Statement on the 104th Anniversary of the South African Communist Party

Sunday, 3 August 2025

104 Years of consistent struggle for socialism: Intensifying the class battle for meaningful working-class representation and for ending poverty

The Communist Party has stood firm for more than a century, carrying forward the banner of the working class and the poor. The lesson of our 104 years is clear. Political freedom without economic emancipation is incomplete. Democracy without working-class power remains hollow.

Unemployment, poverty and inequality continue to define the lives of millions in our country today. Private monopoly capital continues to loot our resources, exploit labour and sabotage development. Neo-liberal austerity and monetary policy suffocate our economy while corruption and lawlessness undermine the gains we won through decades of sacrifice. This cannot continue.

We call on the working class as a whole, employed and unemployed workers, the poor in general, women and men united, the youth, progressive intellectuals and sections of the middle class, and peasants, to intensify the class struggle. Let us unite in defence of our hard-won democratic breakthrough and for the advance to socialism.

Our hard-won democratic dispensation, a key milestone in our revolution, is not and must never be treated as an end in itself. It must serve as a means to obliterate the legacy of colonialism and apartheid to build a better life for all, especially the majority, being the working class and poor, and to establish shared prosperity on a non-racial and non-sexist basis.

In the same way, the National Democratic Revolution is not and must never be reduced to an end in itself. It is a direct route to socialism, rooted in our country’s historical realities, to achieve freedom from capitalist-class domination and exploitation of the working class and control of the state and society at large.

The National Democratic Revolution is a strategy of struggle, transformation and development. It was first conceptualised by the Communist Party as a world movement and here at home in the course of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle for liberation and social emancipation. But even then, the Communist Party advanced this strategic perspective not for its own sake but in the interests of the working class, the peasants and, ultimately, society as a whole.

The National Democratic Revolution is therefore not the private property of any single organisation inside or outside our movement, nor does any such organisation have an exclusive leadership or other role in it. The revolution is for the people. Everything within it must be about serving the people, and nothing within it must be against the people.

In class terms, the working class, as the majority class and primary but not the sole motive force, must rise to the occasion and establish its leadership of the National Democratic Revolution by democratic means. This must help overcome the crisis of working-class representation that has emerged under the elite pacts that characterise our national political scenario.

To the working class, both employed and unemployed, in urban and rural areas, in the squatter camps, in the labour movement and beyond, young and old, let us build a powerful, socialist movement, and a popular Left front.

Let us intensify the struggle against privatisation in all its forms, including the auctioning off of state assets and the outsourcing of state functions, as well as the replacement of state participation in sectors such as electricity, rail, ports and water infrastructure with profit-driven private interests, including the water tankers associated with the deliberate destruction of or sabotage in the public water provision infrastructure.

Let us intensify the struggle against the conversion of permanent work into insecure and temporary employment, the struggle against labour brokering and the overall struggle against neo-liberalism in all its framing and agendas, including austerity.

Let us tackle the crisis of working-class representation

We must rise with the strength of 104 years of consistent struggle for liberation, democracy and socialism.

The struggle for meaningful working-class representation is not for tomorrow – it is for today. It is a struggle that demands organisation in our workplaces and institutions of learning, mobilisation in our communities and unity in action across our country. This struggle requires us to set the national transformation and development agenda in pursuit of the goals of the Freedom Charter, which remains the basic programme of the National Democratic Revolution.

In that order, we must hold the government and other organs of the state accountable and reclaim our economy for the benefit of the people. To this end, let us strengthen and deploy our collective capacity to provide leadership in the forthcoming National Dialogue process, to secure outcomes that advance the eradication of poverty, achieve large-scale employment creation to end the unemployment crisis and realise, in practice, the right of all to work.

The National Dialogue process must contribute to the radical reduction of inequality and its ultimate elimination. Without advancing these objectives, including resolving the unresolved land question, the National Dialogue will become nothing more than another talk show and a waste of national resources.

Advancing the immediate struggle to confront the crisis of working-class representation requires strategic consistency, with vanguard implementation of our National Congress and Special National Congress resolutions to contest elections directly and more effectively. This is no longer a question of if or when. It is now a question of strengthening our preparations at every Central Committee, Political Bureau and sub-national level of leadership organs to contest the forthcoming local government elections in 2026 on a wall-to-wall basis, as resolved in clear terms by our Fifth Special National Congress in December 2024.

Engagements with our allies on the reconfiguration of the Alliance and on better ways of relating and strengthening our relationship are not a substitute for our National Congress and Special National Congress resolutions but must be pursued, as we are doing, in line with those resolutions. It is a fact that every ally within our Alliance upholds the resolutions of its highest decision-making body, whether a National Congress or a National Conference. It was with a clear appreciation of the situation that the last bilateral meeting between the ANC and the SACP agreed to establish a joint task team on these issues.

The People’s Red Caravan, taking forward village development and tackling the urban–rural uneven development

The People’s Red Caravan is a nationwide village development initiative launched by the SACP in 2025 as a mobilisation platform rooted in working-class and peasant struggles and grassroots community development. SACP Central Committee members led by the General Secretary, and other leaders of the Party from the provincial and district levels and branches, live and work alongside local residents for a full week, called the activation week, addressing poverty, unemployment, food insecurity and violence, to mention but a few, through practical community measures rather than distant bureaucratic rhetoric.

We launched the first Red Caravan Activation Week in Motlhabe Village, North West, in June 2025, followed by a second week in Matibidi, Mpumalanga, in July 2025.

At its core, the People’s Red Caravan rejects patronising charity or top-down delivery. It embodies collective and self-reliant action within communities and calls for community involvement in local development. The programme focuses on sustainable solutions in food security, community safety, health education, cultural and recreational activities, and economic development through local cooperation.

Beyond Motlhabe and Matibidi, the campaign is rolling out to other villages across the country, with each deployment designed to have a lasting impact that strengthens the capacity of communities to fight poverty and build development.

The sustainability and success of the People’s Red Caravan depend on strong and consistently active SACP district and branch structures, serving as the primary organisational mechanism to sustain this work. The SACP must lead in working closely with communities, including traditional councils and leaders who have made land available for productive use, as part of the struggle for development and the fight against poverty and the high cost of living.

The People’s Red Caravan expresses the Communist Party’s determination to mobilise the people directly in their communities to take part in resolving local development challenges.

A call for monetary policy change

The SACP calls for the South African Reserve Bank to be urgently repositioned to play a developmental role, as opposed to the neo-liberal role that has failed, since the adoption of the Constitution in the mid-1990s, to deliver on the constitutional mandate of ensuring balanced and sustainable growth in our nation’s economy. This failure to realise a constitutional obligation must not be allowed to pass without accountability.

Also, it is unacceptable for any institution in our state system to claim independence from democratic policy direction and accountability, while being captive to the dictates of private monopoly capital, other capitalist class interests and imperialist-controlled financial institutions, such as domestic and foreign-controlled commercial banks and the IMFs of this world.

The developmental role that the Reserve Bank should play must include maximum sustainable employment as part of its mandate, explicitly. Its performance must be measured against this employment creation target as a monetary policy goal.

Moving in the opposite direction instead of pursuing a developmental role while announcing a token interest rate reduction of only 0.25 per cent on Thursday, 31 July 2025, the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee led by its governor declared, obviously using different words, that it will, going forward, adopt a more conservative stance within the narrow policy of inflation targeting. The 3 per cent inflation target they announced may seem to be within the long controversial 3 to 6 per cent range set by the National Treasury, but it represents a shift towards even greater conservatism within the narrow policy of inflation targeting. There are more problems with this, of which three are worth highlighting, at least for now.

First, it is not the mandate of the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to set monetary policy. That mandate belongs to the executive authority. The conduct of the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee is therefore deeply problematic and demands scrutiny. Second, the Reserve Bank failed to state how it intends to achieve the new target. From experience, we know its method will involve raising interest rates.

Third, high interest rates and, as if that were not enough, additional interest rate increases strangle the economy. A high-interest rate regime and additional interest rate increases do not unlock productive investment but instead enrich finance capital monopolies while suffocating workers, households, co-operatives and small enterprises. This monetary policy regime compels families to pay more for mortgages, cars and basic loans, thereby decreasing their capacity to cover daily social reproduction expenses. Co-operatives and small firms are pushed to the edge as the cost of credit becomes unbearable. The outcome is stagnation, which we have faced for a long time now, and persisting high rates of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

The high interest rates regime serves not the needs of society but the greed of finance capital. It protects the capitalist-class elites who profit from debt while the majority endure suffering. Companies retrench workers, the government spends more on interest rate payments than on serving communities, manufacturing de-industrialises and sectors such as construction are paralysed. The economy is throttled, living standards decline and inequality intensifies. High interest rates are not neutral instruments of monetary policy but weapons that entrench underdevelopment and crush the aspirations of the working class, of whom the majority is poor.

Instead, South Africa needs a monetary policy that confronts unemployment and poverty head-on. As things stand, over 12 million people in our country remain without work or have given up looking for it. A just macro-economic policy would support industrialisation and national productive development to create employment on a mass scale. Economic policy must serve the people, not the greedy capitalist-class financiers. It is time to demand a system that prioritises human needs and development over the profits appropriated by a few.

A call for decisive action against crime and corruption

While the SACP has welcomed President Ramaphosa’s decision to establish a judicial commission of inquiry to probe the allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police provincial commissioner General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the President’s response must not be allowed to distract from the broader crisis.

The crime and corruption crisis that we face as a nation demands decisive, far-reaching action, beyond what the President has announced. Additional measures must include, but must not be limited to, the following.

1. Urgent interventions across the entire landscape of the police, crime intelligence and the criminal justice system at large. These interventions must include forensic auditing and consistent monitoring to isolate and hold unscrupulous and captured elements to account.

2. Stringent measures to enforce full accountability, focusing on all office bearers and officials within every law enforcement authority.

3. The neo-liberal fiscal policy that has contributed to the weakening of law enforcement capacity must be scrapped. Capacity gaps, crime intelligence failures and forensic delays must be addressed. SAPS and other law enforcement authorities must be adequately resourced to win what is now a war declared by criminals, mafias, gangsters, syndicates, and corrupt public office bearers and officials, altogether with the corrupting private sector interests.

4. A clear plan to ensure public safety and security and rebuild public infrastructure, without which millions will continue to live in fear and economic stagnation.

5. Overhaul transformation in law enforcement governance and administration.

There can be no dispute that crime in South Africa has reached intolerable levels and is, in many instances, escalating unchecked. This is coupled with corruption. Conservative estimates suggest that crime costs South Africa at least 10 per cent of total annual output or gross domestic product.

Between October and December 2024 alone, the SAPS recorded 6,953 murders. South Africa is not in the state of war, yet these murders are higher than numerous wartorn regions. Our communities, particularly in the most affected, high-risk provinces like KwaZuluNatal, Gauteng, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape, remain under siege.

Entire townships and parts of suburbs operate as de facto lawless zones. Major crimes, including gang violence, kidnappings, construction and taxi mafia activity, and extortion, have flourished with virtual impunity. Illegal mining by so-called ‘zama zamas’ has become entrenched.

Criminal syndicates have not merely escalated street crime; they have infiltrated sectors such as state-owned enterprises and, according to the allegations by General Mkhwanazi, also law enforcement authorities, including high-ranking officials and office bearers.

Rail infrastructure was stripped to skeletons. This includes the two-thirds of overhead rail cables, costing billions, which were looted. This looting rendered Metrorail and Transnet infrastructure and operations inoperable or nearly inoperable in many corridors across the country. This has severely affected workers and the economy.

In too many areas, law enforcement is paralysed or compromised. Local communities are virtually defenceless, while top public office bearers enjoy 24hour state provided armed protection.

Dockets languish, prosecutions falter and criminal networks tighten their grip, all sabotaging justice. The justice system, prisons included, is rife with bad influence, crime and corruption, while top criminals continue business as usual.

Conviction rates in major crimes remain shockingly low, often around 10 per cent or less. Let us all rise, protect ourselves and defend our country against the criminal, mafia, syndicate and gangster networks, as well as against the failure of the government and law enforcement authorities to stop the rot and guarantee public safety and security. This must be an immediate objective of our present struggle to achieve complete freedom and social emancipation. Let us build maximum working-class unity and mobilise the broadest possible patriotic and popular Left fronts.

Unite for gender equality and to end gender-based violence in all its forms

In this National Women’s Month of August, we reaffirm that our struggle is a struggle for gender equality, a struggle to end patriarchy and the discrimination of people based on their sexual orientation, and a struggle against gender-based violence and femicide. This struggle is a central pillar of the National Democratic Revolution.

It is intolerable that South Africa continues to rank among the most dangerous places in the world for women. For example, between January and March 2025 alone, police statistics recorded 966 women murdered and more than 9 000 reported rapes. The majority of gender-based murders are intimate partner femicides, and in most cases, the perpetrators are not imprisoned.

We are not just talking about figures here. We are talking about people, human beings. Gender-based violence is a national disgrace and a brutal assault on the lives of working-class women, girls, mothers and sisters who have played decisive roles in our liberation struggle. As a tribute to their courage, the SACP calls for an all-out mobilisation in every community, workplace, campus and rural village, to end the scourge and ensure an effective state response.

We call for safety, justice, resources for survivors and an end to impunity. Let us build socialist working-class power to dismantle patriarchal oppression and capitalism, which thrive on exploitation and violence.

International solidarity

We stand with the people of Swaziland in their struggle for democracy and call for an end to the war in Sudan.

The SACP stands firmly with the people of Western Sahara in their struggle for national self-determination, democratic sovereignty and an end to the occupation of their land by Morocco, which is backed primarily by imperialist powers as well as sellouts who have turned against the Sahrawi people after years of pretending to support their struggle. The SACP expresses its unwavering solidarity with the heroic people of Palestine in their just struggle against genocide, land dispossession, colonial occupation and apartheid. In just 24 hours, between 28 and 29 July 2025, the apartheid Israeli settler regime massacred 113 Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and injured 637 others. This atrocity is part of the continuing genocide that has already claimed the lives of 60,034 martyrs since 7 October 2023, with a conservative estimate of 145,870 others injured. Among those murdered are patients killed in or while seeking care in hospitals and other healthcare centres, as well as children, the elderly and women.

The cruelty of the apartheid Israeli regime is further shown in its deliberate targeting of civilians seeking food and humanitarian aid. By 29 July 2025, 1,179 civilians had been killed while trying to access aid, with another 7,957 wounded in these criminal attacks. These acts are not only war crimes, but they are also crimes against humanity. They expose the true nature of the apartheid Israeli settler regime, which continues its genocidal project with impunity, backed and armed by imperialist powers such as the United States, who are complicit in this ongoing slaughter.

Instead of addressing the genocide against Palestinians by the apartheid Israeli settler regime – which has also destroyed Palestinian social and economic infrastructure, including hospitals, healthcare centres, schools, learning institutions and places of worship – Donald Trump, the President of the United States imperialist regime has chosen to fabricate a false claim of white genocide in South Africa.

Not only did Trump and his administration seek to divert attention from the real genocide against the Palestinian people by the apartheid Israeli settler regime, but he also arrogantly displayed his racist attitude by turning a blind eye to the plight of the landless black majority in South Africa, who were dispossessed under colonisation and apartheid, while falsely elevating claims of land confiscation from white people.

The SACP calls for worldwide unity of the working class and all progressive forces against the United States-led imperialist war-mongering offensives, including direct military and trade wars. The SACP reiterates its support for the BRICS Plus partnership, which must become a vehicle to build a just and better world and systematically end uneven global development and the exploitation of one country’s resources and people by another.

The SACP expresses its solidarity with the peoples of Iran, Lebanon, Syria and others resisting the attacks of the United States-backed apartheid Israeli settler regime. We express our solidarity with the people and government of Cuba in their struggle against the United States’ illegal sanctions and criminal economic, financial, trade and investment blockade. We call on the United States to end these sanctions and the occupation of Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. Similarly, we stand in solidarity with the people of Venezuela against United States-led imperialist suppression and illegal sanctions.

ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY,

FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA.

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