South African Communist Party

Message to the 15th National Congress of COSATU, 12 October 2026, Kempton Park Emperors Palace Convention Centre

Revolutionary greetings,

President of COSATU Comrade Zingiswa Losi, the entire collective of National Office Bearers, General Secretaries and leadership of affiliated unions, delegates from workplaces across our country, local and international guests, comrades and co-workers. Leadership of the Alliance present here and components of the mass democratic movement.

On behalf of the Central Committee and the nearly 400,000 members of the South African Communist Party, I bring revolutionary greetings to the 15th National Congress of COSATU.

We salute the workers who produce and render services in mines, factories, farms, shops, schools, hospitals, municipalities, railways, ports, public services and everywhere they work. We salute the shop stewards who carry worker struggles every day. We salute women workers in workplaces, homes and communities. We salute young and old workers.

Your Congress theme is not a ceremonial slogan. It is coined as a programme of struggle, “Building a militant, revolutionary labour movement and strengthening anti-imperialist working-class unity to defend jobs and advance socialism”.

Capital is organised. The working class must organise

From the beginning let us indicate that we live in a period of endemic capitalist crisis. The crisis of capitalist accumulation of wealth. What creates this crisis oddly is overproduction, producing more than anyone needs to consume. In other words, capitalist crises are crises of abundance rather than of shortage.

The world capitalist crisis is being transferred to workers and the poor. Across the world, imperialism is driving militarisation, war, austerity and attacks on labour and labour rights. Multinational corporations swiftly move capital across borders in search of cheaper labour, weaker unions and higher profits. Capitalist exploiters place technology, now increasingly including artificial intelligence, under their monopoly control. They do this not to improve the working and living conditions of workers but to maximise profits and accumulate more wealth - socially produced wealth. They and their ideological agents (in governments) attack workers’ income share of production and trade as “labour costs”. The capitalist bosses are intensifying surveillance and weakening collective bargaining, including through governments under neo-liberal influence.

Our answer must be international working-class solidarity, national sovereignty and a just peaceful world order. We urge the congress to reaffirm its solidarity with the people of Swaziland fighting for democracy, and Palestine suffering genocide and under constant daily attack from the Zionist Israeli regime and call on the South African government to stop coal exports to Israel, express our solidarity for the self-determination of the Saharawi people and call for the end of the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.

We should send solidarity to Venezuela and its abducted President Nicolus Maduro and Celia Flores and call for their release, send regard to the brave Yemen people for defending their sovereignty, and express our militant regards to Islamic Republic of Iran for defending their national sovereignty with valour and determination. We should call for the release of Abdullah Ocalan from Imrali Prison in Turkey and give solidarity to the over 60 million stateless Kurdish people. On this centenary of the birth of the heroic Comandante Fidel Castro, we share our militant regards to Cuba and call on Congress to send humanitarian assistance and relevant material support during this most difficult period in Cuba with the USA blockade strengthened and denying possible trade with other countries. Cuba needs us today. We should also condemn all imperialist offensive against the Russian Federation through the proxy of Ukraine. And indeed, we know you share solidarity with all peoples resisting imperialist domination, subordination and occupation. Internationalism is not charity. It is class consciousness beyond borders.

Political democracy, economic oppression

Our movement won political democracy in 1994, but economic power remains concentrated in monopoly capital and other sections of the capitalist class. In particular, a small capitalist bloc continues to exercise enormous power over investment, public policy, employment and prices through its ownership and control of mines, banks, major retailers, farms, digital platforms, strategic industries and the wealth produced by workers. This brings us to a fundamental question. If what is going on is a National Democratic Revolution, then why is it going against the Freedom Charter, the basic programme of the revolution?

You have all heard Operation Vulindlela presented as structural modernisation of electricity supply capacity, rail and freight logistics, water, telecommunications and local government, the core of network infrastructure now being handed over to private capital on a platter. This is privatisation and should be rejected.  Meanwhile, in class terms and practice, Operation Vulindlela means giving away the public economy to the private sector. Paving capitalist ownership and profit-competition capture in targeted strategic sectors that, until the rise of neo-liberal policies to dominance, were under public control and state-owned operations. Operation Vulindlela aims to facilitate capitalist private wealth accumulation in sectors that, had the Freedom Charter not been thrown under the bus and abandoned, would belong, together with their operations, to the people as a whole.

The Freedom Charter is clear: “The people shall govern!” Not capital. The Freedom Charter is clear, “Monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole”, not capitalist private wealth accumulation interests and their competition for profit capture and maximisation.  So, we ask again, if what is going on is the National Democratic Revolution, where is the democratic public ownership and control demanded by the Freedom Charter?

Unemployment, a national crisis impacting the working class

The latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey by Statistics South Africa tells a brutal story.

The official unemployment rate, which excludes discouraged work seekers, reached 33.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, representing 8.5 million people unemployed and active work-seekers. The expanded unemployment rate, which includes discouraged work seekers, stood at an astronomical 46.3 per cent. This represents around 13 million people who are living under unemployment.

So, we ask, why do around 13 million people live under unemployment if what is going on is an NDR? Why is the situation and prevailing policy outcomes the opposite of the Freedom Charter? The Freedom Charter clearly states, “The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits.” This right of all to work has not been put into practice.

Our communities need decent houses and public clinics, hospitals and schools that are well-resourced, serve people diligently and produce high-quality health and education outcomes. It is estimated that in education we have almost 27000 vacant teaching posts, in policing almost 20000 shortages in police, and there are taunted retrenchments of 6000 workers at the SA Post Office, pending retrenchments in PRASA, all these in the public sector where apparently forces of the NDR are in charge. Then you have those in the private sector in the motor industry and at Adcock Ingram, which has already retrenched 2500 in the past 18 months.

Our people need proper roads, an end to potholes and the accidents, injuries, loss of life and damage that rotten roads cause. Our communities need water supply infrastructure, food production, food security and food sovereignty.

To be sure, the problem is not the unemployed. The problem is a capitalist system that organises production for profit rather than social need. This problem includes the use of mass unemployment by the capitalist class as a weapon against employed workers. Capital tells workers demanding better wages, “There are thousands outside the gate.” It is not nature but the capitalist class and their neo-liberal governing agents who replace permanent employment relationships with labour broking, outsourcing, casualisation and other temporary contracts.

The right to work for all must become a central working-class demand. Things cannot end here; we must address the root of the matter. To do so, we must ask, “Who produces the wealth, and who owns it?” Under capitalist exploitation, labour produces wealth while the capitalists appropriate and accumulate it as their so-called private property. We must intensify the struggle to end exploitation.

All workers must understand that exploitation extends beyond economic exploitation. There is also political exploitation. It is not wise to do the same thing repeatedly while aiming for different outcomes. Therefore, workers must unite to advance the struggle against political exploitation as well, including in elections. Voting, yet excluded from decision-making and consultation, must become a thing of the past. It is undemocratic in the name of democracy. This very struggle led us to call for the reconfiguration of the Alliance.

Yes, we called for the reconfiguration to end unilateralism so that the Alliance can function based on the principles of democratic, consensus-seeking consultation, collective leadership of the NDR – properly understood and without any revisionist distortion, collective accountability and unity of purpose and cohesion anchored in the Freedom Charter, the basic programme of the revolution. We were and are still worried that the Freedom Charter’s fundamental economic clauses remain unrealised.

There is no progress under the prevailing direction, especially for the Freedom Charter’s ownership by the people as a whole, the majority of whom are the working class. Instead, there is regression because of the toxic combination of neo-liberal policy dominance and corruption, including state capture in various forms. By standing for elections directly and independently, actively exercising the right we have long reserved, we advance the same struggle and, even so, its connection to the goal of achieving complete social emancipation under a socialist society.     

We are deeply concerned about the cost-of-living crisis of the working class. This is another expression of class power. Workers experience this crisis in food, transport, electricity, rent, school costs, debt and municipal charges, to mention but a few areas where the crisis hits hard the most. We reject the neo-liberal argument that workers’ wages are the problem. The real problem is capitalism and its monopoly pricing, including the import-parity pricing model of energy and other products produced in South Africa. It is excessive mark-ups, financial extraction, de-industrialisation and profit shifting allowed by the bourgeoisie government.

The real problem includes poverty and inequality. A tiny minority is filthy rich from socially produced wealth, while the masses are poor. South Africa remains among the most unequal countries in the world. The top 10 per cent own approximately 86 per cent of aggregate household wealth, while the top one per cent owns more than half. The masses own no wealth.

Consider just one example. Shoprite’s 2025 remuneration report records annual pay of approximately R70.5 million for its Chief Executive Officer, Mr Pieter Engelbrecht. At the 2026 national minimum wage of R30.23 an hour, a full-time minimum-wage worker earns roughly R63,000 a year before deductions. Meanwhile, this one CEO therefore received approximately what more than 1,100 minimum-wage workers earn in a year.

Yet workers are told to accept below-inflation wage increases in the name of so-called competitiveness. Public servants are told that the wage bill is too high. Communities are told there is no fiscal space. But executive rewards, profits and concentrated wealth remain largely untouched. This is class power. We must name it, expose it and organise to defeat it.

Defend public ownership and public services

The capitalist offensive appears in many forms: retrenchments, outsourcing, privatisation, casualisation, labour broking, austerity and the destruction of public services. When a clinic has too few nurses, workers and patients suffer. When refuse collection is outsourced, municipal workers and communities suffer. When the rail infrastructure is looted and when trains fail, workers lose time and income. When water infrastructure collapses, working-class households carry the burden, with women severely affected. When electricity becomes unaffordable, households, employment and small enterprises suffer. Electricity prices have increased by 1,172 per cent from 2007 to 2026. This is not the NDR; it is the outcome of neo-liberal reforms combined with corruption.

Corruption and tender capture have deepened the multiple capitalist crises that South Africa has been forced into, with more devastation on the working class. A weakened public sector creates space for private accumulation. Outsourcing creates contracts. Contracts create opportunities for cartels. Cartels weaken the state further. We must oppose both corporate state capture and the corrupt tender system. We salute the National Union of Mineworkers for resisting the privatisation and fragmentation of Eskom. This is not merely an electricity struggle. It is a struggle over public ownership, energy sovereignty, decent work and industrial development.

We must also intensify the struggle for National Health Insurance. The suspension of National Health Insurance implementation is not part of the NDR. We say so because the Freedom Charter, the basic programme of the revolution, says, “A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state”, and that “Free medical care and hospitalisation shall be provided for all, with special care for mothers and young children”. If the NDR is to have meaning, these principles cannot remain words on paper or be suspended.

Unite the working class in action

A militant federation cannot unite workers through resolutions alone. Unity must be built through common struggle. We must defend collective bargaining and the right to strike, stop retrenchments and closures, fight outsourcing, labour broking and casualisation, organise precarious, platform, informal, migrant and young workers, defend public services, rebuild manufacturing and beneficiation, fight for affordable food, transport, electricity and housing, and build international working-class solidarity. The unemployed are not outside the working class. They are part of the reserve labour force created by capitalist accumulation. Migrant workers are not the cause of unemployment, low wages or collapsed services. Capital exploits divisions of nationality just as it has historically exploited divisions of race, gender and ethnicity. Our answer is worker unity, not xenophobia.

From unity declarations to working-class power

The Conference of the Left, convened from 29 to 31 May 2026, brought together more than 110 organisations, including trade unions, political formations, traditional leadership organisations, religious organisations, community and social movements, women and youth organisations, student formations, co-operatives, other progressive formations and international delegates.

Its Declaration for Working-Class and Popular Power recognises that unity is built by acting together against austerity, privatisation, unemployment, retrenchments, inequality, patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, corruption and imperialism. We call on COSATU and its affiliates to deepen this process. Let us turn unity into organisation. Let us turn organisation into mobilisation. Let us turn mobilisation into power.

Build people’s power where we live

The People’s Red Caravan provides one practical field for this united action. It has worked with communities in more than six villages across six provinces, helping build farms, repair roads, improve clinics and schools, confront community safety problems and organise co-operatives and Village Agricultural Co-operatives. Communities have planted approximately 110,000 spinach plants and 35,000 cabbages with no tender and no government funding. The programme has supported approximately 2,400 laying hens, producing almost 70,000 eggs every month nationally. It has also helped build six community-owned stores. These figures are modest compared with the scale of need. But they prove something important. Working-class communities are not passive recipients. When organised, they become agents of change.

The principle is simple: KNOW AND ACT.

We call on COSATU affiliates to join this work, the People’s Red Caravan. Bring shop stewards, technical skills and solidarity. Connect workplace struggles to food production, co-operatives, public services, community safety and local infrastructure. Imagine mineworkers, teachers, metalworkers, nurses, municipal workers, transport workers, farmworkers, retail workers and public servants acting together in the communities where they live. That is people’s power. We thank the affiliates that joined several of our activities, NEHAWU, NUM and POPCRU.

The Alliance must be reconfigured

This brings us directly to the Alliance. The SACP remains committed to the strategic objectives of the NDR as shared by the forces of the revolutionary Alliance. Equally, commitment to the Alliance cannot mean the political subordination of the working class. An Alliance cannot function through unilateral decisions followed by instructions to other components. Hence the call for its reconfiguration. Reconfiguration means democratic consultation and collective leadership. It means consensus-seeking decision-making and collective accountability. And above all, it means restoring the working class as a leading force of the NDR.

The Alliance must become an instrument of struggle, not merely an arrangement between leadership structures. Its purpose cannot be the distribution of positions. Its purpose must be the transformation of society. Our disagreements must therefore not be allowed to divide workers.

The election is a class struggle

Elections are not separate from workers’ share of income, employment and services. Capital understands political power. It uses its economic power to fund its political parties and influence the state and public policy. The working class cannot surrender the political field to capital and its political parties and hope to defend itself only at the bargaining table. The SACP is contesting the 2026 local government elections directly and independently under its own name but for the working class. We do so because working-class representation is in crisis and because we want to put a clear working-class programme before the people.

Our message is clear: BUILD PEOPLE’S POWER WHERE WE LIVE – FOR THE RIGHT TO WORK, ACCESS TO LAND, WATER, ELECTRICITY, ROADS AND SAFETY FOR ALL.

On 4 November, the working class must not vote against itself. It must vote for its interests, its programme and its power. We say this because our recent Central Committee Plenary made clear that we must call on this Congress not to divide COSATU along which organisation to align with in elections but to unite behind ensuring that workers vote for their class interests.

We are no longer debating whether to stand for election. All talk of a socialist axis in words, while doing nothing in practice where it matters most, including in electoral contests, reduces the necessity for socialism to empty talk. Rather than a talk show debate, socialism is, above all else, a necessity, a struggle for a caring system, relations of production and a better quality of life for the working class in a society without the economic, political and social exploitation of one person by another.

Theses on the state of the NDR in South Africa and the strategic tasks of the working class in the new era

Thesis one: The NDR has achieved nominal political liberation but not economic liberation. It sustained the colonial apartheid economic structure with some microeconomic reforms that failed to transform the overall economy. The apartheid economic structure never got a shock therapy; it instead got a boost with the implementation of GEAR. The principal contradiction of the South African revolution remains the contradiction between monopoly capital and people, in other words between capital and democratic political power and the continued dominance of monopoly-finance capital over the economy, the state and the elected representatives.

The democratic breakthrough of 1994 defeated apartheid political rule and represented a historic victory of the liberation movement and the working class. However, the ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy remained largely intact in the hands of the erstwhile exploiters. The mining houses, banks, retail monopolies, insurance corporations, agricultural conglomerates, digital platforms, logistics networks and major industrial assets continue to be controlled by a relatively small capitalist bloc integrated into global capitalism.

Our country remains politically democratic but economically undemocratic.

The commanding heights of the economy remain concentrated in the hands of a tiny capitalist elite while millions of people struggle daily for survival. This contradiction lies at the heart of the present phase of the NDR. Political liberation without economic transformation can never satisfy the aspirations of the overwhelming majority. This reality demands not tactical adjustments but strategic renewal, hence the NDR in the new era. This means that while political power changed hands, economic power remained concentrated. The NDR therefore remains incomplete. The point is will the organised working class reclaim its historic mission as the leading revolutionary force of social transformation, or will it retreat into defensive economism while monopoly capital deepens its assaults on workers and the poor? This is a real challenge of the moment rather than perhaps a mere rhetorical question or postulation.  The central task of the present phase is not the defence of formal democracy alone, but the transformation of economic power relations. The fundamental question remains, who owns? Who controls? Who benefits without the transformation of ownership, democracy remains vulnerable to capture by capital.

Thesis Two: South African capitalism has entered a deep and prolonged structural crisis which it has transferred to the democratic government and the working class, through the cost-of-living crisis and its cyclical reproduction. The crisis facing South Africa is not simply a crisis of governance, corruption or state capacity even though these are part of the problem. It is fundamentally a crisis of the unchanged capitalist mode of production and its power relations with the working class under South African conditions, when extractive foreign capital has been undergoing deep structural changes in modernisation through digitisation and relating to South Africa under its new changed advances and conditions and still maintaining a dominant role, namely through the unilateral restructuring of the workplace, casualisation and labour brokering and short-term contracting on the one hand, and whilst domestic capital, especially that not linked with global corporations, de-industrialised and regressed largely due to sheer inability to compete and thus shifted to importing of goods than producers. The productive economy stagnates while wealth accumulates for a few at the capitalist pyramid. The result is a perfect crisis in which the system increasingly loses its capacity to secure legitimacy among the people. The NDR in the new era must therefore place the struggle against monopoly-finance capital at the centre of national transformation.

Thesis Three: The working class has expanded and changed in form but remains the leading revolutionary social force. The working-class today is broader than before. It includes, industrial workers, mineworkers, construction workers, farmworkers, public sector workers, retail and service workers, platform and digital workers, logistics and transport workers, informal workers, cooperative producers, community workers, the unemployed, working-class youth excluded from production. The working class today is therefore increasingly fragmented but objectively larger than at any point in history. South African capitalism reproduces a massive reserve army of labour which is permanently excluded from productive employment.

The strategic task of the NDR in the new era is therefore to reunify these fragmented sections of the working class into a common political project. Without working-class unity there can be no successful NDR. Without working-class leadership there can be no socialism.

Thesis Four: The principal danger facing the NDR is the consolidation of a neoliberal bloc and reactionary capitalist forces. The crisis of capitalism has intensified efforts by domestic and international capital to restructure political power in South Africa. Under the language of fiscal consolidation, structural reform, market confidence, public-private partnerships, austerity and state rationalisation. Capital seeks to deepen its control over the economy and weaken democratic institutions. The objective is clearly converting the democratic state into a facilitator of private accumulation. The assault on local government, public services, worker rights and developmental state institutions forms part of this broader strategy. From this thesis the congress should call on our ally the ANC to abandon neo-liberalism.

Thesis Five: The evaluation and assessment of the weakening, disintegration and ultimate collapse of the relationship between the 1994 social contract between capital and the democratic transition. How the liberation movement understood and acted on this, its ramifications for future relations between (now) capital and the democratic state. This thesis reckons that not only the social contract has collapsed but that capital duped the liberation movement to delay certain radical changes on property relations like on the nationalisation of mines with promises to embrace the new transition and consequently reneged on this agreement as they soon achieved the Gear {gift of God} from the liberation movement.

Thesis Six: The liberation movement has been gradually captured by compradorial forces who now seek to co opt the trade union movement. This thesis is so crucial for us that if not properly engaged we will have a compromised trade union leadership, particularly as we witness a growing rapport between state and capital as opposed to the state and the people.

From within this thesis, we can also address a worrying aristocratic tendency in the entire stratum of leadership, from within the liberation movement, within the labour organisations and even the SACP itself is not spared of this tendency. This tendency has collaborated with the leading elites of cadres to keep the NDR in a single spot whilst justifying its inability to get a forward traction through benign Marxist phraseology to divert working class attention from its core tasks and embrace. 

Thesis Seven: The NDR in the era must consciously become a bridge between radical democratic transformation and socialist transition. This thesis recognises the national question in the NDR and therefore appreciates the unresolved African oppression issue – because the NDR has neglected the central question of the SA revolution which is to address the African oppression question or the national question put properly and broadened to the conditions of South Africa black people in general and Africans in particular, from colonial, imperialist, capitalist control and subjugation. So, in the absence of this resolution of the African question, the NDR has not achieved its principal task and accordingly leaving so much discontent amongst the African people and the working class whilst capital remains protected by the state from the crisis it has created.

The NDR in the new era must become a platform for building organic South African socialism. The NDR cannot remain trapped within a narrow reformist framework. The objective is not merely to administer capitalism more efficiently. The objective is to advance the balance of forces toward socialism. This requires building what can be termed Organic South African Socialism. A socialism rooted in our concrete realities, traditions of collective struggle, cooperative production, community ownership and democratic participation.

The strategic direction must include, public ownership of strategic sectors, democratic control of natural resources, worker participation in economic decision-making and ownership, expansion of cooperative production, industrialisation, food sovereignty, land redistribution, municipal economic transformation, state-led development, expansion of social infrastructure, democratic planning. The NDR in the new era must consciously become a bridge between democratic transformation and socialist transition.

Organise, unite, fight and win

Comrades, let this Congress not be remembered merely for electing leaders or adopting resolutions. Let it be remembered as the Congress that rebuilt militant workplace organisation, united workers in action, organised the unorganised, joined the workplace and community struggles, defended public ownership, fought unemployment and retrenchments, strengthened anti-imperialist solidarity and restored working-class confidence in its own power. A divided working class negotiates from weakness. An organised working class changes the balance of forces. A politically conscious working class can govern. A united working class can drive the NDR towards Socialism and can build socialism. Fidel Castro would say, “All and everything for the revolution and nothing against it!”

Amandla!

Forward to Socialism!

Down with Capitalism!

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ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY,
FOUNDED IN 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA