The shutdown was meant to be an opportunity for working class people to show their anger at rising inflation, spiraling crime, and rolling blackouts. It immediately threw all its energies, and considerable resources, into trying to organize a national shutdown, planned for just a few weeks after the meeting concluded. The WCS meeting gave vent to the mounting hardships facing working people in South Africa and laid the groundwork for rebuilding networks across the fractured landscape of the Left.īut after this very promising start, the WCS committed a major unforced error. In just a few months-and after years of virus-induced stagnation in civic spaces-they pulled off a highly successful meeting, drawing in activists from every part of the country. But this project hit a snag when Jim’s faction failed to secure a leadership majority at SAFTU’s Congress last May. In an attempt to impose its own derelict “vanguard” party over the federation, NUMSA leader Irvin Jim has been sabotaging the WCS. The WCS’ main convener is the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), which has been going through a bruising internecine struggle for the several years, pitting its general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and most of its smaller unions against the leadership of its largest affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). In August 2022, 600 activists representing more than one hundred movements packed into a Johannesburg hall for the first meeting in several years of the Working Class Summit (WCS), revealing welcome signs of life on the South African Left. This article is a longer version of one that originally appeared in Issue 84 of Amandla! from our running partnership with the South African publication.
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