The labour movement has been unable to de-link itself from its archenemy: capital. As its structures bureaucratise, as its leaders become career unionists, as it opens investment companies and pays staff increasingly inequitable salaries, it increasingly mirrors the very thing it is fighting. If the South African Federation of Trade Unions is to meet its promise, it must be fundamentally different from the organisation it was born out of.

Stiff-necked apartheid high priests had their problems but none of them contemplated the type of weird political culture the ANC and Mr. Zuma are foisting on post-apartheid South Africa. Where is that country headed?

Does the gradual increase in the number of offensive strikes starting in 2007, the occurrence of the Marikana Massacre and the farm workers’ revolt of 2012, the five-month platinum strike and the one-month metalworkers’ strike in 2014 indicate that a new wave of offensive strikes has begun? Or is this just a short-lived revival? A key question is: has South Africa reached a turning point?

The evidence available contradicts the propaganda the South African president and his backers are attempting to disseminate: Zuma has been, not a victim, but a friend of both white monopoly capital and organisations linked to Western intelligence agencies when it suits him.

With the internet and all other technologies which can connect the world working class into a global fighting force to defeat global capitalism which is threatening not only human life but the entirety of our universe, there have never been better conditions for the success of the global Socialist Revolution than now.