SACP Central Committee Statement, 31 August 2025
SACP Communications
South African Communist Party
Central Committee Statement
Sunday, 31 August 2025
The Central Committee of the South African Communist Party (SACP) met from 29 to 30 August 2025 at COSATU House in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. The Plenary of the SACP’s highest decision-making body in between the Party’s National Congresses received and discussed comprehensive reports from the Political Bureau and the Secretariat, including a Political Report presented by the General Secretary, Solly Mapaila.
The reports provided an in-depth analysis of the domestic and global situation, exposing the deepening crisis of the capitalist system and its devastating consequences for the working class. In particular, most of the burden of the capitalist system and neo-liberal policy failures falls above all on the unemployed, workers trapped in low-wage exploitative relations of capital and the poor in general.
The Central Committee reaffirmed the historic mission of the SACP to build itself and act as the vanguard of the working class in the struggle for a socialist future, including by defending, advancing and deepening the national democratic revolution.
The outcomes of the Central Committee Plenary will guide the SACP in building working-class power in all sites of struggle, consolidating socialist alternatives and confronting both domestic and global centres of capitalist domination and exploitation of the working class.
The national democratic revolution and socialism
South Africa faces deep economic and social crises, especially for the working class. These cannot be explained solely as a legacy of colonialism and apartheid, nor as the result of poor governance alone. They are systemic, rooted in capitalism, a mode of production built on class inequality, private ownership of the means of production and the relentless appropriation of socially produced wealth by a minority.
The wealth accumulated by the tiny minority of the capitalist class is not the fruit of its labour. It is created collectively by workers, who form the overwhelming majority and often the sole producers of value. As Karl Marx observed, the accumulation of wealth at one pole comes with misery, toil and oppression at the other, borne by the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.
The Central Committee reaffirmed the SACP’s programme to intensify the struggle against class inequality in all its forms, including race, gender and spatial disparities. We continue to defend, advance and deepen the national democratic revolution as the most direct route to socialism. In this regard, the Central Committee rejected attempts by certain leaders within our broader movement to divorce the national democratic revolution from socialism or to privatise it for the ANC.
Historically, the national democratic revolution was first theorised and elaborated by the Communist Party in response to South Africa’s conditions, drawing from the world communist movement, including the Communist International and the world Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties. For example, the SACP was the first, in the 1920s, to adopt the transformation of South Africa into a democratic republic under majority rule with equal rights for all races as the strategic objective of the nation’s liberation struggle. It was in advancing this objective that the SACP was the first to conceptualise and theorise the national democratic revolution, notably in 1962 through its programme The Road to South African Freedom. Because we are opposed to capitalist private property relations and therefore never treated it as private property, we welcomed the ANC’s adoption of the national democratic revolution seven years later, in 1969, in Morogoro, Tanzania, in its first Strategy and Tactics document.
Therefore, the SACP rejects the argument that when it contests the 2026 local government elections it should do so on a platform of a socialist revolution detached from the national democratic revolution. This argument is theoretically flawed and risks provoking the very conflict with the ANC that its proponents claim to avoid. The SACP condemns all attempts to provoke such conflict.
The SACP is not preoccupied with contesting the ANC, which remains an ally as long as we share strategic objectives both in theory and practice. Exercising our rights, the SACP will contest the 2026 local government elections to defend, advance and deepen the national democratic revolution in connection with the pursuit of socialism while confronting the failed neo-liberal policy regime imposed since 1996 under Gear and subsequent reformist policies.
Those who invoke selective amnesia ignore that the SACP rescinded its short-lived initial statement on Gear, replacing it not only with subsequent statements, resolutions and declarations but, above all, also with a consistent campaign against the policy. This campaign sharpened differences with the ANC, which played themselves out at the 10th National Congress of the SACP in 1998. In opposing Gear, the SACP characterised it and the reformist tendency behind it as a 1996 class project, generating further contradictions with its proponents. Few in South Africa will forget these historical facts.
Our 2026 electoral strategy will be aimed at addressing the crisis of working-class representation. This crisis has deepened due to the absence of campaigns linking the national democratic revolution with socialism in electoral contests. Coalition arrangements without the SACP or Alliance consultation and the failure to reconfigure the Alliance have effectively compounded the crisis of working-class representation.
Contrary to claims of opportunism, the call for Alliance reconfiguration is rooted in revolutionary principles: democratic, consensus-seeking consultation on major policy questions, joint leadership of the national democratic revolution as a shared strategy, Alliance inclusivity and collective accountability. The SACP’s reconfiguration principles, agreed in a 2019 Alliance document, were intended to achieve all the goals of the Freedom Charter, including economic clauses, as the basic programme of the national democratic revolution. Implementation has been blocked by internal challenges in one Alliance partner, which, subsequently, could not honour both the letter and spirit of the common Alliance reconfiguration document.
While fully upholding its independence and National Congress resolutions, the SACP remains committed to engaging with the ANC.
The Central Committee also wished Cosatu every success in its forthcoming Central Committee meeting.
Ever-rising electricity tariffs
While it may appear to be merely a correction of a technical error after the National Energy Regulator announced mistakes in the electricity price determination issued in January, the out-of-court settlement between Eskom and the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa), announced on Tuesday, 25 August 2025, to raise tariffs for 2026/27 and 2027/28 by 8.8 per cent each year from 5.4 and 6.2 per cent, represents yet another devastating blow to working-class and poor families struggling under the cost-of-living crisis. This is deeply concerning.
The SACP calls on the government to adopt policy measures that make electricity more affordable for working-class and poor families and support industrialisation as a driver of employment.
We will consult with other working-class organisations to explore the way forward against the high electricity tariff regime.
Seventy years of the Freedom Charter, 31 years since our 1994 democratic breakthrough
This year marks 31 years since the 1994 democratic breakthrough. That breakthrough, won through heroic sacrifices, was not the end of the struggle but an opening for deep transformation towards complete economic and social emancipation, while defending our hard-won democratic sovereignty and national independence.
While we won democratic rights and delivered social advances that benefited millions, negative forces and trends have grown and now actively undermine this progress. The working class still has not realised substantive equality and freedom from the system of economic exploitation and its negative results. Claims that the Freedom Charter’s goals have been achieved, or that substantial progress has been made on all of them, are false.
Land remains in the hands of a tiny capitalist minority, dominated by commercial farmers, mining houses, estate developers, game farms and tourism property, reflecting the continuing legacy of racial capitalist ownership anchored in white bourgeois domination.
In land restitution, redistribution and tenure security, most of the few beneficiaries of the little progress made have largely been abandoned under austerity, deprived of post-settlement and multi-sectoral economic development support. This defies the Freedom Charter’s call that all land shall be re-divided among those who work it and the state shall support them with implements, seed, tractors and dams, referring, in modern terms, to productive equipment, machinery, inputs, other resources and technical capacity.
The Freedom Charter declared that mineral wealth, the banks and monopoly industries shall belong to the people as a whole. Yet the commanding heights of the economy remain firmly in monopoly capitalist hands, largely white-owned and tied to global finance. In reality, for example in mining, the vast value of minerals is converted into profits for capitalist bosses. This effectively transfers ownership of mineral wealth, in proportion to that value, from the people to a few private hands. This prevails in a context where mineral royalties and contribution to development from social and labour plans remain insignificant compared to the wealth extracted.
Neo-liberal austerity, structural reforms and deregulation entrench capitalist domination by weakening state-owned enterprises, depriving them of recapitalisation and growth, dismissing support as bailouts, and systematically eroding state participation in the economy, including in the productive sector, to benefit private profiting interests.
In the energy sector, Eskom has been deliberately weakened by state capture and neo-liberal restructuring and reforms to create space for private power producers under the false pretext of a just energy transition and claims of stretched state resources. Meanwhile, the government guarantees these private power producer projects, shifting risk to the public. In aviation, SAA was driven to collapse under the same paradigm to prepare for privatisation and domination of the sector by privately-owned airlines and cargo services. The Post Office and Post Bank face similar threats as the same agenda is pushing social grant payments to private commercial banks.
Privatisation now means more than selling state assets. It includes the systematic weakening of state participation in the economy, leading to its replacement by competition among private profit interests, and the outsourcing of functions once performed by the state. Neo-liberal structural reforms targeting key infrastructure, including electricity, rail, ports, water and the high radio frequency spectrum, which was auctioned to the highest bidders, reinforcing the Vodacom and MTN duopoly as the two captured the lion’s share of this productive national asset.
The Freedom Charter said there shall be work and security, yet unemployment is catastrophic and exploitation has deepened through casualisation, labour brokering and other practices that make employment perpetually temporary, insecure and reduce workers’ share of production income. Instead of sharing in the country’s wealth, inequality has widened, with a handful of capitalists appropriating vast wealth while millions remain in asset and income poverty. The working class is excluded from power, leading to mass alienation and voter abstention rather than the people governing. This is not apathy but a rejection of a system that serves the few.
The SACP will not blame the masses. We will intensify grassroots organising, principled struggle and programmes that meet material needs. The next 31 years must break from the capitalist trajectory. We need an organised, militant working class to lead society to real democracy and socialism.
The unemployment crisis, capitalist system and long-term neo-liberal policy failure
The unemployment crisis in South Africa is not a statistical illusion. It is a structural outcome of an economic system built on exploitation. The attempt by corporate interests, such as the retired Capitec chief executive officer, to claim that unemployment stands at 10 per cent was not an innocent error. It was a calculated distortion designed to protect the image of capitalism and delegitimise scientific evidence from Statistics South Africa.
The SACP stands with Statistics South Africa and rejects the claim made by the retired Capitec Bank boss. Rather than pursuing evidence-based policymaking, which requires a change in policy direction given the more than 31 years of failure to overcome the unemployment crisis, two ministers and several ANC MPs sought to lend credence to the false assertion by the retired Capitec Bank chief executive officer.
He also claimed that Statistics South Africa’s Labour Force Survey ignores work in the informal sector. This claim is entirely incorrect. The Quarterly Labour Force Survey not only accounts for informal sector work but also includes work in private households and highlights the so-called non-market activities, such as collecting dung. The SACP denounces both the false claim and the support it received from these public office bearers and MPs, which undermines evidence-based approaches to policy.
The latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey found that over 8.3 million people who seek work are unemployed. Including discouraged work seekers, this rises to 12.6 million. The unemployment crisis is not an accident of history. It is the product of the colonially imposed capitalist system, its reinforcement and associated intensification of racialised and gendered super-exploitation under apartheid, its endemic crisis, and its neo-liberal restructuring and policies.
Even by the narrow official definition that excludes discouraged work seekers, unemployment has exceeded 20 per cent since the neo-liberal Gear in 1996 and has never fallen below this level, instead worsening over time. Large-scale industrial work was destroyed through de-industrialisation, productive sectors were gutted by cheap imports, and public investment in the productive sector and state-owned enterprises was slashed under austerity. Increasingly, finance capital, benefitting from liberalisation and deregulation, shifted into speculation and offshore investments as part of financialisation.
The SACP rejects the false narrative that wages and labour protections cause unemployment. The real driver is a system that generates unemployment and uses it to suppress wages and maximise profits. Breaking this trajectory requires a radical programme for structural transformation: large-scale industrialisation, public ownership of strategic sectors and a universal social security system.
The SACP calls on the working class and all progressive formations in society, including trade unions, civic movements, youth, student and women’s organisations, progressive faith-based and cultural bodies and traditional leaders to unite in action.
The SACP will meet with other Left forces in September 2025, kicking off preparations for a Conference of the Left.
The struggle against unemployment is inseparable from the fight for defending, advancing and deepening the national democratic revolution and intensifying the struggle for socialism.
Monetary policy change to make it an instrument for people’s development
The South African Reserve Bank’s current stance is a textbook example of neo-liberal orthodoxy. By prioritising the narrow policy of inflation targeting over employment and development, it entrenches structural unemployment and underdevelopment. The recent announcement of a 3 per cent inflation target represents an even more conservative policy shift, moving from the upper figures of the 3 to 6 per cent range, which was, however, already problematic due to its limited flexibility against the background of failure to achieve the constitutional mandate of sustainable and balanced growth throughout the entire democratic dispensation.
While the Reserve Bank did not specify how it will achieve its more conservative target, history shows that it will increase interest rates. Since its opposition to Gear, the SACP has consistently opposed a monetary policy regime of high interest rates and further increases, particularly at a time when the economy requires developmental monetary policy support to resolve the crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
High interest rates serve finance capital while strangling productive investment, destroying suppressing the establishment and growth of co-operatives and small enterprises, and pushing working-class households into deeper debt. The SACP calls for a developmental monetary policy with an explicit mandate to support industrialisation, structural transformation and maximum employment.
The People’s Red Caravan, a timely intervention
The SACP salutes the People’s Red Caravan, a living expression of the development of people’s power, fresh grassroots organisation and community self-reliance in our villages and townships. From Motlhabe in North West to Matibidi in Mpumalanga, the People’s Red Caravan is building alternatives, including communal and household food production and community-owned co-operatives, enabling our people to feed themselves and break free from capitalist exploitation and control.
Under the People’s Red Caravan, SACP leaders and volunteers work side by side with residents in villages, with the active support of community organisations, trade unions and progressive traditional leaders, to fix schools, crèches, clinics, soccer fields and bridges, improve safety and security, and provide access to water and electricity for productive use.
Where the People’s Red Caravan goes, communities embrace seven days of activation collective work and solidarity, showing that our people do not need tenderpreneurs or profiteers to build their future. This intervention is not charity. It is a weapon of struggle and an organised response to capitalist exploitation and crisis, poverty and land dispossession. The SACP will expand this into a mass programme of rural and township development and transformation, advancing the road to socialism building people’s power with the working class as the majority in action.
The SACP calls on specialists in occupational trades and professionals in various fields, including, but not limited to, artisans, technicians, engineers, architects and spatial development planners, to join the People’s Red Caravan and contribute their expertise and experience. We also call for support through tractors, irrigation equipment, planters, borehole machinery, graders and other inputs.
Industrial policy to drive industrialisation and address unemployment and poverty
De-industrialisation continues. The closure of Iscor, a former state-owned enterprise privatised to ArcelorMittal, along with 12 companies in the automotive sector, including Gabriel, Goodyear, Johnson Matthey, KLT, NGK, Venture, Foxtec, Steelbest and Jaschke in the last two years has affected thousands of workers through retrenchments. Other retrenchments have occurred in the automotive assembly sector and in sectors such as mining. The SACP pledges its solidarity with NUMSA, the NUM and other unions, with the workers and their families. We call on the government to strengthen its interventions, including responding effectively to the tariffs imposed by the United States imperialist regime under Donald Trump without compromising our trade policy sovereignty.
The SACP reaffirms the strategic importance of building a people’s economy anchored in collective ownership and social solidarity. Drawing lessons from the People’s Red Caravan, it is clear that South Africa’s dependence on imported inputs, machinery and productive technology undermines industrialisation and rural economic development. The SACP calls for an industrial policy that prioritises domestic production of inputs and productive equipment, including tractors, irrigation systems and borehole drilling machinery, linked to research and development, and employment creation.
We are advancing the establishment of a co-operative banking system to break the grip of capitalist finance and ensure that people’s savings serve development rather than private profit. Co-operatives supported by the SACP are not pseudo structures used to bypass labour rights but genuine worker-owned institutions.
The fight against corruption and crime, including gender-based violence
Crime and corruption have reached crisis levels. Organised criminal networks dominate large sections of our nation, operating with the complicity of corrupt elements within the state. While we reject his claims that workers’ wage demands cause unemployment, we support a judicial commission of inquiry into the allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi. This inquiry must not serve as a smokescreen but must lead to a systemic overhaul and strengthening of law enforcement authorities.
It is unacceptable for public office bearers to interfere in operational matters, including investigations. The SACP therefore welcomes the decision by National Police Commissioner General Fannie Masemola, announced at the 27th Interpol African Regional Conference on Thursday, 28 August 2025, to return 121 case dockets previously removed from the KwaZulu-Natal political killings investigation task team.
But other urgent measures are required. The police and criminal justice system must be fully resourced and transformed to serve the people as a whole. Forensic audits are needed to expose and root out captured elements, while austerity policies that cripple law enforcement must end. All office bearers, officials and officers in law enforcement must be held stringently accountable for failures and corruption.
Gender-based violence remains a national emergency. Between January and March 2025, nearly 1,000 women were murdered and over 9,000 rapes reported. This is a war on women, rooted in patriarchy and reinforced by capitalist exploitation.
The crime epidemic is inseparable from the neo-liberal assault on public institutions, which has weakened state capacity and left communities without safety or security, in direct contradiction to the Freedom Charter. Neo-liberal restructuring and austerity force even working-class households who can, to divert resources to private security.
In many communities, gangs and mafia networks assert control through so-called protection fees, among others. Mafias, extortion rackets and illegal mining syndicates terrorise working-class communities, particularly in areas with minerals or abandoned mines, while law enforcement remains paralysed. In the economy, generally, the burden of crime increases overheads, leaving South Africa disadvantaged compared to countries with stronger law enforcement and lower crime.
The SACP calls for mass mobilisation to end this scourge and calls for a state response that is immediate, effective and uncompromising.
Further, we call for peace in the transport industry and for the government to regulate both the e-hailing and traditional taxi industries.
Privatisation offensive and the sell-out of the state
The Central Committee condemned the stealth privatisation agenda pursued by the government. The decision to abandon the Post Bank as the payment channel for social grants, the handover of sections of Transnet’s rail operations to private interests, and the reforms for private sector involvement in water supply represent an assault on public ownership and democratic control.
The recent World Bank loan of $1.5 billion, following two earlier loans, will deepen dependency and accelerate privatisation under the guise of ‘development policy’. These measures are an attack on sovereignty and a betrayal of the working class. They must be defeated through mass mobilisation and political struggle.
National dialogue process
The SACP, excluded from the process by not being invited, remains committed to a national dialogue that is truly a whole-of-society process. In its current form, the process falls short. Its outcomes must address the crisis of high unemployment, poverty, inequality, crime, gender-based violence and spatial development disparities. Without doing so, the national dialogue will be a failure.
The international situation and solidarity
The current international situation is marked by American aggression, both through direct military actions and indirect policy measures such as tariff regimes. At the same time, in response to the situation in its historical and broader context, alternative geopolitical blocs are emerging.
BRICS Plus countries, for example, are consolidating trade and other relations among themselves. This reflects a shift towards a multi-polar world in which the hegemony of the US is, while still strong, is declining. The oil trade between Russia and India, maintained despite US objections, demonstrates the relative strategic and political autonomy of both nations.
Yet the world remains mired in capitalist crises and imperialist aggression, and the return of Donald Trump to the White House intensifies US hegemonic dominance, economic coercion and militarisation.
The US has positioned military ships near Venezuela under the pretext of combating narcotics, aiming in reality at political and economic intervention. Bolivarian Venezuela has long faced US threats for seeking an independent economic and foreign policy. The SACP condemns the US’s violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and calls for the immediate withdrawal of US forces and an end to the illegal sanctions.
The SACP stands with the Sudanese people, most of whom are working-class and poor, against the ongoing civil war that has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives, displaced nearly 13 million people, and left 70 to 80 per cent of health facilities non-operational. The working class bears the brunt of the conflict, including targeted massacres based on ethnicity. Both armed factions must be held accountable for crimes including genocide, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence. Imperialist powers also fuel the war to control Sudan’s resources, with severe consequences for African peace and sovereignty. The SACP supports solidarity movements across Africa and the Global South to end the war and rebuild Sudan.
The continued US blockade on Cuba is both unjust and illegal under international law. For over 50 years, the Cuban people have suffered economic and political repression for choosing a socialist development path. The SACP condemns the blockade, reaffirms solidarity with Cuba, and calls on the South African government and people to deepen relations with Cuba for mutual benefit. We reject efforts to tarnish Cuba or restrict diplomatic and trade ties with South Africa.
The genocide in Palestine, committed by the apartheid Israeli settler regime, is one of the greatest human crises of our time. The ongoing attacks, including the killing of health workers and media personnel, children and women, reveal the extreme measures Israel, supported by the US, is willing to take to exterminate the Palestinian people and annihilate the Palestinian state. The SACP calls on the South African government and people to maintain unwavering solidarity with Palestine.
Imperialist aggression in the Middle East is emboldened by the genocide in Palestine. Plans for military intervention in Syria and Lebanon threaten to deepen regional crises. The SACP rejects these actions and stands in solidarity with both the people of Syria and Lebanon in their defence of national self-termination.
The SACP notes with reverence the 80th anniversary of China’s victory in the People’s Resistance against Japanese aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. This milestone marked the foundation of a modern, independent and sovereign China. We offer our congratulations to the Chinese people.
We reaffirm our support for the people of Swaziland in their struggle for democracy and for the people of Western Sahara against Moroccan occupation.
The SACP remains committed to building solidarity and co-operation among left and working-class organisations across Africa. We will revive the Africa Left Network Forum and launch the Southern Front of Solidarity to unite left forces, trade unions and social movements across the Global South. Strengthening regional and continental work is central to advancing working-class struggles.