formation of such soviets as an alternative to treacherous bourgeois nationalist parties (sworn enemies of the working class), armed with Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. That is our way forward.
Related article
South Africa: IBT/ICL discussions on the national question (19 July 2025)