Source: Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) | Published: 2026-06-01
Category: 아프리카 정치경제 | Keywords: governance, state, political economy
This journal was founded during a period when the socialist transformation of newly independent countries of Africa and Asia was on the agenda and the existence of the communist party-led socialist state of Cuba was a reality in Latin America. We made no bones about aiming to produce a journal which would publish well-researched articles in solidarity with movements and parties working towards the liberation and transformation of Africa from imperialist domination. As observed in the last issue, in so doing the journal took up Fanon’s critical stance on the African regimes that dropped the struggle for the liberation of their peoples once they assumed office (Chukwudinma, Lee and Engels 2025). This issue focuses on the role of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the post-liberation government led by the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s main liberation movement. The SACP is the oldest such party on the continent and in 2021, almost three decades after the end of white minority rule and its entry into the ANC-led government, the party celebrated its 100th anniversary.
Three years later, the ANC faced a bruising election in which the tripartite alliance, of which the SACP was part, suffered a serious blow. Forced into coalition, the ANC chose the centrist Democratic Alliance as its partner. The left in South Africa is now reeling from challenges from populist, ethnic and xenophobic mobilisation as the working class and rural masses struggle to find political expression for their desperation and dissatisfaction. No clear socialist alternative was posed in the 2024 election, and the SACP chose to remain part of the ANC tripartite alliance, together with the labour federation COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The SACP has now decided to contest the 2026 local government elections independently of the ANC, posing a fundamental challenge to the party’s decades-long alliance with the liberation movement.
South Africa and its neighbours are suffering from structural socio-economic challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment, combined with the growing impact of climate change. What is the role of the SACP in this context? Are its ideological positions and its strategies flexible enough to remain relevant, and even to play a progressive role in the future?
As part of the SACP centenary events of 2021, an initiative of Wits History Workshop, South Africa History Online and academics from various universities put together a series of webinars under the overarching theme ‘Lineages of Socialism in Southern Africa: 100 years of the SACP’. The webinar hosted by Nelson Mandela University in November 2021 was the final one in the series. Entitled ‘Forward to Socialism/Socialist Futures’, it covered the period from the 1980s, through the unbanning of the SACP in 1990, to the present, and included some discussion of the future of the party and what form a socialist transition could possibly take in South Africa. Four of those papers are published here, together with an article especially written for this issue by Patrick Bond.
The vanguard party and politics from below
These contributions prompt reflection on the role of revolutionary vanguard parties and on the role and purpose of parties themselves as agents of radical change in the current global conjuncture. If parties are indeed the political vehicle of transformation, is vanguardism still the appropriate principle of party organisation, with a central committee determining the party line, or is democratic decision-making from below the way to embed a socialist party’s power to transform once it is in government? Can democratic centralism ever be more democratic than centralist? The victory of a declared democratic socialist both in the US Democratic Party primary and in the election for mayor of the biggest city in the USA last year may have begun to put socialism back on the agenda in the global North, but also suggests a new left politics from below. Whether the socialist party is a minority caucus within a large establishment governing party or a vanguard political party in government with a former liberation-movement-turned-party, the dilemma is the same: how to ensure that its influence on policy reflects its socialism and has a degree of success in moving the country or city in the direction of socialist transformation.
Those left-wing African liberation movements that then became one-party governments developed their versions of socialism in the context of non-alignment with the actually existing state socialism of the USSR and its allies and of its Chinese variant. They did this emphasising the African characteristics of their socialism and, in some cases, presenting a philosophical basis: Nkrumah’s consciencism, Nyerere’s ujamaa or Kaunda’s humanism. While there were Marxists within these liberation-movements-turned-parties, they often kept a low profile given the hostility to Marxism within the political leadership of the dominant parties, and of course they splintered into camps sympathetic to either of the two great socialist powers. The predominance of the imperialist global North in the former colonies’ economic and political relations ensured the failure of the socialist ‘experiments’, leaving liberation from neocolonial imperialism – let alone socialist transformation – still to be achieved.
Imperialism: war and inequality
Indeed, any discussion now of the prospects for socialism, let alone socialism itself, seems somewhat out of place in the current global conjuncture, in spite of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, now some 15 years ago, and most recently those in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger leading to their breakaway from the Economic Community of West Africa and formation of the anti-neocolonial Alliance of Sahelian States (AES). More than four decades of neoliberal global capitalism has reversed many of the advances of that earlier hopeful period, bringing increases in inequality both within and between countries. It has created, both in the global North and the global South, an elite of billionaires and millionaires, together with their well-paid corporate managerial and political minions at one end and, at the other, a global reserve army of labour. As the editorial in Issue 185 (Cline-Cole 2025) observed, although the inequalities of class and nation are at the root of the regular economic crises, little is being or can be done, given the system’s contradictions, to deal with these increasing inequalities.
The growth of the global economy has intensified dependence on fossil fuels and polluting chemicals, which in turn has created climate and health crises around the world. The climate emergency is already bringing regular flooding and droughts in countries with inadequate resources to deal with the consequent destruction and hunger, while inadequate controls over air and river pollution, and over poor diets and food hygiene, bring global pandemics and chronic diseases. The failure to deal with poverty and inequality has fuelled the rise of the far right around the world, with its demonising of the ‘other’ – whether, for example, Zimbabweans in South Africa or Muslims in the global North – as well as continuing the super-exploitation of an increasingly fragmented labour force. Setting these fragments against each other so that the most powerful class or class fraction rules over all of them is familiar divide-and-rule politics.
In a populist reaction to globalisation, the Trump regime prioritises the protection of its domestic manufacturing and agriculture sectors, whose working class formed the backbone of support for its election victories. Its tariff policy was never going to bring benefits to Trump voters and has had to be amended many times, since it has faced both domestic and international opposition, not least from US allies, but even from the US Supreme Court. The reported unwillingness of the Trump regime to get involved in military excursions overseas and a promise to end the Russia–Ukraine war by producing a peace deal is also responding to Trump voters’ demands to see resources spent within the USA and not abroad; but this appears to be contradicted by recent foreign interventions. The war on Iran, the removal of Maduro in Venezuela by armed force, the bombing of Nigerian militants linked to Islamic State and the supply of arms to support the Israeli genocide are all demonstrations of US power and statements of its self-appointed role as world hegemon. Claims to Greenland and even Canada, and the oil blockade of Cuba reflect the US aim not only to exert control over the rest of the American continent and the Caribbean in order to build up security against their big power rivals and especially China, but also to have control over the supply of raw materials essential to the data-driven technology of the so-called fourth industrial revolution and to the potential lying under the surface of Greenland and the Arctic seabed, now made more accessible by climate change. Closing down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is another way of spending less abroad, especially in this case in the global South, for most of which Trump has almost total disdain. This has had dire consequences for people who have become dependent especially on the food supply and health services that go with USAID programmes.
The old imperialist story of interventions and regime change remains strikingly alive, both directly and indirectly. The USA, while experiencing the same decline in traditional manufacturing as elsewhere in the global North, maintains its hegemony through command over advanced technology and deployment of military power. It supplies the allied countries of its empire with arms which they in turn supply to their clients: in Sudan, where several countries, most notably the United Arab Emirates, have been supplying US and UK arms to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan; Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is the conduit for arms used against the Houthi rebels; Israel, where arms from the same sources have been used in the Gaza (and the West Bank) genocide; and in Ukraine against the Russians. This last is a war provoked by the further expansion of NATO and the EU to Russian borders, an expansion that has occurred anyway, provoked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The USA has a military presence over most of the world outside mainland China and Russia, emphasising its status as global hegemon. Across Africa alone it has permanent and temporary bases in around 30 countries, ensuring that US raw material, military and security interests are protected. A recent example of this has been the deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where US support for the government is predicated on access to the DRC’s mineral wealth and support for a railway to take those minerals out through Angola for delivery to the USA. Africa still largely remains a source of raw materials exported for productive activity elsewhere in the global North and the more industrialised parts of the global South.
China, Russia and the US empire
But what of China and Russia? Trump’s attempts to create divisions between the two by cosying up to Putin appear to have failed. Given that China produces many necessary inputs in US-manufactured products, it seems odd for the USA to pursue a hostile policy towards such an important power and source of wealth for its corporates. However, having China as a security threat in South East Asia, especially with its claims on Taiwan, justifies increasing US spending on arms and the rewarding of the military–industrial complex and its financial backers to cement the USA’s status as the global hegemon.
As for China’s increasing involvement in Africa, its one African military base in Djibouti appears to be there to protect China’s investments in the region and the shipping routes to the South. Its Belt and Road Init