WASP began life as the Marxist Workers Tendency (MWT), operating inside the African National Congress (ANC) from 1979.

[1] The MWT was founded by activists who had helped build independent trade unions and participated in the 1973 Durban strike wave and youth from the Black Consciousness movement.

Active both in exile and within South Africa the MWT was an affiliate of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) participating with them in the struggle for socialism worldwide.

But the MWT explained that the only way genuine national liberation and economic freedom for the black working class majority could be achieved, including the Freedom Charter’s demands for free education, free healthcare, welfare and workers’ rights, was on the basis of a socialist revolution and the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy - the banks, the mines, the commercial farms, big factories and big businesses - under democratic working class control.

The DSM developed a perspective recognising that the ‘love-triangle’ between the mine bosses, the ANC government and the NUM leadership was pushing the mineworkers ahead of most workers into facing-up to the co-option of their organisations and the betrayals of their leaders.

Immediately after the massacre, DSM put out a pamphlet calling for workers to respond by shutting down all of Rustenburg's mines in a local general strike.

After weeks of patient work and the undented determination of the mineworkers, the possibility of calling a co-ordinated strike across all Rustenburg’s mines was posed.

Other than the DSM and the mineworkers’ national strike committee, which affiliated in March 2013, significant forces organised under WASP’s umbrella included the National Transport Movement union, a significant split from the Cosatu-affiliated South African Transport and Allied Workers Union; Moses Mayekiso, the first general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), and activist in South Africa’s civic movement; and organisations of Johannesburg’s street traders whom WASP worked with in a campaign against the Johannesburg municipality’s 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’,[10] culminating in a march of several thousand traders.

Contesting the upcoming 2014 national and provincial elections was raised as a key task and WASP was registered with the Independent Electoral Commission in April 2013.

Moses Mayekiso was put forward to head the list as WASP’s presidential candidate, followed in second and third place respectively by DSM Executive Committee members Mametlwe Sebei and Weizmann Hamilton.

Other notable candidates included the deputy general secretary of the National Transport Movement, the general secretary of the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa, a regional office bearer in an emergency workers' union; mineworkers’ strike committee leaders from the gold sector in Gauteng, the Platinum sector in Rustenburg and Limpopo, and the coal sector in eMalahleni; leading community activists from independent civics in the Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg, Sekhukhune, Mogalakwena and Ingquza Hill municipalities; a leading activist of the Johannesburg street traders; a shop steward from the metalworkers’ NUMSA union; and a university student activist from the Socialist Youth Movement.

Gwede Mantashe, general secretary of the ANC, made public speeches blaming "foreign nationals" for the unrest on the mines, singling out Swedes and Irish.

The new factors included the emergence of the Economic Freedom Fighters with a radical left programme whose leadership were unwilling to make a principled alliance with WASP;[17] the metalworkers’ union NUMSA, whose delegates to their December 2013 Special National Congress voted not to support the ANC and "explore the possibility of a new workers’ party",[18] but whose leadership rejected supporting WASP in the 2014 elections as a step toward that;[19] and the consolidation of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) in the mining sector whose leadership ensured the independent mineworkers’ strike committees were closed down and who rejected any role for AMCU in a new workers party and were actively hostile to WASP.