South Africa’s swerve from liberation to bungling kleptocracy is not unique—the United States is in the throes of an analogous meltdown—but the speed and extent of that unraveling continue to both perplex and prefigure thinking about the prospects for recovery.  The latest book by Vishwas Satgar, one of South Africa’s leading figures on the left, is a trove for anyone seeking a clearer understanding of the country’s hobbled efforts to step free of its past and a beacon for seeing past the gloom. Ranging from declarative newspaper articles to clear-headed essays, A Love Letter to the Many gathers three decades of writing and reflection into a hefty, impassioned volume which, in confronting defeat, also establishes grounds for hope.

The first of the book’s four sections covers South Africa’s path from poster child for national liberation—and reconciliation—to what Satgar labels “a shallow and corrupt market democracy” with an anemic neoliberal economy, ongoing endemic poverty among black South Africans, and widening income inequality. Within less than a generation, the great expectations of the 1990s became dim memories, eclipsed by brash freebooters claiming to be conducting radical change. “An unliveable society was turned into an unviable society,” Satgar writes.

Insistent that “South Africa did not have to end up where it is”, he traces the spurned opportunities, misjudgments, and capitulations that led to the detour. He starts with the important reminder that “South Africa, compared to most places in the world, had the conditions to navigate neoliberalisation differently.” For much of the 1990s, there was an activated mass resistance movement, a powerful global solidarity network, international institutions keen to side with an African success story after the horrors of structural adjustment, and an internal capitalist class in disarray.

How, then, did ostensible working-class-led hegemony dissolve so quickly and emphatically? It’s a complex story, which Satgar unspools with analysis that draws also on his experiences in the trade union movement and the South African Communist Party.

The machinations of incumbent elites featured strongly, but the defeats also had other origins. Satgar’s analysis draws productively on Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “passive revolution” (in which mass politics is subdued and co-opted to permit a restructuring of the capitalist class) to chronicle the steady neutering of South Africa’s organized left. There were efforts to regroup and resist, including thwarted attempts to undo the sclerotic tactics and practices of the South African Communist Party, but they failed. Satgar convincingly shows how African nationalism was deployed to defeat working-class left alternatives, only to then degenerate into a “criminalised politics.”

This downcast analysis risks obscuring significant achievements—including the avoidance of all-out civil war in the 1990s, the value of the constitutional guardrails and judicial powers added in that period, and the (admittedly faint) rudiments of a welfare state that were introduced. But it is indisputable that much of the material deprivation and inequality that typified apartheid South Africa continued to be reproduced. Poverty stayed entrenched among black Africans, with the unemployment rate among African youth topping 60%. Income and wealth inequality widened, and vast wealth continued to be extracted by a small, increasingly multiracial elite.

For Satgar, the transition of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) from a progressive national liberation movement to a vehicle for “parasitic accumulation” cannot be reduced to moral failings or the avarice of individuals. The decline was the outcome of a class project overseen by the ANC, which he terms an “Afro-neoliberal mode of transformation.”

Leaving the economy in the hands of white elites was obviously untenable, but the ANC also lacked the appetite for a more directive approach. This was clear when, in 1996, it adopted a macroeconomic policy that imposed a set of pliant adjustments that cramped the state’s role and exposed the economy directly to the discipline of financial markets. Rather than marshal the country’s major corporations to support a coherent developmental effort, the ANC allowed them to adjust and extend their growth strategies abroad. The policy was advertised as an economic stabilization measure. But tucked into it was the misplaced hope that conglomerate restructuring would leave room and opportunities for the emergence of a black capitalist class.

Instead, the economy remained dominated by massive cross-holding corporations. Only two entry points for substantial enrichment existed for newcomers: via economic affirmative action (black economic empowerment ventures brokered by the ruling party) or through snagging procurement and service contracts with the state. Access to both those channels required fealty to the ANC. This fertilized criss-crossing networks of patronage, which, in turn, enabled political rivals to build and consolidate power, all inside the broad tent of the ANC.

Soon, Nelson Mandela’s successor as President, Thabo Mbeki, faced a challenge from one such rival. By the early 2000s, Jacob Zuma, a former ANC intelligence chief, had consolidated a powerful, chauvinist support base and was trumpeting the need for more radical change. Satgar shows how the Communist Party (and the Congress of South African Trade Unions), rather than shift towards mass organizing, hitched themselves to Zuma’s populist bandwagon—a fateful blunder.

The Zuma era unleashed rampant plundering of the state and metastasizing corruption that took the country to the brink of being a failed state. Media coverage focused on the pillaging but tended to miss the deeper objective, which entailed rapidly growing a transactional black capitalist class under the pretext of “economic liberation.” Though brazenly dysfunctional, this project became so thoroughly lodged in the ANC that it lasted almost a decade, to 2018.

Entire state structures were turned into fiefdoms for doling out patronage and bagging wealth. Public agencies and local municipalities sank beneath mountains of debt, and basic services collapsed. Eventually, with the state incapable of keeping the lights on for more than a few hours a day, the wheels came off Zuma’s “radical economic transformation” swindle. Corruption scandals, brave judicial decisions, worker resistance, community struggles, and rollicking feuds inside the ANC laid bare its crisis of legitimacy. Cyril Ramaphosa, a trade union leader turned billionaire, was tasked with the “reset.”

History might in retrospect seem to move on tracks, but, as Satgar repeatedly notes, there are always forks in the path traveled. Within given constraints, contending social and political forces make choices. Sometimes the ability to enact those decisions attaches to the legitimacy and authority of an individual, as Satgar reminds us when he pays tribute to the former Communist Party leader and ANC guerrilla commander, Chris Hani.

Aside from Mandela, no South African in the early 1990s commanded the charismatic political authority of Hani, and none personified the rare combination of revolutionary politics and humanism as he did. Young, blisteringly smart, and committed to a renewed and transformative socialist project in South Africa, he was already being touted as Mandela’s successor. He cared little for the Stalinist reflexes of many of his Party comrades, saw inequality and redistribution, not “just” poverty, as South Africa’s fundamental challenge, and he commanded mass support. A far-right gunman killed him in a Johannesburg suburb in April 1993. Hani’s death, Satgar writes, “inaugurated the neutralisation of the national liberation movement left.”

A radical understanding of non-racialism lay at the heart of Hani’s political idealism, which Satgar innovatively develops by linking a revitalized understanding of non-racialism to the quest for a just transition that can avert climate catastrophe. For Satgar, the radical tradition of non-racialism requires more than tolerance and inclusion: it is a “deeply political humanism” that is “foremost about solidarity and unity,” and it implies a foundational commitment to anti-capitalism and democratic practice. The desiccated understandings of nonracialism that survive in South Africa contain no such ambition.

It is to Satgar’s great credit that, in writing “against the grain of defeat,” as he puts it, he turns such baneful critiques into a basis for reimagining a more just South Africa and for outlining a set of principles and a left politics that can bring it about. Shifting the current trajectory, he writes, requires a reckoning not just with “the exclusionary rationalities of national liberation politics” but with the prospect that the accumulating shocks of climate change, combined with socio-ecological collapse, “could push the country into an irreversible process of decline.”

Some of the strongest essays are gathered in the book’s final sections, which draw together an analysis of Afro-neoliberalism, the unfolding climate catastrophe, the state’s ongoing alliance with fossil fuel capitalism, and fledgling efforts–many involving Satgar himself–to build a mass politics of solidarity for climate justice. Outlined in them, for example, are building blocks for a democratic “ecosocialism,” such as the proposed Climate Justice Charter, which Satgar has helped refine and promote. It positions the worsening realities of hunger, water stress, drought, and the climate crisis as a basis for building a new mass politics for transformation.

Several key themes dominate: one is a sustained critique of economic “productivism” in a world of finite resources and in delicate ecological balance; another is a rejection of the hope that conventional top-down command politics and technocratic innovation offer an escape from catastrophe.

Satgar makes the case for embarking on multifaceted processes of bottom-up change that privilege the commons, co-operatives, self-management, food sovereignty, socially controlled public utilities, and more; as well as for a “solidarity economy” that can safeguard both human and non-human life in all its richness. The aim is to establish systemic alternatives through decentered actions that revive working-class and popular power from below, and that scale up from the local. He reminds us that similar, vibrant forms of resistance tipped the scales for the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s—but were then corralled and demobilized by a liberation organization steeped in traditions of democratic centralism. The unhappy outcomes argue against repeating such strategies.

The book brims with rich reflection and guidance, distilled from wide reading and sustained engagement. In combining sharp analysis with steely idealism, Satgar stays alert to the constraints facing transformative struggles, the many ways in which neoliberal ideology has embedded in local political traditions and “commonsense,” and the mixed record of counter-hegemonic challenges in recent decades. The hopefulness is not untethered from realism. What shines through is a deep commitment to a radical humanism, couched in the knowledge that the struggle for human emancipation is ultimately tied up with our ability to repair what Karl Marx saw as our “metabolic relationship” with the non-human world.