South African Communist Party

SACP condemns xenophobic attacks and threats and calls for working-class unity and solidarity

Friday, 5 June 2026: The South African Communist Party (SACP) overtly rejects and opposes the xenophobic violence and threats of violence against immigrants. There is no justification for the abuse of any migrant, regardless of their legal status.

As the SACP, we call for unity, not division of the working class and poor. We call for peace and not violence or vengeance. We need more working-class solidarity and not mutual elimination of workers, not destruction. We also call for the implementation of a sound and humane migration policy, not abrupt witch-hunts and abuse.

The SACP, of course, recognises the pervasive crisis of illegal immigration as a legitimate political issue for South Africa, with state authorities over time unable to effectively deal with the crisis. We thus call for proactive and effective state mechanisms to deal with the matter in line with the law.

Migration has been a persistent challenge over time, occasionally surfacing at key moments and at other times remaining dormant under the surface but still consistently present. At all these times, however, there has not been a predictable, measurable, effective and consistent all-encompassing policy response to it at the state level to address it or even to understand it fully. Any interventions that have been implemented have been misaligned, unstructured and inconsistent, leading to a distorted view of both its nature and its gravity. For the average working-class person residing in areas with high poor migrant populations, this crisis was always likely to spring up and escalate into an uncontrollable disaster.

At this critical juncture in South Africa’s history, one characterised by a crosscutting capitalist crisis that has led to mass unemployment, poverty and a severely diminished state apparatus unable to effectively respond to migration and poverty, we are compelled to find solutions where the state system has failed. The state’s inability to coherently respond to the crisis of poverty and migration emanates from the known systemic capacity problems of the state that predate the flare-up of the present violence. The working class, whether migrant or citizen, objectively faces the most severe economic limitations that manifest in various ways in their daily lives.

At its material base, therefore, this is a manifestation of the failure of the capitalist system in a country with some of the highest unemployment rates and the most unequal country in the world. These challenges are not accidental but flow from the laws of motion governing global capitalism. Imperialism and colonial legacies have produced extreme uneven development across the African continent. Wars, economic instability, and poverty in neighbouring countries push desperate workers and families to seek opportunities outside of their own borders. Within our own borders, capitalism creates a massive reserve army of labour, using competition to suppress wages and conditions.

The South African economy, anchored in a neoliberal trajectory, is objectively proving unable to create more work given its inability to industrialise, among others.  These economic limitations manifest through mutual confrontation between members of the same working class in the context of diminishing resources, dwindling job opportunities and virtually non-existent economic prospects. Solely blaming fellow African workers for these systemic problems serves only the ruling class and distracts from the real enemies of the working class: monopoly capital, corruption, and policies that prioritise profit over people. The war between documented and undocumented workers is unjustified.

The solution lies in a multidisciplinary approach which involves thoroughgoing working-class solidarity rather than violent attacks and other acts of aggression rooted in dehumanisation of migrants. We call for the construction and implementation of a comprehensive and effective migration policy and system founded on appropriate and effective enforcement measures while building the state’s capacity to manage migration on a sustainable basis and the building of a rigorous labour law enforcement system through the expansion of the department of labour.

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