What South Africa’s conference of the left reveals about a deeper political crisis
The recent Conference of the Left in South Africa should not be viewed merely as another ideological gathering within the country’s crowded political landscape.
Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar)
The recent Conference of the Left in South Africa should not be viewed merely as another ideological gathering within the country’s crowded political landscape.
Rather, it represents a symptom of a deeper structural transition unfolding across Southern Africa, one in which the historical legitimacy of liberation movements is steadily weakening while no new political paradigm has yet emerged with sufficient credibility to replace it.
Call it “the interregnum of morbid symptoms” following a famous quote by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks when he said “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.
This perfectly describes periods of political or social transition where an established order is crumbling, but its replacement has not yet taken shape. This vacuum of authority inevitably breeds chaos, inequality, and extreme political shifts.
