Since the Marikana massacre in August 2012 the character of what constitutes left politics in South Africa has been experiencing profound transformation. Until then the left was broadly defined in relationship to the Tripartite Alliance, and more specifically by either support for or opposition to the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) project of the African National Congress(ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Undergirded by the ANC's political power, the left in the ruling Alliance placed their hopes in an ANC-led state to deliver ‘a better life for all’. The ANC's hegemony has been constructed on the idea that, as the main party of liberation, it embodies the national aspirations of the black majority and is the ultimate guarantor of freedom. Its dominance was also entrenched by the subordination and institutionalisation of the independent movements of the working class, built from the 1970s, which led the struggle to overthrow apartheid. Unions, civics, youth organisations and women's movements were marshalled behind a political consensus centred on the NDR. Left-wing critics, particularly from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), were tolerated as long they did not pose a fundamental challenge to this consensus – which has consigned them to the purgatory of the seemingly perpetual first phase of the revolution. Those who were deemed a threat have been silenced or purged, to ensure acquiescence to the party line. This has been made evident by, for instance, contestations related to the Marikana massacre, Nkandlagate and the government's macroeconomic policies.

Although the ANC's comfortable victory in the 2014 general elections seemed to confirm the authority of the ruling Alliance, beneath this veneer of ‘business as usual’ important tectonic shifts were already underway, the effects of which have opened the prospects for wide-ranging changes to the country's political landscape. The Marikana massacre undoubtedly marked a moment of severe disruption to and subsequent fracturing of the Tripartite Alliance. However, the ideological fault lines that have since manifested themselves publicly have been present in the Alliance for many years. Centred on divisions between those who defend the status quo (cohering principally around the ANC/SACP leadership) and those who have found the subordination of the workers’ movement to the economic and political interests of the elite increasingly intolerable, the contestations between them have become increasingly intense.