In Part Two of our article, we continue our perspectives on the GNU and outline why the glue that holds it together is the common purpose of all the parties to maintain political stability. The strategists of the capitalist class fear the instability that could follow following the electorate’s rejection of all the parties, especially its main instrument for capitalist rule, the ANC. In Part One, which you can find here https://marxistworkersparty.org.za/?p=5510 we offer our analysis of what the GNU represents and the reasons behind how it came to be constituted. We argue that the lifespan of the GNU will endure for as long as there is no countervailing force to channel the discontent of and unite the masses under a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
The choice of the GNU from amongst the various coalition forms available including a minority government or “confidence and supply,” was not random. There was method in Luthuli House’s apparent madness and its determination to fend off accusations of betrayals especially by its allies in the Tripartite Alliance.
The capitalist class worldwide has many times resorted to the tactic of coalitions when its main parties have been discredited, sometimes even inviting working class parties into what they would dub a “national government.” A similar “we are all in this together” deception was used to secure support for the Covid19 pandemic measures.
The notion put forward by many from the Left across the board, that the DA would call the shots in the GNU reflects an astonishing lack of political comprehension or wilful denial firstly, of the ANC’s class character and its role as the architect and principal driver of the neo-liberal polices of the past thirty years. The Left is asking us to believe (i) that the ANC has not been carrying out an unrelenting neo-liberal assault on the working class and betrayed every promise made since the dawn of democracy; (ii) that this assault either only began now with the DA “in charge” of the GNU or will be escalated because of it. The mind boggles.
Secondly it reveals an inability to distinguish between what is primary and secondary in the class calculations of the bourgeois. In the electorally disastrous outcome of May 29, the defence of the post apartheid political order took precedence over the rival ambitions of parties committed to capitalism that had all suffered defeat.
The “national unity” propaganda of the GNU is intended to confuse cause with effect; to attribute the social, economic and political crises caused by capitalism to the re-inflamed racial, ethnic and tribal divisions in society. It aims to place the veil of the myth of “national unity” to cover the gigantic chasm that capitalism has opened up between the classes in a society dubbed by the World Bank as the most unequal in the world.
The GNU formula provides the ANC with the added benefit of drawing all those parties that have joined it from the opposition benches and new parties into co-governance on its terms. This deprives these parties of the luxury of opposition in exchange for the co-responsibility in governance. It has also freed the ANC from the constraints of allocating ministerial positions proportional to the number of votes parties won despite the DA’s initial insistence that this was the proper interpretation of the Statement of Intent (SoI) all GNU parties signed.
You can read about the historical precedent of the first GNU here
In resorting to and securing support for the GNU as a preferred form of coalition, the ANC also drew on historical precedent and Mandela’s authority as the head of the first GNU that ushered in the post-apartheid era. The capitalist think tank, Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) argues that unlike GNU 1.0, which was a constitutional imperative, GNU 2.0 “is a 21st century South African political contract which, by implication, brings together political voices of partners that are meant to forge a social compact: workers, middle strata, communities and captains of industry … a (subconscious or subliminal) political expression of social compacting.”
From the standpoint of the working class Mistra is making two damaging admissions in one. That the negotiated settlement had produced an agreement to make a coalition mandatory irrespective of the vote, was an attack on the most important democratic right – the right to vote for a party of your choice to govern. Ordinarily in bourgeois parliamentary democracies, the majority required to form a legitimately elected government with the authority and mandate to govern is 50%+1.
The ANC’s majority was 62.7%. It was in fact massaged downwards, and those of the Inkatha Freedom Party and Nationalist Party inflated, this was to justify their inclusion in the GNU as representatives of respectively the Western Cape i.e. the Coloureds, who constitute the majority in the province, and Kwa Zulu Natal, i.e. the Zulu people who dominate that province. In neither province was it likely that the ANC did not get a majority. In combination with these lowered votes, those in the Pretoria–Witwatersrand-Vereeniging PWV) region – the industrial heartland of the country and centre of working class power — were brought down to an outlandish 57%! The aim was to bring the ANC’s overall vote below two-thirds – the threshold for empowering the ANC to change the constitution.
It was the mortal fear of all the main parties, the capitalist class and imperialism that a two-thirds majority would enable the masses to exert pressure on the ANC for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy and be compelled to amend clause 25. This so-called property clause protects the capitalist class from expropriation of the banks the mines, commercial farms and the big factories. Thus, the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class was insulated from the democratic will of the working class majority.
Even so the ANC’s 62.7% was a massive majority by the standards of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The inclusion of the NP and IFP was not just completely unwarranted from a bourgeois parliamentary democratic point of view. It constituted the imposition of divisions amongst the masses on a racial and tribal basis broken down in struggle in unity that enable the ANC’s installation into office. The seeds of the sense of Coloured and Zulu marginalisation amongst a minority of both communities that both the PA and MK exploit today, were sown then.
The claim that the GNU was aimed at averting a racial civil war is false. The forces of reaction in both the IFP and within and around the NP had been defeated. The white population had no appetite for a racial civil war they knew would result in slaughter of tens of thousands at the end of which the racial balance of forces would remain unchanged. That is why they gave De Klerk a convincing mandate to surrender white minority rule in the 1992 white-only referendum. GNU1.0 collapsed when the NP walked out in May 1996 without disturbing a single hair on the head of what was in fact an ANC government.
The ANC went on to impose the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy a month later. The DA was not yet in existence. It only came into being in 2000 constructed out of the wreckage of the NP and castaways from the New NP and the Democratic Party – the descendants of the bourgeois liberal Progressive Federal Party. The ANC was the sole architect of this disastrous policy and the brutal attacks on the working class that followed.
Those on the left arguing that it is the DA in the GNU that will now take charge of the anti-working class policy introduced in 1996 as GEAR are falsifying history and acting as apologists for the ANC. The historical circumstances under which GNU 1.0 and 2.0 were formed may be drastically different from the standpoint of the arithmetic of bourgeois parliamentary politics. But the class aims remain the same across the three decades that separate them: to preserve the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class and the exploitation and oppression of the working class. The ANC is doing so today on the basis of 16% support what it did in 1994 with 62.7%. It converted to neo-liberalism without the NP. The DA found the ANC conducting the neo-liberal capitalist choir. It must and will sing along in full-throated harmony.
Will the GNU fracture?
All the parties will cooperate with the ANC in keeping the GNU alive for as long as possible. There is no alternative for parties committed to capitalism. Their collective responsibility is to try and stabilise the seventh post-apartheid administration in line with the pledge in the SoI.
The situation the ruling class faced in SA after May 29 was that its main instrument, the ANC had lost command over the electorate. To make matter worse, the leader of their second eleven, the DA’s Helen Zille, was back in charge. She had been ousted from leadership after 2014 in a desperate attempt to enable it to expand its electoral footprint into the black electorate with the installation of Maimane.
The termination of the Maimane “experiment” signalled the abandonment of its orientation to the black electorate and therefore its ambitions to be the alternative waiting in the wings for the ANC’s demise. Zille’s re-imaging of the DA as a party dedicated to protecting the interests of the white, Coloured and Indian minorities, placed an insuperable obstacle in the path of its electoral ambitions. It was doomed to political irrelevance, stagnation and regression.
This explains the capitalist class’s efforts, whilst continuing to inject the bulk of its funding into the DA, to diversify their portfolio of political investments into Bosa, ActionSA, Rise Mzansi and even the independent candidacy of ex-Marxist, Zachie Achmat. It was clear to the strategists of capital that, whatever Helen Zille’s delusions, the idea that the DA could ever form an alternative government was a pipe dream.
The EFF’s exclusion from the GNU – the collapse of its ANC coalition ambitions
The ANC leadership would have been prepared to accommodate the EFF despite the “Doomsday coalition” hysteria of the DA and sections of the capitalist class. Malema had prepared for this since he led the EFF into bed with the DA after the 2016 local government elections (LGE). The EFF’s ditching of the DA in favour of the ANC after the 2021 LGE in e.g. Ekurhuleni, was really the engagement for the anticipated marriage in 2024.
Malema prostrated himself before the ANC leadership and “white monopoly capital” (WMC) at the EFF’s post-election press conference. The self-styled Commander-in-Chief loudly reaffirmed his faith in SA’s bourgeois constitution to catch the ears of WMC. In addition, in a thinly veiled attack on Zuma’s MK Party, he denounced tribalism as a threat that could lead to civil war. In what was a public humiliation for what was then his second in command, Shivambu, he effectively sacrificed his ambitions to become Finance Minister. Damning Shivambu with faint praise as merely the “best candidate” he made it clear that it was no longer a pre-condition for the EFF to enter into a coalition. In the weeks before, the EFF had replaced with the halo of a rehabilitated “progressive liberation movement” the horns it had driven into the ANC’s head after the 2016 LGE to enter into a coalition with the DA as the “lesser devil”.
Enthusiastic as Malema was individually, he could have accepted an invitation to join the GNU only at the cost of splitting a disoriented EFF leadership, the majority of which had not fully come to terms with the implications of the party’s electoral setback. He had no choice but to put forward a negotiating position that ruled them out of participation in the GNU. The EFF denounced a coalition with the DA it had spent five years in a coalition bed with in three major metros with customary hypocrisy. With the DA included, it did not qualify as a GNU.
[1] Shivambu’s resignation and its implications for the EFF will be deal with in a separate article.
The finalisation of the GNU
The ANC’s GNU partners wasted little time in accepting its invitation and signed the SoI – the equivalent of an oath to support the ANC’s neo-liberal capitalist policy, uphold SA’s post-apartheid capitalist political dispensation and the bourgeois constitution it is based on.
The Pan Africanist Congress and United Democratic Movement spent less than a week in the Economic Freedom Front’s “Progressive Caucus” play pen for juvenile tantrums. For those few days the UDM and PAC parroted their EFF hosts’ latest theatrics in radical pretensions. They happily went along with the EFF’s hypocritical denunciation of the coalition as not a “real GNU” if it includes its former local government coalition partners, the DA.
In the end the ANC provided them with the fig leaf to cover their personal and party-political ambitions and the embarrassment at mimicking the EFF’s hypocrisy in relation to a GNU with the DA included. The ANC invited them to render a patriotic “service to the people” in the great historic project of “uniting the nation” in exchange for senior posts in the GNU. The PAC could not have been more richly rewarded. Its leader’s appointment as head of Land Reform, specially created for it after its separation from Agriculture, was a dream come true. The programme around which the PAC’s entire political being revolves, “returning the land to the people,” was now its responsibility to fulfil.
After PAC leader, Mzwanele Nyhontso’s flattering surprise at being appointed, he hastened to put in his excuses in advance. “If the PAC had won the elections, I would be saying, ‘the land is going to be restored to the rightful owners’. He said in an interview. I would be asking you: ‘Where do you want your farm?’
But, he continued, “I don’t want to sound radical, I am not a populist I must see the reality as we know it. We must utilise what we have.” Nyhontso said he won’t waste his time’ trying to remove section 25 (the property clause that requires a two-thirds majority to amend) and would rather use his tenure to redistribute land using the existing legal framework.
“The national executive committee of the PAC felt that we’ve been isolating ourselves since 1994. We’ve been outside this system criticising this system at a level where it would be difficult… to respond to a simple question: ‘Nifuna ulawula, nakhe nalawula phi?’ (What have you ever run or governed?) (Sunday Times 21/07/2024)
The inclusion of the openly xenophobic and racist Patriotic Alliance that openly supports the Israeli regime’s genocide in Palestine further underlines the cynicism underlying the ANC’s GNU calculations. It has enabled the PA to claim vindication for the misleading claim that the suffering of the Coloured masses is something separate and apart and from that of the Black working class portrayed by the PA as privileged at the expense of the Coloured population.
It is a concession to the PA’s false claim that it represents the Coloured population that must be drawn into the project of “national unity”. In fact, the PA received only a fraction of the Coloured vote mostly in the rural areas of the Western and northern Cape and was decisively rejected in the Western Cape where the Coloured population is the majority. It is the ANC’s investment in the disunity of the working class. In addition, it enables the ANC to provide official legitimacy to the xenophobia it has been fuelling without the courage to do so officially. Gayton is their ambassador for the legitimisation of xenophobia. He has already established his credentials. His actions have already claimed his first victim – the contestant of Mozambican and Nigerian parentage, Chidinma Adetshina in the SA beauty pageant subjected to the legal equivalent of a xenophobic necklacing. This in turn has encouraged Operation Dudula to feel compensated for its electoral losses by reigniting their xenophobic campaign in Soweto.
Why the DA joined the GNU
Contrary to the hysteria particularly from the left of the political spectrum, this applies to the DA as much as it does to the others. The Left has portrayed a confidence in the DA as some super power on economic policy not even shared by capitalist commentators. As one put it: “The DA, is thin on the ground when it comes to economics, and until the election didn’t have an economic policy at all. The DA’s preference is a “social market” economy, a lift from the German Soziale Marktwirtschaft consensus-driven free market model, regulated by the state for social stability and security, that drove its success after World War 2. But a draft DA economic plan released during the election was drawn up without any consultation at all.” (BL Premium 20/06/2024)
Despite her periodic uncontrollable outbursts, the DA’s real leader Helen Zille’s hysteria has softened into a whimpering sob over how unfair it all is. The ANC secured 159 seats in the National Assembly but allocated itself 22 full cabinet and 31 deputy ministerial positions. The DA secured 87 seats in parliament but only 6 cabinet posts and 5 deputies. Contrary to her and her party’s delusions, there was really no alternative but to become part of the GNU on the terms dictated by the ANC despite her initial insistence that the GNU Statement of Intent provides for proportionality between votes and cabinet posts.
The DA’s big business paymasters would have pointed out to its leadership that their party had actually lost over 300 000 votes. May 29 showed that its electoral tide had continued to ebb. It faced the prospect of political irrelevancy, as the “bittereinder” political commandos of a right wing reactionary electoral kraal. Its turn to relying on the continued political exploitation of the fears of the white minority and sections of the Coloured and Indian electorate had already begun to produce diminishing electoral returns. For the DA, May 29 marked above all, the evaporation of the illusion that its 2014 elections results were the foundations on which it could one day become an alternative government. The idea that the DA was a “government-in-waiting” to the right of the ANC, was as illusory as the EFF’s to its near left.
The DA’s moneyed men in grey suits would have taken the leadership for a renewal of their political vows to the post-apartheid political dispensation that one of their ancestors, the apartheid Nationalist Party had co-birthed as a partner in the original GNU 1.0. They would have read them passages from the books of Ecclesiastes and Corinthians in the Christian Bible. For everything there is a season. The time of inconsequential stone-throwing from opposition benches was over. It was now time to “put away childish things.” Its duty was now, as a political adult, to act as a prop for the fellow capitalist ANC. The ANC remains the capitalist ruling class’s main political instrument. It is the DA’s duty to help hold together the political post-apartheid dispensation whose credibility and support was dealt the most serious blow on May 29.
The DA would have been reminded that even with a 21% electoral performance, it could still qualify as a pass. They should accept their graduation certificate to be admitted from the high school of opposition to the university of governance. The ANC itself after all, even if it only just matched the electoral equivalent of former Basic Education Minister’s 40% matric pass mark, was still the best performer in this 2024 class of electoral failures. The ANC was going to form a government regardless. The DA would have been further warned that, with their infantile preconditions in the GNU negotiations threatening its feasibility, they would have had to take political responsibility for the very scenario they had hysterically portrayed their election campaign as aimed at preventing: a “doomsday coalition” of the ANC and EFF.
This is why the DA went even further than we had predicted in our previous statement in surrendering its “non-negotiables” in the GNU negotiations. It threw overboard all the missiles they could fire at the ANC from the opposition benches without consequences before. It went on to confirm that it was just a garden variety bourgeois party trading in political hypocrisy.
In order of importance, the DA’s first “principled” position to go was the pursuit of the Phala Phala corruption scandal against Ramaphosa that Zille’s puppet, Steenhuizen, had described as treason during the election campaign. Instead clasping the lifeline Ramaphosa threw out to the DA to pull them from the swamp of probable post-election political irrelevancy, made dropping the pursuit of the Phala Phala corruption cover-up itself non-negotiable.
Next to go were the DA’’s opposition to the minimum wage and black economic empowerment that Maimane’s coronation had been the hypocritical political equivalent of. Last but not least to go was its opposition to “cadre deployment” in the battle against which the DA had invested considerable political and financial resources in court. Now Zille demanded, with effortless hypocrisy, that the DA be allowed to choose its own directors general in “its” ministries.
The leaders of both the ANC and DA see in the electoral debris out of which the GNU has been constructed, a brighter future for their parties individually and the country as a whole. Ramaphosa predicts that the ANC will rise like a phoenix out of its ashes through the GNU to once again regain its overall majority. Helen Zille foresees the ANC crumbling and the DA becoming the party of government. Both are whistling in the dark.
National Unity – a veil to cover class divisions
There is clearly little love lost right at the beginning of this marriage. In the place of declarations of mutual love and affection of newly-weds, the loudest mouths on both sides have traded insults. Zille insists that it is not a GNU but an ANC/DA coalition in which all other parties are merely wedding guests showering them with confetti as they walk down the political aisle. ANC secretary general, Fikile Mbalula’s response was to tell Zille to get lost and that the DA can leave if it wants to. The reality is that even if they do not wish to remain together “till death us do part”, they are trapped in this arranged marriage for the “greater good” of the capitalist class.
The duration of this marriage of (in)convenience is not dependent on their individual political fidelities to their marriage vows. What necessitated the marriage was the interests of the social forces they both serve – the capitalist class. From the standpoint of the strategists of capital, the political squabbles are an irritating, sometimes entertaining overhead. But if these infantile histrionics were to threaten the viability of the GNU, the strategists of capital would be quite prepared to act against Zille. They did so in 2014. They would do so again as the early, at this stage, friendly warnings in some bourgeois newspaper commentaries are indicating.
Their mandate is to continue the neo-liberal capitalist policies of the past thirty years. What the ANC has been implementing on its own with the DA cheering on from the opposition benches, they must now implement together.
As Peter Taaffe of our sister CWI-affiliate, the Socialist Party of England and Wales point out in his 1978 article “Popular Frontism in France”: “During a period of upswing and relative stability the capitalists prefer to rule through their traditional parties. But faced with economic or social crisis and the resulting mass discontent, with the weakening and discrediting of their traditional parties, the capitalists invariably resort to the coalition tactic. They seek to break the movement of the masses by pushing the leaders of the workers’ parties into an alliance with the capitalist parties.”
The ruling political and economic elite have resorted to the ideological weapon of patriotism normally whipped up in sports to ease class tensions and to encourage the oppressed and exploited to see their oppressors and exploiters as “compatriots” and “fellow South Africans”. The ruling class is now using it to whip their political representatives into line on their side of the class barricades against the working class. The absence of “national unity” is presented as the cause of the polycrises. It is thus the patriotic duty of all parties to restore the myth of “national unity.” A reminder of 18th century English writer, meant when he famously said that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
The GNU scoundrels’ real mission is to achieve this mythical “national unity” between the working-class majority and the capitalist minority. Their interests are irreconcilably opposed. Only the working class can break the impasse that capitalism has created. To do this, as Marx pointed out in the “Communist Manifesto”, the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation.” For this the working class must organise itself based on a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
The GNU economic programme – a reactionary utopia
The analysis, perspectives and solutions put forward from both ends of the ideological spectrum offer no way out of the disastrous socio-economic crisis in the country. The GNU will solve neither the economic nor the political crisis of which it is a distorted expression.
GNU’s SoI commits all parties to the 2012 National Development Plan. The NDP has been such a complete failure that economic and political analyst Duma Gqubule has rightly called for it to be thrown in the dustbin. (BL Premium – 12/03/24 and 12/07/24)
The SoI sets the GNU the achievement of a number of objectives (See Here):
“Rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, the promotion of fixed capital investment and industrialization, job creation, transformation, livelihood support, land reform, infrastructure development, structural reforms and transformational change, fiscal sustainability, and the sustainable use of our national resources and endowments Macro-economic management must support national development goals in a sustainable manner. It also pledges the creation of “a more just society by tackling poverty, spatial inequalities, food security and the high cost of living, providing a social safety net, improving access to and the quality of, basic services, and protecting workers’ rights.”
Gqubule points out that in fact, after the experience of 12 years of the NDP, the ANC and its new partner, the DA, both surrendered to the reality that even those modest targets are unachievable. They do not believe in their own original promises. Before they wrote their manifestos they must have turned to 18th century English poet Alexander Pope’s words for inspiration: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
“The ANC’s manifesto”,” Gqubule points out, “did not have a jobs target. The DA’s had a target to create 2-million jobs over five years. On the current trajectory — an annual GDP growth rate of 1.5% — the labour force will increase by 3.5 million during the next five years, and the economy will create about 1.2 million jobs. The DA target is only 800,000 higher than the jobs the economy would create with low GDP growth, and the number of unemployed people will soar by 1.5 million to 13.6 million under this lame scenario”. Instead of jobs, the ANC’s manifesto has a target to create 2.5 million “work opportunities” within the country’s three public employment programmes (PEPs). But the 2024 budget made cuts of almost R10bn to these programmes, which will slash annual work opportunities by about 50% to 900,000. The ANC also pledged to introduce a basic income grant (BIG) within two years. To meet the ANC’s commitments, the 2025 budget must include increased funding for PEPs and the introduction of the BIG. Yet the last budget made provision for a primary budget surplus, stripping out interest payments on the debt that consumes 20% of the annual budget and is set to increase. With corporate tax increases ruled out, this can only be achieved by even more savage cuts.
See here for further GDP and employment targets
The 2012 NDP had a target to create 11-million jobs and reduce the unemployment rate to 6% by 2030 using the official definition. The GDP growth rate collapsed to 1.2% a year in 2009-2023. The number of unemployed thus soared by 6.1 million to 12.1 million. The labour force is set to increase to almost 28.9 million by 2030 amidst new projections of annual average GDP growth rate slightly lower than the five year pre-pandemic average growth rate 0.8% since 2012.
The economy will therefore have to create 10.4-million jobs from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the fourth quarter of 2030 to achieve the 6% target for the unemployment rate, according to Gqubule’s modelling. This is equivalent to almost 1.5-million jobs a year, which will require an annual GDP growth rate of 8%.
The ANC and DA manifestos do not have GDP growth targets. The NDP had a GDP growth target of 5.4% a year for ten years consecutively merely to eliminate extreme poverty. Economic growth did not exceed 1% over the twelve years since. Even worse, “after 16 years of falling average living standards, the most recent Budget Review forecast average annual GDP growth of 1.6% a year from 2024 to 2026. In other words, by 2026 GDP per capita will be lower than it was in 2007. With an annual GDP growth rate of 1.2%, the number of unemployed people will increase by 2.5million to 14.6million. The unemployment rate will soar to 45.2% from 41.9%.”
The SoI pledge is a reactionary utopia. The patriotism of the GNU is soaked in cynicism. It will be no more successful at achieving its aims collectively than the ANC government was on its own.
The reaction of the masses at already unmet expectations was the reason for the rejection of the main capitalist parties on May 29. The disappointment of the masses was this time expressed in a combination of a stay away from the polls and a turning away from the parties of capital. In addition, the decline of the EFF is an expression of a realisation that it offers no alternative.
The economic crisis will deepen. The attacks the ruling capitalist elite has been obliged to intensify to place the burden for the crisis of their system on the shoulders of the working class will intensify. The disappointment of the masses that the ruling class calculates can be contained by lowering expectations, will turn into rage. That is what will determine the longevity and stability of the GNU, not relations between the coalition partners.
The crisis of political representation for both classes that the MWP has pointed to before, will thus continue for both the working class and the capitalist class in spite and because of the GNU.
A mass workers party on a socialist programme to unify working class struggle
From the standpoint of the working class, the most critical and urgent task remains: the establishment of a mass workers party on a socialist programme. Such a party must combine the struggle for reforms with an understanding that any reforms won will only be temporary, so long as the capitalist system exists, the ruling class will be obliged to roll back and nullify those reforms. The main strategic objective must be the unification of struggles within each of the four theatres of struggle in communities, youth and students, women and organised workers. These forces must rely on their own strength and organisation. They must be marshalled for unity in action, their own power under their own leadership, accountable and recallable, and their own socialist programme. It must be a party of struggle firstly and foremostly.
This mass workers party must however, use the struggle on the electoral plane as a platform to popularise its socialist programme and to unify the working class. it must draw under its banner the hundreds of thousands who have illusions in parliament, those who are misled by formations using racism, xenophobia, tribalism, misogyny and religious bigotry to divide them. Such a party must set itself the goal of the overthrow of capitalist and the socialist transformation of society.