South African Communist Party 

SACP Red October Campaign 2025–2026 launching statement

Seventy years of the Freedom Charter: Deepening the struggle for its unfulfilled goals

Delivered by Thulas Nxesi, SACP Deputy National Chairperson

Sunday, 5 October 2025

Dear comrades, we officially launch the Red October Campaign 2025–2026, guided by the objectives of advancing the struggle to achieve the unfulfilled goals of the Freedom Charter in its 70^th year, the 31^st year of our hard-won April 1994 democratic breakthrough. The objectives include the following.

1. Strengthening the struggle to realise the Freedom Charter’s unfulfilled goals, including ensuring the people share in the country’s wealth to eradicate poverty, radically reduce inequality and reverse uneven development.
2. Implement the National Health Insurance to guarantee access to quality healthcare for all.
3. Building safe and secure living environments by strengthening the fight and capacity against crime, corruption and social decay.
4. Advancing land ownership transformation through restitution, redistribution, tenure security and state support, including productive equipment and technology, inputs and technical capacity – It is in this context that the SACP is pressing ahead with the campaign for a referendum to finally resolve the unresolved land question and ensure land justice.
5. Rolling back neo-liberal policy dominance, including privatisation, strengthening state-owned enterprises and reclaiming key strategic sectors, including energy, water, transport, the ports, and communications.
6. Addressing the catastrophic unemployment crisis by advancing policies for broad-based industrialisation, promoting collective worker empowerment and challenging casualisation, labour brokering, outsourcing and other exploitative practices while creating large-scale sustainable employment.
7. Promoting public ownership of strategic sectors and advancing the campaign for a universal social security system, including the transformation of the Social Relief of Distress Grant and its improvement to form the basis for a universal income grant.
8. Building people’s power through grassroots organisation, co-operatives and initiatives such as the People’s Red Caravan, strengthening rural and township economies.
9. Advancing and deepening the struggle for gender equality and against gender-based violence in everything we do.
10. Uniting the working class, trade unions, youth and civic movements, women’s organisations, progressive traditional leaders in a common struggle for social and economic emancipation.

This year we are dedicating the Red October Campaign to the 70^th anniversary of the Freedom Charter. We celebrate the historic victories won through struggle, most notably the April 1994 democratic breakthrough against apartheid, and we want to strengthen the struggle to realise the Charter’s unfulfilled goals. These goals include ensuring that the people share in the country’s wealth, the only way we can eradicate poverty, radically reduce inequality and roll back uneven development.

We return to the Charter’s unfulfilled goals, which include the implementation of the National Health Insurance to ensure access to quality healthcare for all, and building an environment for everyone to enjoy dignity in a safe and secure living environment. This requires that we bring down the high rates of crime and corruption in all their manifestations. The SACP insists the commission probing the capture of authorities within the criminal justice system finish its work and deliver clear outcomes. Those outcomes must help the country strike a deadly blow against crime and corruption.

In reflecting on the Freedom Charter, especially the struggle to achieve its unfulfilled goals, we also celebrate the democratic victory of 1994 against the apartheid regime. The transition from the apartheid regime was not a gift. It was an outcome of a long and bitter liberation struggle, led by our movement, fought for by the masses of our people. The April 1994 democratic breakthrough marked the end of colonial and apartheid regimes and opened the democratic dispensation, paving the way for real gains for millions, especially the workers and poor.

Before April 1994, the right to vote was a privilege of a white minority. Colonial and apartheid regimes built a better life for the minority by dispossessing, super exploiting and impoverishing the black majority, of whom the majority was, and still is, the working class.

For the first time as a direct fruit of the April 1994 democratic breakthrough, millions of the previously oppressed gained access to political, social and economic rights. This brought progress in health, education, houses for the poor, household electrification, water supply and other tangible benefits that had been deliberately denied under racist oppression. Others, as they gained access to better work opportunities, built themselves better homes, including in rural areas. 

The SACP itself has a proud history. From its pre-history of opposition to the imperialist First World War starting in 1914, to its launch as the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921, our Party has played a decisive role in the liberation struggle, in the 1994 democratic breakthrough and in the advances realised by millions, thousands and hundreds since.

Our fight against the dangerous tendency of HIV–AIDS denialism is one such example, in which we continued the struggle towards all the goals of the Freedom Charter post-1994 while some concluded they were free at last and argued that the struggle was no longer necessary. Against resistance, we led the campaign for HIV treatment as part of the broader struggle for the right to life through quality healthcare. This mass struggle saved lives, improved life expectancy and stopped the tide of needless deaths.

We must be even more frank. While important progress has been made, we remain far from the Freedom Charter’s vision. This is one reason the struggle must continue in the here and now. We must advance, deepen and intensify this struggle, an indispensable part of the national democratic revolution.  

For example, the majority of arable and well-located land is still controlled by a minority of the capitalist commercial farmers, mining houses, property developers, hospitality and tourism bosses. This translated to 72 per cent of land remaining in the hands of a small white capitalist minority.

Restitution, redistribution and tenure reforms have been weak, not achieving the goals of the Freedom Charter on division of land among those who work it.  Many of the few beneficiaries of land reform have been abandoned under austerity. About 5,400 restitution claims unresolved and hunger stalks millions. The Charter called for all land to be re-divided among those who work it, with state support through implements, seed and dams. Translated into today’s terms, this means productive equipment and technology, inputs and infrastructure. Considering what the Freedom Charter says about education, including technical and vocational education, support for productive land use must include technical capacity building.

The Freedom Charter declared that the mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industries shall be transferred to the ownership by the people. Yet these commanding heights remain in private hands, tied to global finance.

Notably, 31 years into our democratic dispensation, there is still not a single state bank that serves the people’s financial and development needs.

The minerals of our land generate enormous value, but this is converted into profits for capitalist bosses. Communities and workers are left with little more than poverty wages. The nation is left with meagre royalties and inadequate development projects from the mine owners’ social and labour plans. In material terms, in value form the lion’s share of our minerals is transferred to the capitalist exploiters as their profit through the current regime of mining licences. It does not belong to the people, despite claims to the contrary, based on the text of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act. 

It is important to recognise the truth in pursuit of our struggle. This at the time when neo-liberal austerity has further entrenched capitalist power. State-owned enterprises have been deliberately weakened. In energy, Eskom was undermined through state capture and restructuring to create space for the private power producers called independent power producers. The state guaranteed their projects, shifting risks to the people.

In air transport, SAA was nearly collapsed to make way for private airlines. It was almost gifted to private owners as part of privatisation.

The agenda to channel social grant payments to commercial banks is part and parcel of privatisation. In the neo-liberal playbook, it is part of the agenda to weaken public entities, in this regard the Post Office and the Post Bank, and to eventually collapse them in favour of competition between private sector interests. 

Privatisation today is not only about selling state assets. It includes weakening state capacity, outsourcing the roles of the government in service provision and handing public goods over to private profit interests. In infrastructure such as electricity, rail, ports, water and telecommunications, neo-liberal reforms have opened the door for monopoly or dominant sections of capital. The auctioning of high radio spectrum under the pretext of de-monopolising the ICT sector has entrenched the duopoly of Vodacom and MTN. The two captured the lion’s share of the high radio frequency spectrum, a national asset.

The right and duty to work

The Freedom Charter said there shall be work and security. Yet today unemployment is catastrophic. Exploitation has deepened. The workers’ share of income from production and trade has fallen. Still, the workers receive no cent from the profits appropriated by the capitalist bosses. Outsourcing, out-contracting, casualisation, labour brokering, perpetual temporary employment relationships, are among the strategies through which the exploitation of workers by the capitalist bosses has deepened.

Instead of sharing in the country’s wealth, the working class is locked out while class inequality deepens, including in its racial and gender dimensions. A handful of capitalists continue to accumulate vast riches while millions are left in poverty. No one is rich on behalf of the rest. Everyone in the few who are rich or empowered at the expense of the rest is rich privately.

Increasingly, the alienation of the masses is expressed in voter abstention. This is not apathy but a conscious rejection of a system that excludes them.

The SACP will not blame the people. Emerging from the recent Plenary of our Central Committee, from which the perspectives we outline today were discussed, we will intensify grassroots organising, rebuild principled struggle and drive programmes that meet material needs. Our democratic dispensation must NOT follow the failed path of capitalist exploitation of the majority of the people. In the period ahead, we must define breaking with exploitation and advancing a revolutionary transformation led by an organised and militant working class.

Our country is facing multiple crises: high levels of unemployment, poverty, inequality, crime and corruption, and a social reproduction crisis. To be sure, the crises we face cannot be reduced to legacies of apartheid or state capture alone. They are systemic, rooted in a capitalist system that survives on inequality and the appropriation of wealth produced by the majority. Neo-liberal policies, post-1994 dating back to GEAR, are embedded with factors that underpin and sustain these crises.

Under the capitalist system, wealth is produced collectively by workers but appropriated privately by capitalists. As Karl Marx observed, wealth at one pole always comes with misery at the other.

The SACP has consistently rejected neo-liberal policies.

SACP to independently contest 2026 local government elections

In economic and social policy terms, the SACP will contest the 2026 local government elections to fight neo-liberal policies that have hollowed out and still hollow out municipalities through outsourcing and privatisation. The struggle against capitalist exploitation and neo-liberalism must take place on all fronts and significant centres of power, including in election contests.

Instead of a reconfigured Alliance, coalitions with neo-liberal, right-wing parties opposed to the national democratic revolution and the Freedom Charter have been prioritised. In political policy terms, the SACP will contest the 2026 local government elections to address the crisis of working-class representation that has emerged in the absence of a reconfigured Alliance.

It is ironic that some of those who say they disagree with the resolution by the SACP to contest the elections are the very ones embracing and even defending coalitions with neo-liberal, right-wing electoral parties opposed to the national democratic revolution and the Freedom Charter.

Communists cannot abandon the electoral terrain to the class enemy and its political agents amid a crisis of working-class representation. As Lenin warned in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, to refuse to contest elections is to leave the masses under the influence of the bourgeoisie and its agents. Elections, even under conditions shaped by capitalism, provide a platform to expose the ruling class, to reach millions with revolutionary ideas through campaigning and to organise workers for struggle beyond the ballot. Contesting elections is therefore not an end in itself, but a tactical consideration in the broader political struggle to build working-class power, deepen the national democratic revolution and open the road to socialism.

The SACP will therefore contest the 2026 local government elections not for narrow electoralist ambitions, but to defend, advance and deepen the national democratic revolution as the most direct road towards socialism. We reject the assertion that seeks to divorce the national democratic revolution from socialism and compartmentalise them into unrelated positions. This fatally flawed assertion also seeks to privatise the national democratic revolution, to convert it into a private property of only one organisation within the Alliance movement.

But when we say, “The People Shall Govern,” we mean more than casting a ballot every five years. We mean People’s Democracy – democracy that expands into every sphere of life: political power in the hands of the working-class majority; economic power through collective ownership of wealth and resources; social power where housing, health, water, education, electricity, and transport are guaranteed rights, not commodities.

This requires living organs of people’s power and self-governance, built from below such as community and civic forums to shape development; shop steward/worker councils to organise labour power; safety structures to protect communities from crime and violence; and co-operatives and people’s committees to manage production and services democratically.

Our electoral platform will therefore be rooted in working-class representation, reconfiguration of the Alliance on democratic and accountable terms, and the full pursuit of the Freedom Charter’s economic and social programme. This is crucial in the broader struggle to move towards socialism.

Crisis of unemployment a manifestation of the failure of neo-liberal policies

The unemployment crisis illustrates the failure of neo-liberal policies. Over 8.3 million people are unemployed, rising to 12.6 million if discouraged workers are included. This is not by accident but by design.

The neo-liberal shock therapy of rapid trade liberalisation under GEAR, the associated de-industrialisation and austerity, have had a destructive effect on productive sectors. Austerity undermined, among others, budgets for industrialisation and industrial policy incentives. This policy scenario contributed to retrenchments and blocked efforts to create employment at the scale needed to overcome the unemployment crisis.

The shutdown of plants under ArcelorMittal will be remembered as clear proof that privatisation serves private profit, not the interests of the nation. What became the privately-owned ArcelorMittal was once a state-owned enterprise, Iscor, and an ownership stake held by the Industrial Development Corporation, a public development finance institution. ArcelorMittal’s abuse of market dominance and monopolistic practices, including the import parity pricing model, along with the widespread retrenchments it has caused, must never be forgotten. The productive capacity that ArcelorMittal has mothballed, shutdown or intends to close, and which can be restarted and recapitalised, must be renationalised.

The SACP pledges its solidarity with workers who faced retrenchments not only at ArcelorMittal or because of its actions, but also throughout the economy, including in mines, manufacturing sectors, construction and service sectors, to mention but a few. We also stand in solidarity with their unions and families.

We reject the false claim that workers’ income causes unemployment. This claim is a weapon of the capitalist class. The real cause of unemployment is a system that generates unemployment to keep wages low and profits high.

The SACP calls for radical structural transformation: broad-based industrialisation programme, public ownership of strategic sectors and a universal social security system.

Monetary policy must prioritise development, particularly industrialisation and the creation of maximum, sustainable employment, rather than narrow inflation targeting. This approach is not reckless and has nothing in common with runaway inflation. Interest rates must serve the people and the economy, not the interests of the tiny minority of finance capital.

The People’s Red Caravan movement

The launch of this year’s Red October Campaign comes at a time when we have added a new dimension to our struggle for full economic and social emancipation. The People’s Red Caravan is an inspiring expression of building people’s power with the working-class as the majority in action. In our villages, it shows that our people can feed themselves, organise co-operatives and rebuild their communities. It is not charity but a weapon of struggle.

The SACP reiterates its call on professionals, artisans and workers in every trade to join and strengthen the People’s Red Caravan movement. While our work began in rural areas, we are now moving into townships and city centres that are now decaying under crime, corruption and neo-liberal policies. We aim to rebuild township economies and revitalise and reclaim city centres, just as we are committed to building strong rural economies with and for the people.

The People’s Red Caravan is already bearing fruits. In Motlhabe, Matibidi, and other villages, Village Agricultural Co-operatives are organising communal farming, goats, vegetables, and orchards. In Matibidi, the Bareki Consumer Co-operative has grown from 21 to nearly 100 household owners in three months – proving collective power works and community self-reliance taking shape.

The Red October Campaign calls on the working class, trade unions, civic and youth movements, progressive faith-based bodies, women’s organisations and progressive traditional leaders to unite in struggle. Together, we must break with the failed path of capitalism and its neo-liberal agenda and build people’s power to advance to full social and economic emancipation.

International solidarity

The SACP stands in solidarity with the people of Swaziland struggling for democracy and with the people of Western Sahara against the imperialist-backed occupation by Morocco.

We call for an immediate end to the war in Sudan. The war has claimed at least 150,000 lives by conservative estimates, displaced nearly 13 million people and left 70 to 80 per cent of health facilities non-operational. 

We reaffirm our solidarity with the people of Cuba and Venezuela against the aggression, illegal sanctions and blockade imposed by the imperialist United States. We strongly condemn the United States’ military encirclement of Venezuela not just as a provocation of war but also as an act of war.

We stand with the people of Palestine against the imperialist, United States-backed apartheid Israeli settler state and the ongoing genocide it is committing. Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 66,000 Palestinians and injured more than 168,000, the majority being women, children and the elderly. We reiterate our call for the leaders of the apartheid Israeli regime to be held accountable.

In the same vein, we strongly condemn the criminal interception and abduction of the humanitarian Global Sumud Flotilla by the Israeli regime. The SACP stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their just struggle for national self-determination and the return of their dispossessed lands.

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