The letter below was sent to the leadership of the EFF along with the WASP article The EFF: populism not socialism prior to its publication.
3rd July 2014
Dear comrades,
We are writing to congratulate the Economic Freedom Fighters for your very credible election result in the 2014 National and Provincial elections. Whilst we know that the 6.35% vote the EFF achieved in these elections was below your expectations, we believe your election result is historic in that it represents the first significant electoral breakthrough for a party to the left of the ANC in the twenty year history of ‘democratic’ South Africa. Your election result is one of the many indications of the major changes underway in this country as the working class, the poor and the youth begin to search for an alternative to twenty years of ANC miss-rule. It features alongside the recent and historic platinum sector strike, continuing and widespread service delivery protests, the crisis in Cosatu, and Numsa’s potentially epoch defining course of action toward the creation of a workers’ party.
We also hope that in writing we may be able to re-open and continue our pre-election discussion. Whilst we both found it necessary to go into the elections separately, for our part, we certainly did not consider that the end of our engagement. We attach an article we intend to publish shortly that deals with the fundamental programmatic differences between the EFF and WASP, but also some of the observations we have made on the development of the EFF in the ten months since we last engaged each other. We are sending it to you prior to publication as a courtesy but also to invite you to reply.
As we state in the article, we have not written it to score petty points against a ‘rival’ political party but to help arm our own members and yours, as well as the wider working class, with an analysis, of what in our view the EFF represents and how it fits into the processes underway in society. These processes are leading the working class and poor to break from the ANC and begin to make their way towards what we feel is the key strategic task in this period, the creation of a mass workers’ party on a clear socialist programme. We do not believe the EFF is the answer to this strategic task for reasons we outline in the article but is nevertheless a product of this period of realignment
As one of your leaders Floyd Shivambu says in his contribution to your new book The Coming Revolution: “Ideological reflections, character and content of political formations are the subject of constant engagements, and EFF appreciates this value. Constant ideological reflections help the organisation to grow and understand itself and society better, and most importantly, ideological discussions and reflections help in the clarification of tasks ahead.” We are therefore confident that you will read this letter, and the attached article, in the comradely spirit in which they are intended.
Events are moving quickly and have already moved on since we completed our article. So we would like to further preface that article with these additional points.
After five heroic months, the platinum workers’ strike has ended in a significant step forward for the struggle for a R12 500 minimum wage. The services of Dali Mpofu at the Farlam Commission in support of the mineworkers and the EFF’s support in general for the mineworkers in the recent period was reflected in the significant votes won by the EFF in Marikana and other parts of Rustenburg. It was the role of the founders of WASP – the Democratic Socialist Movement – and the independent strike committees in the strike wave immediately before and after the Marikana massacre that cleared the space for that electoral support, not to mention clearing the space for the rise of AMCU.
As a quick aside, we note that in Floyd Shivambu’s contribution in The Coming Revolution, this most fundamental and seismic aspect of that period of struggle – the role of the independent strike committees and the DSM – is entirely absent and the role of the ANCYL progenitors of the EFF greatly exaggerated. We wonder if this is not because the independent strike committees, alongside the Democratic Socialist Movement, were the founders of WASP. If so, this would be a re-writing of history and sectarian. We will not develop those points here but will most certainly return to them in the near future.
To return to the main point we wish to make, we applaud the EFF’s attempt to make use of the limited opportunities the capitalist parliament affords to those on the side of working class struggle to table for debate the affordability of the mineworkers’ R12 500 minimum wage demand. However, we feel this approach concedes far too much and reinforces the idea of the ‘neutrality’ of the capitalist state and its institutions, a mistake that we believe runs throughout the EFF’s approach, as we explain in our article. Far better would have been to table a motion censuring the mine bosses for causing the unnecessary suffering of the mineworkers and their families, condemning their greed and profiteering and laying the blame for the ‘damage to the economy’ squarely on them. The almost certain refusal of the MPs of the pro-capitalist parties of the ANC, DA and others, to support such a motion would have done far more to expose them as firmly on the side of the mine bosses in the platinum strike than any debate on the ‘affordability’ of R12 500 which would quickly descend to hair-splitting and quibbling over details. The revolutionary use of parliament as a platform for the voice of workers struggle in this instance would have been far better served by asserting that R12 500 is indeed affordable and daring the capitalist politicians to expose themselves by voting against it.
Indeed, the platinum strike offers an excellent demonstration of one of the central points that WASP has been making. The heroic struggle of the mineworkers over the past five months and the significant wage gains they have achieved coincided with the entire duration of the election campaign period and the formation of the fifth parliament of ‘democratic’ South Africa. Whilst the coincidence no doubt concentrated the minds of mineworkers on how to carry their struggle onto the electoral field, partly explaining the EFF’s good result in Rustenburg, the whole election and even which parties ended up in parliament had almost no bearing on the course or conduct of the strike. As WASP has consistently pointed out, the real struggles will be won in the workplaces, the communities and the institutions of learning. However, we also think that the EFF could have placed the platinum workers’ strike far more centrally to its election campaign. This could have assisted the mineworkers in opening up a new front on the political plane and acted as a rallying point for all workers supporting the strike, which in the ranks of the organised working class, would have been enormously significant.
But the struggle of the mineworkers is far from over. As we have pointed out consistently, decisively winning R12 500, then winning it across the entire mining industry and then defending it from attempts by the mine bosses to snatch it back through mass retrenchments, will require the united action of the entire working class. And so, how the EFF links the struggles outside of parliament to the struggle they must wage within will be the most crucial test faced by the EFF in the coming years.
The comrades sent into parliament by the votes of more than one million South Africans are already getting a taste of the hostile reception those challenging the dominant neo-liberal ideas will receive. The sanctions imposed on your Commander-in-Chief by the parliamentary speaker for daring to speak the truth – that the ANC government committed murder at Marikana – exposes the hypocrisy of capitalist parliamentary democracy and brings to mind Lenin’s warning not to forget that even under the most liberal of parliamentary democracies, the working class nevertheless remain slaves. We applaud the comrades’ stand and condemn the British colonialist inspired ‘etiquette’ that tries to prevent the truth from being spoken and the capitalist politicians that enforce it.
But to underline the difficulties of operating in the hostile arena of the capitalist parliament, whilst this episode raised the standing of the EFF in the eyes of many, your retreat from the promise that EFF MPs would use public services has been used by enemies of the working class and poor, particularly the sensationalist capitalist media, to try and portray the EFF as “the same as all the rest”. This has been compounded by reports of undemocratic manoeuvring by sections of the EFF leadership in packing EFF structures with ANCYL ‘loyalists’.
We believe that this pledge should never have been made and amounted nothing more than ‘revolutionary posturing’ that has now damaged the EFF’s reputation. The inevitable retreat from the pledge and the problems that has caused, even within your own ranks, were an avoidable mistake. We understand that EFF MPs who do not want to leave the health of a sick parent, or the education of a treasured child, to the woefully inadequate public services of capitalist South Africa where only money can buy good health and a good education. But the comrades must realise that it is the hope for something radically different to the corrupt politicians who break every promise made before an election that has won them their parliamentary positions. Much better would have been to adopt the general pledge that all representatives of the EFF would only take the average wage of skilled worker to maintain public representatives’ links to the working class and poor, as WASP has done.We initially expected this incident to provoke a public division in the leadershipbased on our understanding that the public service pledge of the EFF was based on the Sankara Oath, central to the ideology of the Africanist adherents in your ranks. But instead the leadership and parliamentary caucuses closed ranks and no less than Andile Mngxitama, leader of the September National Imbizo, foremost Africanist ideologue, and a newly elected EFF MP, was tasked with justifying the retreat! The comrades must exercise far better judgement on the handling of these issues in the future.
As we are sure the EFF leadership will acknowledge, your party’s appeal to the organised working class, especially Cosatu workers, has been limited. We believe that this accounts for the fact that significant as your votes were, you did not improve upon the performance of COPE, a right-wing split from the ANC that nevertheless attracted the hopes of many, despite the immeasurably more favourable objective conditions existing today. WASP believes that a significant step towards a mass workers’ party could have been taken had the EFF accepted our proposal for the registration of a joint EFF/WASP banner to stand joint lists of candidates in the election.
It may be objected that the vastly greater number of votes the EFF received contradicts this argument. But we cannot approach the analysis of social phenomena by the method of simple arithmetic, especially in a snap-shot of the mood of the masses as fleeting as that captured in elections to a capitalist parliament. History is already littered with failed political parties that were rapidly lifted up by the desperation and hopes of the masses only to collapse as rapidly. In the revolutionary struggle for socialism, the correct ideas and methods count for far more than the superficial turning of a party’s fortunes in the capitalist parliamentary election cycle. We hope that the EFF will look at the question of working class solidarity from the standpoint, not of the EFF’s narrow party political interests, but those of the working class as a whole and use parliament to raise their voice and their demands for all to hear.
Comradely,
Weizmann Hamilton
For the WASP Executive Committee