‘We’ve got the state. Where’s the power?’: debilitating contradictions in the South African Communist Party’s state leadership since 1994

The South African Communist Party’s potential to play a progressive role within post-apartheid state leadership was frequently tested – and found wanting – following liberation in 1994. The failure was in not advancing the National Democratic Revolution’s ‘second-stage’ objectives, that is, ending not just racial injustice in civil and political terms (the first stage), but socioeconomic injustice. Several Communist cabinet members shaped transitional and post-apartheid policies. Their sector-by-sector travails merit attention in part because they openly documented and defended their own work, and also because in housing, water and industrial development, three ministers made crucial, long-lasting neoliberal policy decisions. In the spirit of a structure–agency dialectic, such leaders (Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Rob Davies) reflected Marx’s conclusion in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that people ‘make their own history … but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’, not of their own choosing – and thus not fighting effectively for socialism, either.