The fundamental political struggle in South Africa is that between the political forces advancing and representing the interests of the working class and landless peasant majority on the one hand, and those representing the bourgeoisie, on the other. It is in the latter camp that a new party like Agang SA finds itself. Agang SA will be operating as an exclusive parliamentary party, feverishly canvassing for votes and engaging in futile exercises to genuinely represent its supporters in the corridors of local, regional and national government. It will loudly proclaim that it is fighting elections in the name of the poor. In reality many will only be seeking to carve out political careers for themselves at the expense of the poor. It should be noted that Agang SA is drawing heavily upon business people and elements of the petit bourgeoisie to constitute its national leadership. This tendency to seek out and build political careers as bourgeois party representatives holds for all parliamentary parties; parties funded to the hilt by big business and other big-moneyed vested interests. These parties are all agreed on defending the anti-worker and anti-poor South African constitution with all which that implies. On top of this they get funding from the public purse as well; money that could be spent on urgent social needs.

Agang, through its leader Ramphele Mamphele, says that it will be fighting for a corruption-free SA government. This struggle of Agang is aimed at rooting out all the thieves and scoundrels who do not abide by the rules and regulations of the capitalist system. She, like others, neglects to add that the system’s corruption includes the fact that the system is incapable of not being corrupt: it is a system designed to harm and destroy people. It is therefore not strange that there is a strong similarity between the standard political, economic and social aims of the UDM, COPE, the DA and others. Besides this, Agang SA says it will be fighting for reforms in the electoral system, with an emphasis on fighting against the parliamentary list system – instead, propagating an alternative constituency based system.

Their sole focus is reform of a corrupt system. This is equal to putting a plaster over a festering wound. Its policies and aims are meant to serve “all South Africans” and show few differences from that of the Democratic Alliance. There is no reference to its fundamental class orientation – precisely because this helps in fooling people into believing that the party represents all South Africans equally. This belief is politically incorrect and historically inaccurate.

 Agang SA , the UDM and the DA have been having behind the scenes talks on forming election coalition pacts. Their policies in government  will not be much different from that of the ANC .South Africans are led to believe that being treated to verbal showdowns and skirmishes between political personalities like Ramphele, Helen Zille,  Jacob Zuma and others, is what political leadership entails. These individuals display few differences from the so-called celebrities found in the entertainment industry: all image, no substance. They are elevated in the media as “bigger than life” leaders exactly because there is little else that they can in reality offer the poor. The masses are expected to believe and support their empty political rhetoric. The parliamentary opposition will accuse the ruling party of “lacking political will” – whatever that means; the ANC in turn, will accuse them of “not offering any alternatives”, and of being small insignificant parties. This is what bourgeois politics in South Africa amounts to. It smacks of insulting the public who are forced to swallow this garbage on a daily basis. There is little that is meaningful for the poor majority in what these people are saying and doing.  They are forever fabricating new explanations and excuses as to why fundamental problems of housing, land hunger and unemployment can’t be solved. In the meanwhile, their paymasters remain in the shadows, pumping millions of rands into the party machinery of these parties.

Agang SA has been on a listening campaign to find out how much the majority labouring classes in South Africa are oppressed and exploited. It announced that it will be producing an election manifesto in November 2013. Workers and peasants need to organisationally oppose these with demands of their own. The democratic demands of the workers and peasants remain paramount.