So a bit of context, the EFF is a prominent pan-African, ostensibly ML leftist party in South Africa. This is an FAQ from early 2024, that same year the country had an election in late May. Personally, I don’t think the EFF arrived at these sentiments wanting to appeal to western liberals or whatever. If you know anything about Malema or the EFF, you’d know that they are not concerned with playing soft with right-wingers, much to the chagrin of the compromised ANC and white supremacist “Democratic” Alliance. Not sure who wrote it, but from the writing style I think it might have been written by either Shivambu or Malema himself.
Some quotes for those who don’t want to read:
Stalin and Mao were NOT Marxists, they were actually quite anti-Marxist in that they led regimes based not on democratic control of the state by the workers, but rather based on totalitarian control by an elite stratum of bureaucrats who were a parasite on the workers’ state.
The Stalinists were terrified of any potential opposition, and especially the intellectuals that they could not control. They were snuffed out, in many cases quite literally. Individual expression was portrayed as counter-revolutionary, even culture was subjugated to the “collective will” - not of society but of a handful of bureaucrats desperate to cling on to their power and privilege.
Had the Communist International remained firm on the positions of Lenin and Trotsky, the victory of the world revolution would have been ensured. Unfortunately, the Comintern’s formative years coincided with the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, which had a disastrous effect on the Communist Parties of the entire world.
Sorry for being late but I forgot my password so I had to find my old phone since it had my password. But anyways kinda cringe of the EFF for saying this I thought there takes would have at least been better.
Yep, the South African left has been in some dire straits, and “kinda cringe”, since the late 1990s.
EFF are trots who flip flop on Zuma, GSM rights, and xenophobia. SACP have been largely silent on the ANC’s rightward neoliberal shift since Mbeki, though recently fractures between the two have become quite public since the SACP’s announcement to independently contest local elections later this year. SRWP was weird but I was nonetheless optimistic about it, seems to have gone quiet unfortunately.
Personally, I think AbM (leftist but not ML as far as I know), SAFTU (explicitly ML trade union federation), and as far as I can tell KAAX (anti-xenophobia formation founded by a former SACP member) seem to be the only good options without the major problems mentioned earlier at the moment. Nonetheless, I would encourage SA comrades to join the local EFF, ANC, or SACP chapter, as there is no perfect leftist formation and anyone who claims to be is either an academic with no history of activism or a charlatan.
Edit: upon more research about KAAX, it appears the founder is Trot who may have been kicked out of the SACP partly for typical ultra-leftist entryism. Nonetheless, xenophobia is major problem in SA (one that the ANC has unfortunately been quite squishy on) and I believe something like KAAX is needed to combat it while almost all major political parties are fanning the flames of anti-migrant sentiment.