South African Communist Party

SAFTU’s decision not to participate in the Conference of the Left regrettable

Wednesday, 20 May 2026: The South African Communist Party (SACP) notes the position by the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) to not participate in the Conference of the Left. We fully respect the right of every independent working-class organisation to determine its own political line and organisational approach. We do not seek to impose participation.

However, we believe this moment demands principled engagement and organised contestation, not retreat into parallel platforms or mutual isolation, particularly at a moment when the working class and poor face the most severe social, economic and political crisis since 1994. The deepening crisis of mass unemployment, deindustrialisation, austerity, failure of public services, state decay, rising social fragmentation, and the real danger of both neoliberal consolidation and right-wing reaction cannot be confronted through fragmentation.

The Conference of the Left was initiated precisely to create a space for honest debate, strategic reflection, and possible convergence on the urgent tasks facing workers and the poor. We regret that SAFTU has chosen to characterise the Conference in narrow terms rather than test it as a platform for open contestation.

The SACP categorically rejects the accusation that the Conference seeks to collapse class distinctions or that it has invited business formations into a supposed conference of the left.

We have never claimed that every small enterprise or informal operator is part of the capitalist class. Millions of people engaged in survivalist micro-enterprises, spaza shops, street vending and informal services are proletarianised and semi-proletarian layers, workers forced to supplement meagre wages, social grants or unemployment with precarious self-activity. These strata form a significant part of the expanded working class in our country. Equally, genuine worker and community cooperatives represent collective and democratic ownership that stands in opposition to individual capitalist enterprise.

Organisations representing micro enterprises and informal traders are not bourgeois business lobbies. They are structures through which large sections of the working class and poor organise their daily survival. Engaging these formations strengthens rather than weakens the class character of the conference. When the SACP engages such structures or cooperatives, it does so from a clear working-class standpoint. Our objective is to organise these layers, defend their survival struggles, and prevent them from being absorbed into bourgeois ideology. Engagement is tactical and always subordinate to the strategic goal of building working-class power and advancing the struggle for socialism.

We also reject the claim that inviting broader progressive formations compromises the left character of the conference. The conference is not a closed ideological club. It is an open platform for honest contestation among forces that claim to stand with workers and the poor. Participation does not mean endorsement. Differences will be debated openly. What matters is whether these formations are prepared to engage seriously on the crisis facing the working class.

The Conference of the Left is a platform to strengthen, not dilute, class politics. We invite all genuine working-class and progressive formations, including SAFTU, to participate and test this claim rather than boycott.

On the accusations levelled against the SACP, we state clearly: the Party has never claimed political perfection. The democratic movement and the Alliance have confronted serious contradictions, weaknesses, and failures, including policy compromises, corruption, and the slow pace of radical economic transformation. Many of the sharpest critiques of GEAR, austerity, privatisation, state capture, and anti-working-class measures have come from within the SACP itself.

At the same time, we reject the ahistorical narrative that reduces more than a century of working-class struggle to the claim that the SACP merely acted as a “shield” for anti-worker policies. The Party’s history is inseparable from the struggles of organised workers, rural communities, women, youth, and the broader democratic movement against apartheid, the system of racialised capitalism. That legacy is a matter of record.

We agree with SAFTU on one fundamental principle: the working class requires a strong, militant, democratic and socialist alternative. The decisive question is how such a project is built: through mutual denunciation and political isolation, or through organised mass work, open debate, and principled unity in action.

South Africa’s crisis is too deep for the left to afford further fragmentation. While we regret SAFTU’s decision, the door for engagement remains open on the basis of mutual respect, honest contestation and a shared commitment to the working class and poor.

The struggle for socialism, working-class power and a people-centred economy will not be won through isolation. It must be built through organisation, debate, principled unity in action and sustained mass struggle.

The SACP will continue its work among workers, trade unions, social movements, cooperatives, progressive intellectuals, youth and women. We hope SAFTU will reconsider, because the challenges confronting the working class are greater than any single organisation or historical disagreement.

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