William Shoki is a South Africa-based writer, and editor of the online intellectual platform Africa Is a Country. William regularly receives mails and comments informing him that, in fact, Africa is not a country but a continent. Remarkably often, these messages come from Europeans. The ERB’s Sander Pleij texted with him about the South African left.
WS
Sorry for the late reply! I was in rural South Africa for a Marxist political school and had bad signal throughout the week.
SP
Wow. What did you do, what did you learn?
WS
It was a Marxist political school I co-organized as a member of a socialist group I belong to, called Zabalaza for Socialism (ZAS0), which is a democratic socialist outfit trying to catalyze the re-groupment of the South African left. The school was led by Indian-American Marxist Vivek Chibber, modelled on a school he’s run with Achin Vanaik in India for the last twenty years. We invited 25 militant organizers from trade unions, student movements and social movements to a coal-devastated, deindustrialized town called Emalahleni (which means « place of coal », formerly known as Witbank), where we are building a community center and where we had the school.
SP
What’s the main obstacle for the South African left and how can the Marxists of the « Marxist political school » play a role there?
WS
The obstacles for the South African left are numerous. The party of liberation, the African National Congress, effectively demobilized popular forces after the end of apartheid, absorbing them into their own political structures or incorporating them into large, informal networks of patronage, such that the antagonistic posture towards the state and capital has dissolved (because that entrenches dependence on the party-state). The role of Marxists, and schools like this one, is to empower the most militant organizers out there with materialist tools of analysis that off er the kind of conceptual clarity that can illuminate the strategic tasks ahead. The left in South Africa has to be rebuilt, through painstaking organization and struggle. But theory aids in clarifying how we go about doing so effectively.
SP
Which political topics become subject to these tools of analysis? And which book or article of Vivek Chibber should I read?
WS
The school was organized through a series lectures. We defined Marxist class theory and contrasted it with bourgeois notions of class, explaining why class is fundamental in understanding social dynamics. We discussed how capitalism creates markets through class structure, dividing society into capitalists and workers, and driving conflict between them. We explored the state’s role in upholding capitalist interests, even in democracies, and the potential for workers to resist through collective organization. We focused on class struggle, emphasizing that collective resistance is not natural but requires institution-building. And we examined identity politics, arguing that racial and gender struggles are deeply tied to economic class dynamics. Two books of Vivek Chibber to read, are his latest releases: The Class Matrix, and Confronting Capitalism.
