I am writing from New York where I am meeting university educators and activists.
Everyone is talking about the devastating exposé of Deputy President David Mabuza published in The New York Times. Nodoubt other South Africans abroad are having asimilar experience.
The exposé of Mabuza, published in what is arguably the world’s most respected English-language newspaper, is a game-changer for President Cyril Ramaphosa.
From this point on he will, at best, be seen as the head of a divided party and of a government that includes the worst dregs of the Jacob Zuma era.
On the international circuit any talk of a “New Dawn ” or a “crackdown on corruption”will now be immediately followed by the question: “Yes, but wha tabout Mabuza, and his ilk?”
If Ramaphosa cannot remove Mabuza and others like him from the party and the government, his presidency will be paralysed.The sheen that surrounded Ramaphosa in the early days of his presidency has now been lost, and recovering international confidence in his presidency will require him to do hard yards — to act decisively against the remnants of the Zuma faction.
Back home in SA, confidence is crashing. Ramaphosa is now widely seen to be caving in to the authoritarian populism of the EFF.
As I, along with other commentators, have argued before, globally centrist politicians like Ramaphosa are losing elections and falling like dominoes.
The spoils of power are going to populists, of the Right and the Left.
In light of this international scenario, Ramaphosa’s centrism does not seem like a viable basis for long term stability.
In South Africa the alternative to Ramaphosa’s centrism is, in media terms, the authoritarian populism of the EFF, with its increasingly racist and militaristic politics. Many have termed the EFF’s politics fascist.
In terms of political power within the ruling party and some of the metros and provinces, the alternative is the authoritarian and kleptocratic politics of the Zuma faction.
Both of these forms of populism — neither of which is actually popular with the South African electorate —would spell catastrophe for SA should they capture the state.
In the US, Donald Trump’s right-wing populism is wreaking havoc on society. The centrists in the Democratic Party have no real traction.As many have noted, the primaries’ choice to run Hillary Clinton against Trump, instead of left-wing populist Bernie Sanders, was a fatal mistake. But the Democratic Party has been so captured by entrenched interests that it seems unable to move forward and grasp the political moment.
It is outside of the two-party system that exciting progressive prospects are emerging.
New publications, among them The Jacobin, the Boston Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, have made socialist and radical ideas hugely popular with a generation of young intellectuals.
The Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter, which were mostly organised via social media, were important developments in the emergence of a new radicalism. But, like all politics driven by social media,they collapsed quickly.
We at home are familiar with this in light of the rapid rise and equally rapid collapse of the student movement.
But there is a new project — the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — that is organised on a proper democratic and membership-based model. It is rapidly growing and is winning local elections, sometimes displacing powerful career politicians.The party is rooted in Trotskyist sectarianism, a project that always ends in a farce. But in 2017 it broke with that toxic mode of politics and its membership has rapidly grown. It now has 48,000 paid-up members.
By South African standards this is small. Our two most significant genuinely left-wing organisations are Abahlali baseMjondolo and the National Union of Metalworkers of SA.
The former has a paid-up membership north of 50,000 and the latter of more than 400,000.
But by US standards an avowedly socialist and genuinely democratic party with a membership of close to 50,000 people is significant. Last year the party won 15 elections .
This year it aims to get its first representative in Congress and to have 100 elected officials. In June Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a charismatic young woman, sensationally won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district, defeating the incumbent, Democratic caucus chair Joe Crowley.
It was described as the biggest upset in the 2018 midterm election season. And because the DSA has won over so many young intellectuals it has an influence on debates that far exceed its numbers.
We know from international experience that centrist politics has as bleak a future in SA as it does elsewhere.
Ramaphosa is being pulled in dangerous directions by the EFF and the Zuma faction in the ANC. This is because we don’t have a credible left wing alternative .
The DSA has shown, again, that social media-driven political projects don’t last. It’s the old slog of meetings and elections that builds political projects that last.
It is important that serious work is done to build a credible left-wing alternative. There are rumblings about uniting the Left and building a workers’ party.
But our political crisis is coming to a head, and time is short. It is time for the different factions of the Left to put their egos aside, remove their hatchets from each other ’s backs and agree to principled unity.
A decisive break needs to be made from the disastrous sectarianism of the last 20 years, with its endless plotting and character assassination.
The sense of optimism generated by the DSA is refreshing. We need something similar in SA.
✼Buccus is senior research associate at Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at University of KwaZulu-Natal and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation..