ABSTRACT
This, then, is simultaneously the most hopeful and sobering set of lessons from internationalism following apartheid. The challenge is for the next SouthAfrican left to tackle. Undoubtedly the strongest component of South African democratic eco-socialism in the 2015-19 period, before the next general election, is the metalworker breakaway union as it attempts to forge solidarity with local community, social and environmental activists. To do so, the “United Front” that is being built must be at once sufficiently concrete to carry forward the “Movement Towards Socialism” declared by the metalworkers in late 2013 on the ground (in spite of long-standing class and political differences between workers and the mass of unemployed, not to mention women who suffer South Africa’s extreme versions of patriarchy) and sufficiently internationalist to generate the next round of solidarity with South African radicals. In the past, like Marx’s mates in the IWA, South Africans have taught the world an enormous amount about the potential for transformative power deployed from below. In the future, similar lessons beckon us all back to a form of socialist solidarity that is still very much work in progress here, and everywhere.
