In August 2022, 600 activists representing more than one hundred movements packed into a Johannesburg hall for the first meeting in several years of the Working Class Summit (WCS), revealing welcome signs of life on the South African Left. The WCS’ main convener is the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), which has been going through a bruising internecine struggle for the several years, pitting its general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and most of its smaller unions against the leadership of its largest affiliate, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA).

In an attempt to impose its own derelict “vanguard” party over the federation, NUMSA leader Irvin Jim has been sabotaging the WCS. But this project hit a snag when Jim’s faction failed to secure a leadership majority at SAFTU’s Congress last May. The WCS leaders seized the opening. In just a few months—and after years of virus-induced stagnation in civic spaces—they pulled off a highly successful meeting, drawing in activists from every part of the country. The WCS meeting gave vent to the mounting hardships facing working people in South Africa and laid the groundwork for rebuilding networks across the fractured landscape of the Left.

But after this very promising start, the WCS committed a major unforced error. It immediately threw all its energies, and considerable resources, into trying to organize a national shutdown, planned for just a few weeks after the meeting concluded.  The shutdown was meant to be an opportunity for working class people to show their anger at rising inflation, spiraling crime, and rolling blackouts. But no more than 5,000 people across all of South Africa’s major cities heeded the call to demonstrate. By the standards of South African movements, that figure is diminutive. It is around 0.001 percent of the combined membership of SAFTU and COSATU, which called for a parallel shutdown the same day.

The matter was made worse by the lofty language used in the call to action—which evoked the imagery of a general strike. Almost nothing was actually shut down however. Unless you physically crossed paths with the handful of demonstrators that day, you wouldn’t have been any wiser about plans to paralyze the national economy. The actual disruption caused, and the costs inflicted on elites—presumably the main objectives here—were therefore negligible.

Roger Etkind, editor of Amandla Magazine,  has keenly analyzed the problems underlying this poor outcome. Years of corruption scandals, internal squabbling, and a persisting failure to represent the general interests of working class people have depleted public sympathy for the union movement—the backbone of the WCS.  The paltry turnout served only to broadcast these problems to the world, turning the shutdown into a demonstration of weakness, rather than the show of strength it was meant to be.

Even with ten times as many people on the street, it’s hard to see how the shutdown would have contributed to developing the WCS process. The first problem is that it wasn’t embedded in any longer-term campaign of ongoing, cumulative actions that could build popular momentum behind key demands. And even if it had been, it’s not likely that the WCS would’ve been able to use such a campaign effectively as a tool of organization–building because it presently lacks structures, program, and centralized leadership.

At a more discursive level, the impact of the shutdown was dampened by a failure to develop a clear message that was both positive and political. Rather than targeting an absentee government and a profiteering capitalist class for passing on the costs of the crisis to workers, and hammering on a few key slogans (for price controls!), the protest made “the cost of living” into its main enemy.