This is a discussion on the current state of working class politics in South Africa in early 2019

Welcome to ON THE BRINK, the new journal of the Workers’ International Network (WIN), which links activists across several countries. Working people the world over are facing hard times and desperately searching for a way forward. Many have been marching, mobilising and striking. We need to link up in the struggle for a better world. Today eight multi-billionaires own as much wealth as half the world’s population, who live on less than $2-50 a day, many of them on little more than a dollar a day. Two-thirds of the world’s wealth will soon be concentrated in the hands of the top 1%. And the more intelligent members of that 1% are feeling the ground shaking beneath their feet. One top US banker has asked nervously: “This is something billionaires are concerned about. At what point will society intervene and strike back?” A very good question. At the height of the Greek crisis, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, spelt out his fear that the current atmosphere throughout Europe was “the prelude to revolution”. Marx and Engels once famously proclaimed: “a spectre is haunting Europe“. That spectre soon took on human flesh with the revolutions of 1848. Today, as these comments show, an even bigger spectre is haunting the whole world, and it is straining with every fibre to materialise. That’s because the whole capitalist system is collapsing. It is now a decade since the economic catastrophe of 2008. The accumulated shortfall in the projected rise of world production since then is equivalent to the disappearance of the entire German economy. And still today there is only sluggish growth. Ten trillion dollars were injected into the world economy after the last recession, but still the capitalists have failed to make any meaningful productive investment. A huge ballast of loose cash is sloshing around, salted away in land, property, art works and asset-stripping. World trade is shrinking and threatens to collapse in the new era of protectionism and trade wars. Once a new recession comes, which it inevitably will, with interest rates already at little more than zero there are few options left to boost the economy. Today’s crisis conjures up the nightmare of the 1930s. Capitalism can only weather this storm at the cost of economic collapse, environmental destruction, mass migration, brutal repression, civil war and ultimately a world war perhaps even more devastating than that of 1939-45. That is the prospect offered to us by the 1% – or, more precisely, the 0.1% – who own and run the world. The ghost of fascism has sprung back to life, whipping up a choking cloud of xenophobia and racism. These are more dangerous times than any since the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. We know what horrors could lie in wait for us at the end of that road unless we change the system: concentration camps, gas chambers, tens of millions bombed and burned and slaughtered in world war. This is a very real threat. And even if it could be averted, under capitalism our planet could become uninhabitable.   And yet before this dying class can deliver its final blows, it will first have to contend with a worldwide movement of the 99%, above all the working class, who are only just beginning to rise to their feet. The age of globalisation has transformed the world. In Europe, a newly pauperised working class living from hand to mouth in the so-called “gig economy”, in casual