Today’s national shutdown organised by the EFF is the beginning of a long-awaited united action by the working-class against the status quo in SA.
What sets this protest apart is that it has a national footprint, it is going to have an international audience, and it is finally going to bring the attention of the world to the economic crisis facing SA and its implications for the poor black majority.
The world will get to see that the post-1994 democratic project has not delivered quality living standards to the people, and the modern project of international capitalism is being challenged by working people in SA and the world.
Similar protests were seen in Sri Lanka and across Latin America – and they are gaining ground in France, Iran, Hong Kong, Palestine and Indonesia.
SA took a while to get to this point. There were many signs of a country sitting on a ticking time bomb.
Just 11 years ago, the world witnessed the brutal killing of 34 mineworkers in Marikana by state police in defence of mining capital, and the students closed down all public universities in 2015 protesting against the commercialisation and the maintenance of coloniality in higher education institutions.
Outside these two national protests, SA has been a protesting country every single day. Communities have been agitating in small local towns and villages against government and market failures.
Commercial and state media simply label these riots as “service delivery protests” against “poor governance and corruption in local government”. Sometimes these statements get peddled without proper engagement with the people involved and their reasons.
In other words, the language, knowledge and concerns of these protesting communities were being overlooked by elite academic analysts and media as insignificant issues.
This localisation of people’s frustrations was a deliberate act to minimise a bigger problem. South Africans have been engaged in anti-capitalist campaigns for years in their communities and nobody was listening to what they were saying.
The nationalism of regular elections every five years in SA receives significant attention from the bourgeois media – while the socialist concerns of local social movements receive little attention.
The EFF came to realise this huge gap and it has come up with a game-changing strategy of transcending these local revolts into a comprehensive and coordinated national movement.
Using innovative and imaginative organising skills, it forged the national crisis of load shedding, unemployment and the rising unpopularity of the sitting president into a mobilising tool to pull every concerned South African to the national picket line.
The same bourgeois media were used to mobilise and conscientise every South African about the national shutdown, to maximum effect.
This is the same strategy that was used by the #FeesMustFall movement in 2015 to put the system on its knees – and the EFF has again utilised its youth traditions to drive the message home.
The reality is that the EFF is a beautiful concept whose time has come. The socioeconomic conditions of SA enable it to exist as a socio-political response to the growing hopelessness produced by the neo-liberal crisis of a post-colony.
The leadership of the EFF has taken the literature of historical struggles of the proletariat in Africa and across the world seriously. Its political tactics, strategies and priorities are rooted in critical socialist thought. It has a young leadership that is self-developed and trained in formal and non-formal institutions of political science – and they take time to craft anti-imperialist concepts and agitations against international capitalism and its effects on everyday life.
It has neatly packaged the language of the left and it has infused it with youth flair to capture the frustrations, imaginations and aspirations of the majority.
In essence, today’s national shutdown by the EFF is further confirmation that this is an African international youth movement of the 21st century that is making significant inroads into the national consciousness of the working-class – and the people are going to finally realise that their liberation rests on their militant solidarity.
This is, finally, the beginning.
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