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Book review: How Ireland Voted 2016: The Election that Nobody Won

(alongside the Congress of South African Trade Unions: COSATU) in the ‘tripartite alliance’. Even so, while the SACP may now have acquired a ‘mass membership’, its participation in the Alliance means that communists only compete in elections as members of the ANC, and once elected, are subject to the ANC’s discipline. Were the party to compete on its own at elections, it is likely – as Kolasa points out – that it would be unable to obtain more than a tiny percentage of the popular vote. Accordingly, the SACP is faced with a difficult choice: either kowtow to the ANC, with which increasingly it has moved into disagreement around (notably economic) policy issues, or to go independent and run the risk of virtual elimination from the country’s various legislative bodies at national, provincial and local levels. Kolasa deals with all this in considerable (often wearying) detail, taking the reader through the interminable ideological debates which have characterized the SACP’s post-apartheid history. He provides chapter and verse of the changing eddies and currents within the party, citing extensive commentaries upon the party by insiders and outsiders, as well as quoting from the party’s own documentation and his own interviews with party leaders and activists. In addition, there is a formidable battery of long endnotes providing copious further details of the party’s history, internal differences, policy positions and so on. In so far as it does all this, this book is a useful contribution. However, readers seeking to locate the SACP into the country’s spectrum at the present will be disappointed by serious omissions. First, although the SACP has now become a fervent admirer of the Chinese Communist Party, this is scarcely acknowledged – let alone discussed. Second, there is no discussion at all of the challenge being presented to the SACP by the Economic Freedom Fighters led by ANC outcast Julius Malema. Pursuing a Black nationalist-cum-populist platform, the EFF is threatening to make significant inroads into the SACP’s most likely popular constituency among the Black poor. Third, there is only very cursory discussion of the challenge presented to the SACP’s claimed vanguard leadership of the working class by the National Union of Metalworkers’ of South Africa, which has broken with COSATU and is working hard to form an alternative, working-class-based party of the left. Fourth, there is no discussion of how, on the ground, at least in some areas of the country such as the Eastern Cape, membership of the SACP forms the basis for vicious factional struggle within the ANC for access to state position and resources. Kolasa concludes that the SACP’s future will depend upon how it manages to face ‘hard choices’, not least of which is that if the ANC continues to pursue its centrist and pro-capitalist policies, ‘the ANC-SACP alliance is inevitably doomed’ – even though it may continue for ‘possibly decades more’ (p. 222). Readers may well respond that the real dilemma the SACP is facing is whether to continue to cling to the illusion and accoutrements of state power which its leaders presently enjoy, or to concentrate more convincingly on mobilizing working-class power and articulating a credible anti-capitalist platform.