Umsebenzi Online Volume 24, Number 1, 21 May 2025
Red AlertSACP moves forward to participating independently in the 2026 local government elections – Resolution of the 5th SNC, extract from the April 2025 CC Statement |
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SACP moves forward to participating independently in the 2026 local government elections
The SACP has taken several resolutions on our approach to participating in local government elections independently since 2002. Building on this, the Party took a resolution at its December 2024 Special National Congress, which we reproduce here. This is followed by an excerpt concerning the contestation of the local government elections from the 4-6 April 2025 statement by the Central Committee
5th SNC Resolution
Towards the 2026 local government elections
Noting:
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- This discussion on the reconfiguration of the alliance and SACP consideration on electoral contest started in 2002 in the 11th National Congress and 22 years later, the ANC is still not committed to the reconfiguration with the exception of rhetoric.
- The reluctance and lack of appetite to engage and conclude the discussion on the reconfiguration of the alliance, the ANC absolutely rejecting the 2019 adopted Alliance Reconfiguration Document and coming with a new concept of a Renewed Alliance, an obviously frivolous act to stall the process.
- The systemic crisis of capitalism is based on growing socio-economic inequalities and rampant poverty, coupled with increased alienation of the working class from the mainstream of political institutions.
- The structural inefficiencies of neoliberal policies such as privatisation of state institutions only serve to weaken the public sector, discredit the government and enhance the exploitation of the working class.
- The historical challenges that the Party has faced in maintaining organisational coherence and mass membership are juxtaposed with the current state membership that requires revitalisation of its vanguard role.
- This would call for the mastering of the legislative and governance frameworks regulating local government, including the Systems Act, Structures Act, Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) and Section 7 of the Constitution, to empower the Party for a revolutionary electoral contest.
- The changing contradictions within the Tripartite Alliance raise both opportunities and constraints in the maintenance of principled unity while asserting the Party's independence in pursuit of our shared national democratic revolution.
- It is of critical importance to note that resource equity and sustainable funding models counter the capitalist austerity agenda and promote a developmental local government framework that addresses the needs of the oppressed majority.
- At least three ANC President have post-1994 asserted that the ANC is not a socialist movement, they have not at the same time equally asserted that it is neither a capitalist movement.
Believing:
- The South African Communist Party (SACP) has the task of re-establishing itself as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class in order to lead the struggle against systemic exploitation and the neoliberal subjugation of the working class through the so-called GNU.
- The contestation of elections must not necessarily be seen as a contest against the Movement or the ANC, but a consolidation of a platform for its full ideological identity and aspiration, which has never been contested by the ANC.
- The ANC has its ideological stand that takes “the middle ground”, “Neither socialist nor capitalist”, but subject to “the balance of probabilities” and, at least in words, with a “working-class bias”, while the SACP is categorically a Marxist-Leninist Party that advances the inalienable revolutionary connection between the NDR and socialism – as a transitional path towards a communist society.
- Therefore, grassroots mobilisation, guided by Marxist-Leninist principles and the historical mandate of the Party, is of great importance for the strengthening of the revolutionary will of the people.
- By its very nature, the Party's organisational structure must reflect a revolutionary character, with a disciplined and ideologically cohesive cadre base capable of participating effectively both electorally and in the class struggle.
- The decision to contest elections on our own is not a tactic but, in fact, a principled departure to assert the Party's revolutionary independence even as it maintains dialectical relations with its allies.
- The Party must speak out against the austerity measures and fiscal structures that capitalism has brought about, which worsen the plight of the working class and rural proletariat, while simultaneously forwarding policies for socialised redistribution and collective ownership of public resources.
- The future success of the Party in the 2026 elections will depend on whether it can give body to the aspirations of the working class through revolutionary praxis, effective governance and consistent efforts to promote socialist alternatives.
Resolve:
- Revolutionary contestation strategy
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- The Party’s preferred contestation will be wall-to-wall (all municipalities) contestation.
- The Revolutionary National Election Committee must kick-start the process of preparing for elections, including setting up structures, a candidate selection process and the development of an election strategy for consideration by the CC.
- The Secretariat should ensure that in all engagements with Alliance partners, fraternal formations and left forces, the decision to contest the 2026 local government elections is conveyed and explained.
- The Party must continue to build its organisational strength and independent voice while consolidating its efforts towards building popular left fronts and a powerful socialist movement of the workers and the poor in the quest for a socialist order in South Africa.
- The Party will fight on all fronts and in every ward and municipality, making them sites of revolutionary struggle and platforms for advancing the NDR – our direct route towards socialism.
- The electoral campaign will mobilise the working class, intervening in rural communities to break the hegemony of untransformed spatial development.
Extracts from the Central Committee statement, 4-6 April 2025
The declaration and resolutions of the SACP Fifth Special National Congress held in December 2024, together with the political and organisational reports received and discussed by the Central Committee, covered the implementation of the SACP’s resolution to contest the 2026 local government elections.
In early March 2025, the SACP complied with the IEC’s notice regarding the annual renewal of the Party’s status as a registered political party. The SACP also made a supplementary representation to the IEC, reaffirming its status as a registered political party. In the end, the IEC cleared the SACP and furnished us with correspondence, validating our Party’s registration.
The SACP will go ahead to contest the 2026 local government elections across the country in line with the declaration and resolutions of the Party’s 15th National Congress held in 2022 and the Fifth Special National Congress.
SACP structures across the country should now begin work to contest the 2026 local government elections. The Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the SACP will continue to guide the process of implementing the electoral contest, aimed at addressing the crisis of working-class representation that has emerged in our country and openly advancing measures to achieve socialist transformation, development and transition.
The SACP calls on all its structures across the country to take an active part in municipal integrated development planning to ensure that the outcomes do not result in a further increase in the cost of living. Municipalities are expected to make final decisions by the end of May 2025. It is essential that this process be used to reverse the decay of local infrastructure, address the persistent failures in its maintenance and security, and improve the provision of services by municipalities to the people.
On the reconfiguration of the Alliance, the statement noted:
All Alliance partners have been united in affirming that ours is a strategic alliance, not a coalition or an electoral alliance. We have all reaffirmed our commitment to the Alliance in line with our shared strategic objectives within the framework of the national democratic revolution. In this regard, we are interdependent while at the same time upholding our respective independence in pursuit of our historical missions beyond our shared strategic objectives. In this regard, it is important to note that, 31 years into our democratic dispensation, the major clauses of the Freedom Charter have not been realised.
The Freedom Charter is the basic programme of the national democratic revolution – a strategy under which Alliance partners have come together to form the Alliance. Neoliberal globalisation and the domestication of neoliberal policies, starting under the apartheid regime, and later institutionalised from 1996 through the adoption of GEAR, have served as one of the key obstacles. To overcome this, the reconfiguration of the Alliance must reassert the revolutionary content of the national democratic revolution to achieve all the goals of the Freedom Charter.
The Alliance should not be misconstrued as a sentimental entity but should instead be united behind a revolutionary programme and the principles of collective leadership, inclusivity, accountability and consensus-seeking consistent democratic consultation on all strategic objectives that have brought us together, policies and choices to advance the shared objectives. These are the key tenets of its reconfiguration, as outlined in a common document adopted by the Alliance Political Council in 2019.
An army of generals? Reflections on the SACP ’s political capacity and the crisis of hegemony
This article has been published in ANC Today, it is published here as the CC has resolved to engage in the debate prompted by Cde Buti ’s article and create space for his response
By Buti Manamela
The moment and the illusion
The SACP stands at what many are calling a historic moment — the decision to contest elections independently for the first time since 1994. But moments can deceive. Not every rupture is a revolution, and not every declaration is a programme of action. The real danger we face may not be the ANC, the Alliance, or even state power itself — but the illusion that we are ready.
The enemy, as we have always known, is not simply the political manager of the moment — not Cyril Ramaphosa, not Jacob Zuma before him, not even the ANC as such — but capital, in all its entrenched forms: economic, financial, political, cultural. And the bitter truth we must face is this: we have neither the organisational strength nor the ideological cohesion to take on this enemy right now in a meaningful way.
This is not a pessimistic view. It is a plea for political realism.
The problems are not new — only our capacity has shrunk
It is tempting to treat the challenges before the Party as novel: the weakening of the Alliance, the rise of new populist and ethno-nationalist formations, the betrayal of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) by elite classes. But these are not new. We faced similar dilemmas at the dawn of democracy, during the GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) years, and again in the Polokwane–Zuma interregnum. What has changed is not the nature of the problems — but our capacity to confront them.
Over the last ten to fifteen years, the Party has suffered a slow decline — ideologically, organisationally, and politically. We have relaxed our revolutionary muscle. We have allowed our hegemony over the working class to wither. Our base is thinner. Our branches are quieter. Our intellectual output is more reactive than strategic. Our cadre development is sporadic. And our links to mass struggle — be it workplace organisation, youth mobilisation, or township struggles — are fragile.
We speak often of a moment of renewal. But what are we renewing for? To contest elections? To reconfigure an Alliance? Or to restore what must always have been our principal mission: to build working-class power for the socialist transformation of society?
Fixing the organisation is not the strategy
Let us be clear: fixing the Party — its structures, discipline, communication, finance — is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Organisational renewal without political clarity is like repairing an army ’s barracks while forgetting to define who we are at war with. A well-oiled machine without a strategic compass serves no revolutionary purpose.
Too often, our debates have been trapped between binary choices: stay or leave the Alliance; contest elections or not; reconfigure or reject. These are tactical questions, not strategic ones. The real question we must ask is: for what purpose does the SACP exist today? What is our role in this moment of capitalist crisis, working-class fragmentation, and global volatility?
An army of generals? A party without a base?
The most dangerous illusion we face is the belief that we are stronger than we are. We have leaders. We have slogans. We have historical legitimacy. But do we have an organised base? Can we say, with honesty, that the YCL is a dynamic force rooted in youth struggles? Can we say we are present in the lives of casualised workers, community health workers, or unemployed graduates? Do we still shape discourse in the trade union movement? Or have we become — painfully — an army of generals without soldiers?
The working class is not waiting in neat ranks for leadership. It is dispersed, informalised, demoralised. Its organisations — including COSATU and National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa — are fragmented. Its struggles are sporadic, localised, uncoordinated. And in this gap, other forces have emerged — populists, ethnic mobilisers, religious entrepreneurs. In this context, Party hegemony cannot be assumed. It must be rebuilt. Patiently. Organically. Without illusion.
Beyond Cyril, beyond the ANC: reasserting class politics
We must stop confusing enemies with symptoms. Ramaphosa is not the enemy of the working class. Nor was Zuma. Nor will the next manager of the affairs of capital be. They are manifestations of a deeper structural enemy: the capitalist class — local and international — whose interests define the economic order, constrain political possibility, and exploit the labour of the many for the profit of the few.
In recent years, the Party has sometimes lost this clarity. We have become consumed by the palace politics of the ANC — who wins at Nasrec, who gets appointed, who delivers which speech. We have allowed ourselves to believe that removing one figure or another from leadership would shift the balance of forces. But capital remains untouched. The masses remain in precarity. The social wage is under attack.
If we do not return to this basic class analysis — if we do not name capital as the primary enemy of the working class — then we are no longer Marxists. And the Party is no longer a vanguard, but a factional support base in a bourgeois circus.
Rebuilding party hegemony: the real task
Whether we contest elections or not; whether we remain in the Alliance or break from it — the core task remains the same: to rebuild the ideological, organisational, and political hegemony of the Party among the working class and poor.
This means:
- Returning to mass work — building branches that are present in communities, workplaces, campuses and informal settlements.
- Repoliticising the YCL — beyond conferences and statements, into youth struggles over jobs, education, housing, and dignity.
- Engaging the fragmented working class — including informal workers, social movement actors, and precarious labourers who live outside traditional union structures.
- Naming and confronting capital — not just rhetorically, but through campaigns, education, and struggle.
- Clarifying our vision — what does socialism mean today in concrete terms? What alternative do we offer to neoliberalism and bourgeois democracy?
A moment for political honesty
We have reached a fork in the road. But we must not mistake motion for progress. Electoral contestation is not a substitute for mass organising. Reconfiguring alliances is not the same as building political clarity.
We need to restore the Party ’s revolutionary purpose — not just as an ideological current, not just as an electoral actor, but as the organised expression of the class struggle in our time. That struggle is not against the ANC. It is not even primarily in Parliament. It is in the mines, the classrooms, the clinics, the townships, the informal settlements — wherever workers and the poor are surviving under capitalism ’s boot.
If we do not build a Party that can lead these struggles — not just comment on them — then we remain, for now, an army of generals with too few soldiers.
Let us be honest. Let us be bold. Let us rebuild — not for the next election, but for the next revolution.
Cde Manamela is an SACP Central Committee member, former National Secretary of the YCLSA and currently the Deputy Minister of Higher Education
Of armies, generals & elections - what about revolutionary agency?
Lazola Ndamase
First of all, I must thank—nay, express profound gratitude—to Cde Buti Manamela , who at great personal cost cracked open this discussion. He risked the venom of ad hominem insults for shattering this ceiling of debate, while others preferred the cowardice of sneering on WhatsApp and hushed personal calls—an arena of gossip, not bold engagement. Your courage, Comrade Buti, has lit a fuse, and for that, we owe you a debt.
Cde Manamela has unfurled a tapestry of searing truths, woven with the threads of a revolutionary realism that demands our unflinching gaze.
His missive, “An Army of Generals? Reflections on the SACP ’s Political Capacity and the Crisis of Hegemony”, is a clarion call—a trumpet blast against the creeping illusions that threaten to smother the SACP in this so-called historic moment.
Yet, in the spirit of comradely engagement, allow me, in the robust timbre of polemical flourish, to wrestle with his meditations—not as a foe, but as a fellow traveller on this jagged road to emancipation, and more importantly, as a comrade. For while Manamela ’s diagnosis stings with the precision of a surgeon ’s blade, there are currents beneath his words that shimmer with possibility—currents of agency, of rupture, and of a Party unshackled from the parasitic grip of opportunists who have long choked its revolutionary breath.
Manamela laments the SACP ’s shrivelled capacity—its thinning base, its quiet branches, its ideological drift—and he is not wrong about this atrophy. But let us not merely mourn the Party as a wounded giant, staggering under the weight of its own history. Let us instead seize this moment of apparent weakness and inject agency, a chance to cast off the suffocating rubble piled high by those who have ridden the Party ’s coat tails not for the cause of the masses of the oppressed, but for the narrow altars of their own ambition.
These compradors—these petty generals of self-interest—have repurposed the SACP ’s machinery to a degree, turning its once-mighty engine of struggle into a vehicle for their personal ascent. They have tethered it to the ANC ’s bourgeois circus, diluting its Marxist fire with the tepid waters of factional haggling. In their hands, the Party has been buried beneath the debris of ANC intrigues and ministerial appointments, its revolutionary soul gasping for air.
But now, in this rupture—this bold step to contest elections independently—lies the possibility of unshackling: they will walk out in numbers. The haemorrhage of the early ’ 90s will be like a Sunday picnic and I say: good. For to shed these vampires who have sought to feed on the carcass of the Party will breathe new life into it; in fact, it will not merely survive—it will get a chance to reclaim itself as a weapon of the dispossessed, sharpened anew for the war against capital. Ideologically and intellectually weaker, yes, as it may well lose some of its most politically developed cadre, but it will benefit from this new lease on life.
Cde Manamela warns of the illusion of readiness, and he is right to urge caution. Yet, let us not mistake his plea for a retreat into paralysis. The decision to stride into the electoral arena does not signal a surrender to parliamentary fetishism—far from it, though some singing songs in Congress may well have harboured this, who knows! Parliamentary politics is but one theatre in the sprawling drama of revolutionary struggle, a single site among many where power is contested. The mines, the classrooms, the clinics, the townships—these are the true battlegrounds where the oppressed forge their destiny, and the SACP must plant its flag there with unrelenting ferocity.
To contest elections is not to abandon these fronts, but to amplify them, to wield the ballot as one blade among many in the arsenal of revolutionary war. Cde Manamela fears we may lose ourselves in the bourgeois game of votes and seats, but let us remember: even the Bolsheviks, those titans of the October Revolution, did not collapse when electoral triumph eluded them post-revolution. Their power was not in the Duma ’s tallies, but in the Soviets, in the streets, in the relentless organisation of the proletariat. The SACP need not fear losing itself in this electoral gambit, for its soul lies not in Council ’s chambers, but in the hands of the masses it must rouse from slumber.
Here, then, is the dialectical dance: contesting elections and heeding Cde Manamela ’s call are not mutually exclusive—they are entwined in the same revolutionary rhythm. To step boldly into this moment is to confront the very weaknesses Cde Manamela decries, not to flee from them. It is to force the Party to reckon with its dwindled base, its fragmented hegemony, its reliance on generals without soldiers. But it is also to wield agency—to break free from those who have hijacked the SACP for their own ends, who have smothered its radical pulse beneath the weight of their personal aspirations.
This rupture can be the furnace in which we reforge the Party, not as a shadow of the ANC, not as a factional cheerleader, but as the vanguard of the working class, its gaze fixed unflinchingly on capital as the enemy. Ah, does this bear all the hallmarks of voluntarist action? And yet, Cde Buti, permit me to press further: at face value, this leap into electoral contestation might smack of careless voluntarism—a reckless plunge into the abyss. But revolutionary movement is not propelled by the rigid arithmetic of positivism, where outcomes are neatly posited and predicted with precision before action is dared.
No, it is decisive action itself that cracks open history ’s shell! This is a leap of faith, yes, but what will liquidate the Party—slowly, insidiously—is not this audacity, but the paralysis of being frozen in time. The SACP must hurl itself headlong into the maelstrom of change, not seek solace in the warm, suffocating embrace of conservative inertia.
And what of revolutionary praxis, that beating heart of our struggle? The very act of contesting elections might jolt the SACP from its slumber, forcing it to stare into the cracked mirror of its current existence and a moribund class alliance—a pact that has dulled its vision, blinding it to the revolutionary potential that flickers even now amidst the debris.
This alliance, with its suffocating embrace, has tethered the Party to a role as the ANC ’s left watchdog, a toothless conscience barking at the edges of bourgeois power. But the triumph of the revolution will not come from such timid posturing. It will erupt when the SACP thrusts its ideas into the crucible of the masses, letting them chew and wrestle with the vision of socialism—not as a distant dream, but as a living, breathing alternative. It will come when the Party seizes revolutionary initiative, not shying from the storming of our own Winter Palace. Recall the July 2021 uprising: while the Party fixated on the spark that lit the fuse—the arrest of Zuma—and not the cause of the looting, chaos, it failed to grasp the common thread: the seething rage of the dispossessed against capital ’s yoke and poverty. That was a moment to lead, to channel that fury into a battering ram against the edifice of exploitation. Instead, we hesitated, and the opportunity slipped through our fingers like sand—I personally was seething with rage.
Yet, Cde Buti, I stand shoulder to shoulder with you in naming the slow liquidation of the Party of yore—a rot festering not from without, but from within, at the hands of some of its leading cadre, perched at the highest echelons. For over fifteen years, ideological pragmatism has been their stock-in-trade, a shameful opportunism that has seen them entangle the SACP in corporate capture (most glaringly under the Zuma presidency) and neoliberal plunder of our country, only raising a feeble critique when an ANC president casts them out of favour. Internal democracy smothered, organisational work traded for the plump perks of government office, and recruitment left to wither on the vine.
Incapable of adapting to new methods of mobilisation or concretising Marxism to the jagged realities of the 21st century, some of these leaders have turned the Party into their personal fiefdom, bleeding it of legitimacy until it was outflanked by proto-fascist and ethnonationalist vultures.
They reified the universal franchise as it manifests itself in South Africa hoisted as a universal, transcultural, classless will of the people, despite the actual realities of what constitutes the will of the people, clinging to the electoral route through the ANC-led alliance as a panacea for democratic governance, forsaking the very possibility of a revolutionary seizure of power and other forms of access to power. Thus, revolutionary upswings—Marikana ’s blood-soaked cry, FeesMustFall ’s defiant roar, and the July 2021 inferno—have been met not with leadership, but with disdain from a Party elite complicit in the systematic destruction of organised labour, reducing it to the fractured husk we see today.
So, Cde Buti, let us heed your summons to political honesty, but let us not shrink from the boldness you also invoke. The task is not to choose between electoral contestation and mass organising, between Alliance reconfiguration and electoral contestation, between loyalty to a historical ally and forging a new path—it is to do both, and more.
Let us rebuild the Party ’s hegemony not by retreating from the fray, but by charging into it, by rooting ourselves in the struggles of the casualised, the informalised, the discarded. Let us name capital as the foe, not with mere rhetoric, but with campaigns that bite, with education that awakens, with an organisation that moves like a living thing among the people. This moment, frail as it seems, is not just a fork in the road—it is a chance to burn away the dross and emerge leaner, fiercer, truer.
An army of generals, yes, but one that can yet summon its soldiers—not for the next election alone, but for the next revolution, which beckons from the horizon. If we drown, what use was our living if it meant being on life-support machines as we already do, surviving only on the goodwill of the ANC that treated us as an organisation when we ’d fast become an organised faction of ANC cadres seeking a shorter route to upward class mobility, with an independent ideological platform from where to criticise without accounting for our actions in what we criticised?
My final word on this SACP electoral contest debate is: truth is the forcefield between subject and object. It ’s a space where the limits of the real (object) meet the drive of the possible (subject), and something emerges from that collision. Truth is no lifeless monument, no mere ledger of objective woes, nor is it the fleeting dream of a solitary mind. It is the living, breathing tension, the electric dance where the iron weight of the real collides with the soaring arc of the possible.
From this clash, a spark—nay, a blaze—erupts, illuminating paths unseen. To our objectivist kin, this forcefield bows in respect: yes, the terrain matters, its ruts and ridges carve the boundaries of our march. Public disdain is no trifling ghost; shaky structures are no mere inconvenience—they are the very ground we tread. But to our subjectivist comrades, it sings a hymn of validation: agency is no idle hope, conviction no hollow echo. These are the hands that knead the clay of reality, that bend the arc of history toward a dawn yet unborn. Weak support may shackle us today, but the sweat of struggle can melt those chains; ideological frailty may hobble us now, but in the crucible of battle, a sharper creed is forged.
This, then, is the fragile yet fierce common ground we might claim—if only we dare to embrace it. The forcefield hums with mutual alchemy: neither the sterile reign of conditions nor the unmoored flight of will can alone birth the new world. Recall the thunder of 1917, when Russia ’s frozen misery met the molten resolve of the Bolsheviks—dismal horizons shattered by the audacity of the deed. So it has been, so it must be. Onward.
Cde Ndamase is former 2nd Deputy Provincial Secretary of the SACP Eastern Cape
Revolution is not a declaration – a response to Cde Lazola
Mafika Mndebele
Cde Lazola’s reply, for all its lyrical zeal, is a monument to voluntarist illusion — the idea that history bends to the will of those who shout loudest. He writes as though he has stumbled upon a secret — that by simply declaring the Party’s independence from its tormentors, by marching into the electoral field, we shall be reborn. But this is not dialectics — it is desperation dressed in revolutionary clothing.
The notion that a Party weakened, ideologically anaemic, organisationally hollowed out, and politically drifting, can leap into the furnace of electoral contestation and emerge forged anew — this is fantasy. It is not Marxism. It is not Leninism. It is the very illusion Cde Buti warned against — the performance of revolution in the absence of a revolutionary situation.
Let us not romanticise rupture. The Bolsheviks did not declare themselves into relevance. They built, organised, educated, disciplined. They did not cry out for purity through the exit of ‘vampires’ and ‘parasites’. They did not mistake factional purging for proletarian consolidation. They understood that the vanguard does not emerge in rebellion in response to its own weakness, but by mastering it — by engaging it, confronting it, and rebuilding on the terrain of real contradictions.
Cde Lazola treats the decision to contest elections not as a tactical choice, but as an existential break — a leap into the void that will clarify all. But this is the logic of despair, not strategy. He speaks of “reclaiming the Party,” as if slogans can replace structures or rage can substitute for rootedness in the class. His appeal is not to the proletariat but to an audience of disillusioned generals, nostalgic for a war they no longer know how to wage.
What is offered here is a kind of left messianism: cast off the chains of the Alliance, enter the fray, and the masses will appear. This is not Marxism. It is prophecy. The class struggle does not reward declarations. It rewards discipline, theory, structure, and clarity of purpose. Without these, contestation becomes mimicry — bourgeois theatre in red costumes.
The most dangerous feature of Cde Lazola’s polemic is not its anger, but its substitution of anger for organisation. He takes the failure of the Alliance and mistakes it for the failure of alliance-building. He takes the betrayal of opportunists and mistakes it for the betrayal of the masses. He takes the decay of cadre discipline and mistakes it for the decay of revolutionary possibility.
To cloak a strategic gamble in the language of historic necessity is not boldness. It is recklessness. To claim revolutionary potential in the very moment of disorganisation is not militancy. It is confusion.
The task of the Communist Party today is not to flee the crisis by leaping into the ballot box. It is to organise through the crisis. To re-forge the link with the working class. To revive ideological clarity. To rebuild the branch. To speak in the language of political economy, not rhetorical flourish. To remind the masses not only who their enemy is, but how we fight it.
We must also recall that the Party’s own strategic orientation—the Medium-Term Vision—grounds us in a long-term, disciplined approach to building power. As stated in the Political Report to the Special National Congress in 2009: “The strategic perspective underpinning our Medium Term Vision is that of building working class hegemony in all key sites of power: the state, the workplace, the economy, the community, the ideological arena and the international sphere.”
This is not an abstract slogan. It is a concrete reminder that revolutionary advances must be built across all terrains of struggle. The tragedy is that we have not yet consolidated power in any of these. We have not rebuilt worker organisation at the point of production. We have not re-established a strong ideological presence in the media, in education, or the minds of the youth. We have not asserted our vision in the community, in the state, or on the global stage. To substitute electoral ambition for this foundational work is to surrender strategy for spectacle.
We do not reject contestation out of fear. We reject voluntarism out of principle. The working class does not need a brave Party. It needs a serious one. One that knows when to act and when to build, when to strike and when to retreat.
Comrade Lazola is right about one thing: the SACP is at a crossroads. But there are two temptations at any historical fork: one is reformist drift. The other is adventurist fantasy. Let us not flee one only to plunge headlong into the other.
Revolution is not announced. It is built.
Cde Mndebele is an SACP member
The art of war or the art of dialectics?
Barry Mitchell
“The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.”
Ernesto Che Guevara
After over two decades of rigorous debate and discussion, the SACP, in our 5th Special National Congress (SNC) in December 2024, resolved to contest the 2026 Local Government Elections. This is a decision that was overwhelmingly supported and adopted by delegates representing SACP branches and a membership consisting of over 370,000 comrades.
A recent article, written by Cde Buti Manamela, SACP Central Committee and ANC NEC member, has been circulating amongst the mass democratic movement with much interest and attention. Cde Buti’s article, which provides a critique of the current capacity constraints facing the Party, be it organisational, ideological and strategic, has provoked a plethora of comments and reactions.
Some comrades questioned the timing of the circulated article, others suggested that Cde Buti’s approach is ill-disciplined as they interpret his piece as some form of rejection of the outcomes of the 5th SNC. Other comrades have suggested that Cde Buti developed the article to secure his position in the ANC NEC or as a Deputy Minister in the 7th Administration.
I found the reactions to Cde Buti’s article quite interesting. I also found Cde Buti’s article quite interesting. This does not mean I am confused or ideologically unclear - one can hold the opinion or perspective of two opposing views and, through genuine analysis and debate of these opposing views, an even greater “truth” can be developed. This is what Marx teaches us, no? The development and articulation of a thesis, the countering antagonisms that arise through debating the thesis in the form of an antithesis and finally, the refinement of these antagonisms and contradictions to reach a synthesis.
This, in essence, is the process in which our 5th SNC reached our resolutions - through debate, through raising contradictions and through the final reflection of this debate and discussion in the form of resolutions and decisions. The debate therefore on whether or not the Party will contest the upcoming 2026 LGE was concluded in December 2024 after the adoption of the 5th SNC declaration and resolutions. Having the privilege to serve as a member of the 15th Congress Central Committee, I can confidently say that the Central Committee has ensured that views and perspectives on the future trajectory of the Party have been fully ventilated through our internal discussions and debates.
What is required now is the implementation of this and other Congress decisions. In this regard, I think Cde Buti’s article is helpful, it raises some of the serious organisational shortcomings that the Party currently faces, challenges that we are all aware of. Cde Buti goes further to make practical and programmatic recommendations on how to strengthen the Party in the context of its decision to contest the 2026 LGE, this is also very helpful.
There are two areas of Cde Buti’s article that I find difficult to swallow. The first is the characterisation of the Party as an “Army of Generals”. The reality is that there are many comrades serving in the Central Committee who also serve in their respective capacities in government, be it at a local, provincial or national level. We have deployed comrades as Ministers and Deputy Ministers, others as Members of Parliament and others advisors. We also have a number of Central Committee members serving and leading in the trade union movement. Are these comrades to be considered Generals of the Vanguard? Generals of workers and the poor?
Cde Joe Slovo, in his famous pamphlet entitled Has Socialism Failed? clarified this error that many comrades make in proclaiming themselves as leaders, as leaders of society or even as a vanguard of workers and the poor. Cde Slovo reminded us that we do not proclaim or impose these titles on society, that “... such leadership must be won rather than imposed.” He elaborates that we can only earn this title as a vanguard force through superior efforts of leadership and devotion to our socialist objective. Perhaps Cde Buti was using a creative analogy in relation to the notion of generals, and army and soldiers? Or perhaps Cde Buti sees himself as a General and our membership as an army of soldiers?
Another difficulty I have with Cde Buti’s piece is premising his article on the notion that the Party is under an illusion that we are ready to contest elections, in other words, assessing the organisational, political and ideological readiness of the Party. Cde Buti makes the mistake of naval gazing, too much introspection and internal analysis of subjective factors to the negation of the objective realities facing the very class we proclaim to be Generals of.
Workers and the poor of this country face some of the most severe socio-economic challenges in the world, in fact these statistics suggest a country at war with itself, with 56 000 people dying annually of tuberculosis in South Africa (a treatable and preventable disease), a lack of adequate nutritious food affects more than 63% of households, with more than one in every four children under five stunted by malnutrition, millions more are languishing in extreme poverty - facing death, deprivation and insecurity as a result of the manifestations of a crisis of neoliberal capitalism. These are some of the factors that have played a critical role in the determination of our final resolution to contest elections. These are also just some of the objective factors that I feel strongly Cde Buti neglects in his assessment.
The Party has always re-emphasised that we are not, and will never be, a narrow electoral political party, that our strategic objective is the establishment of socialist society through the implementation of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). Elections for the Party, unlike bourgeois political parties, is a tactic and not a strategy. Elections are but one tactic in the many other mobilising and conscientising methods we employ, it is a process of building working-class hegemony. So perhaps Cde Buti’s article was providing some flexible tactical considerations and recommendations for discussion?
Antonio Gramsci, writing from the fascist dungeons of Mussolini’s Italy, advised us that the imposition of obligatory tactics is fruitless, he suggested that the Party must allow a process of autonomous creative political thinking. He further advised that “No organisational form can be absolutely perfect, the important thing is to establish which type of organisation corresponds best to the conditions and the needs of the proletariat struggle.” In taking this discussion forward, perhaps comrades can consider this critical advice from Gramsci – what kind of Party do we want to build in the context of the worsening socio-economic conditions facing workers and the poor? What are the tactics we can employ to strengthen the mobilisation of workers, our communities, women and youth? How do we popularise the Party and its decision to contest elections?
I would like to challenge our readers, members and those interested in enhancing this discourse to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard and present their thesis or antithesis to this discussion through Umsebenzi Online. Let us ensure that comradely perspectives are not censored or curtailed because one might feel uncomfortable with an opposing view.
Cde Mitchell is an SACP Central Committee member, and the parliamentary officer for the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union
Engaging Cde Buti Manamela’s article An army of generals?
Sifiso Gwala
Cde Buti Manamela ’s article with the above title centres the debate robustly with the sharpened swords of generals. Swords that must sharpen, not the blade, but the tools of analysis needed in this important moment. Indeed, some will be shocked and amazed, others will be excited, yet others will look at the future with an analytical eye, asking, what will become of the working class and the poor in South Africa? Whether the SACP succeeds or fails in the advancement of the working class and playing its vanguard role. The crisis of hegemony in the Alliance stems from the unashamed, clearly-observed failure to challenge and change economic, social, cultural and political dominance in society that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and the Freedom Charter sought to achieve.
Contesting the elections decision – was it a rupture?
The SACP stands at a crossroads of history, as Cde Manamela, suggests in his thought-provoking article of courage and reawakening. A historic decision indeed to contest the 2026 elections. But can we really say that the decision to contest elections was a rupture? Maybe, maybe not, but it is indeed a deviation from our 30-year practice.
However, we must contextualise how the SACP took its decision to contest elections because it was not instantaneous but was taken gradually in the constant hope that the ANC would accede to the reconfiguration of the Alliance. But this remains elusive to this day. The SACP decision remained more a tactic but has now become a realism that the SACP, ANC and the broader Alliance must face with a bittersweet taste of what will become of the revolutionary Alliance.
Cde Manamela terms it vividly and candidly as the “moment of illusion”. It may sound and feel like a needle being pierced softly in one ’s hand, slowly moving neurons to realise that such a tiny object could render such pain, yet an observer may not even see the wound or understand the pain. It is important to acknowledge that moments come and go. Actions are taken or withdrawn, but in a fable of David and Goliath, the moment is of great importance. This is also covered by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities.
Cde Manamela does not intend to challenge the Party ’s decision to contest elections but critiques the conditions under which the Party ’s contestation is happening.
Characterising Alliance relations between the ANC and the SACP
The greatest challenge that the SACP faces is to continue or change its image of being a Siamese twin with its Alliance partner, the ANC. This analogy of a Siamese twin cannot end in the successful separation of one twin from another, but it can lead to the death of one or both twins. However, the analogy of twins may be an easier choice where both twins grow dependent on each other, yet when they grow up and or get married, they slowly become independent of each other.
The SACP has allowed itself to shrink its voice and influence to be accepted into the ranks of the ANC instead of shaping it towards socialism. It is not the SACP ’s absence of political and ideological supremacy, but our acceptance that in order to survive, as a Siamese twin or two independent twins, political dependency and illusionist survival is the only way. Dual membership was once the strength of the revolutionary Alliance, but what has become of it today in the Alliance in the face of survival and self-preservation? The systematic abortion of ideological debates and less criticism and self-criticism grew over time, followed by ideological compromises in favour of the ANC and the growing liberalism, alienating the working class.
The Party of the working class is changed by the working class and the poor. , As it is the Party that analyses simple ideas of the people, their wants and needs, and then shapes and sharpens them to superior theoretical foundations that guide the people. The question remains that the SACP must acknowledge, and answer: What is the honest and proper analysis of the SACP in the post-apartheid epoch?
The Alliance formation and the dual membership
“Herein lies the fundamental question about the Party ’s strategy and tactics: should it throw up its hands in despair, put a spanner in the electoral works at this deeply sensitive period and abandon the ANC and thus leave it open largely to other influences? This seems to be an admission of defeat and an eschewal of a historical responsibility.” Joel Netshitenzhe argues against the Party contesting elections and points out that it would leave the ANC to other influences. I argue that the ANC is already under the GNU ’s influence and it is being swayed by capital ’s interests, with capital winning most of the time.
The recent VAT march by the SACP went unnoticed, but the GNU successfully put a halt to the Budget Statement. The ANC has taken the Alliance partners for granted for some time now, like an old spouse. As the new spouse in the form of the GNU arrives on the scene, a lot of attention is redirected to them. The 30-year debate is however not an admission of defeat on the side of the Party; it is rather arrogance from the ANC, and undying love and tolerance from the Party, which has led to the mixed signals and speaking past each other. The reconfiguration of the Alliance has been on the table for over 22 years.
The ANC ’s failure to decisively act on corruption is the second bone of contention – that it has failed to resolve this to the people ’s contentment. Contesting elections by the Party will shake the ANC and bring forth a new discourse: what is this Alliance about?
Cde Oliver Tambo reminded us that the Alliance is not a paper arrangement. Its mission remains unfulfilled as the NDR has not been achieved. Some have spoken of a two-stage theory, where the ANC leads the first phase, which leads to the resolution of the national question, and the SACP leads the next phase of the NDR, leading to socialism. The SACP clarified this and came up with the slogan, Socialism is the future, Build in Now. Socialism must be built in the womb of capitalism. The current Alliance has failed to achieve the objectives of the NDR, instead, it is in regression. The constitutional democracy has promoted minority interests and undermined majority rule, failed to return the land to the people, and the economy has not been transformed. Capital flight continues to weaken the democracy, sharpen the fight between the working class and the ruling elite, leaving the real source of the problem, capital, unfazed.
The dual membership of the ANC and the SACP, in light of the SACP's decision to contest the state elections, at the surface, is workable, but in reality, it is too complex. The dual membership means that the ANC and the SACP must run their campaigns independently, with some level of collaboration at some point. Dual membership complicates this because, from nomination to messaging, the ANC and the SACP must run their campaigns in collaboration. What if members of the SACP are nominated and they become ANC candidates, and the SACP runs short of reliable and experienced candidates, which is a possibility? The dual membership could be the very last straw that breaks the camel ’s back. The current resolution puts strict candidate selection criteria:
“candidates must reflect the revolutionary spirit of the Party and show commitment to socialist principles, the working class and social change. […]The selection process will include deep lifestyle audits, ideological scrutiny and governance capability assessments to ensure that nominations go only to the most principled and competent people.”
In light of weaknesses highlighted by many organisational reports and recent analysis raised by Cde Buti and others, do we really have the cadres who qualify for this mammoth task? Or do we find ways to work around this resolution? What measures will we put in place to guard against mosquitoes getting inside the Party when we open the windows to plan and mobilise for the 2026 elections?
What is to be done?
The praxis of the past years has shrunk the voice of the Party to a tiny corner like a child who is seen and not heard. The Party has also grown fonder of the palace politics of who becomes the next pope and what position they can elevate Party cardinals to. As the pope ’s power and influence diminish and are lost, the Party grapples to answer the question: “What is to be done?” as Lenin asked. Or it seeks fast, easy solutions to a complex problem. The ANC is in confusion and temporary paralysis as it slowly sinks into the dark abyss of history as a result of the people ’s rejection. Can it take another rejection from its Alliance partner?
Decisions must be taken after a long and critical analysis based on the living experiences of the people informed by pure Marxist-Leninist theory. The SACP ’s fundamental acceptance of forging the Alliance in pursuit of the resolution of the national question, as highlighted by the Comintern, must be subjected to continuous engagement and analysis of this fundamental question of whether these alliances still serve the purpose of advancing and resolving the colonial and national question. Secondly, is the current formation and balance of power relevant as the driver of the National Democratic Revolution? Thirdly, is decay inevitable? Lastly, debate and theoretical sharpness must shape the Party at all material times.
The reconfiguration of the Alliance must be an active struggle.
The current formation of the Alliance puts more power of governance into the ANC in terms of government policy and strategic governance. It is either the Party effects change, or it changes to become what we are not, what I refer to as a pseudo metamorphosis. For the Party to make meaningful change, it must, at the least, change the power relations and take over as the leader of the Alliance to establish a socialist agenda. These contentions are natural. The ANC in the current political system will continue to be torn between itself, the Alliance and the GNU, with the Alliance taking a back seat.
Even if the ANC continues to remain as the leader of the Alliance and government, it will continue to manage the affairs of capital and perfect them. The Party cannot justify this relationship, which is becoming colder every day. The Party should strongly consider rearranging the Alliance from the inside. The ANC will not bring socialism. The leadership of the ANC will fight to retain the title of the leader of the Alliance, so should the Party. This totally changes the debate as well as the trajectory of history. The ANC has had 30 years in power and is now in sharp decline, and there are no intentions or signs of change. Scientifically, if nothing drastic changes, the ANC will be out of power if the current slide continues unabated. It has failed to challenge racial capitalism. Instead, the capitalist yoke has increased. The revolution needs to be defended, and it can no longer be defended in the manner it has been in the past 30 years. A new jockey, a new driver and a new leader in the Alliance are needed. The revolution is at stake.
Taking the baton and defending the YCLSA and SACP Mission and Vision
The left youth and the YCLSA, in particular, must rise to define their role in history as the future of the SACP that must grow and be ideologically astute and be impatient with the momentum of the current revolution, stagnation or take the famous one step forward and two steps back. The workers and the working class must choose their own path of liberation. Will it be that of acceptance of the status quo or that of shaking the very foundations of capitalist exploitation and oppression? The people themselves must now choose between capitalism and socialism. The current socio-economic conditions are the greatest catalyst for the people ’s revolution.
Our love of the Party compels us to be constantly critical of ourselves, by the very fact that we are human and cannot always be right. We make mistakes, but we are corrected by our revolutionary theory. It is therefore important to go back to basics.
The Party must listen to all views, debates and critiques to make the best choices at any given moment.
Rigorous Marxist-Leninist political education must be strengthened to guard the Party against political charlatans and to grow future communists.
The Party's independence must always dictate the decisions of the Party, free from individual interests within the Party or the Alliance partners.
The collective wisdom of all Party members must be respected within the principle of rigorous, continuous analysis in order to guide the Party through these murky waters.
The Party must embrace criticism and self-criticism as a Party defence mechanism.
The building of the Party machinery, recruitment, political education and conversion of quantity to quality must always be an active action of both leadership and membership. The building of a stronger Party on the ground is critical.
A better Party must emerge from the cocoon of its former self. A better Party must rise and lead the working class to socialism. Let ’s all rise and fight. Socialism in South Africa is inevitable.
Cde Gwala is a member of the PEC and PWC Moses Mabhida (KZN), a researcher and an academic.
A failure of discipline?
Itumeleng Segalo
The first paragraph tells you about Cde Buti Manamela's attitude, posture and position on the decision of the 15th Party Congress to contest state power, and he is clearly opposed to the Congress decision despite the fact that he was part of the Congress when the decision was made.
But why now? The decision was made in July 2022 by the 15th Congress and even endorsed by meetings of the 15th Congress Central Committee (CC), Augmented CC, Politburo and all official structures of the Party including the Party 's Special Congress in December 2024 in which Cde Manamela participated.
It's a pity we don't know when he wrote this piece. Was it written as part of the contestation of ideas within the Party before or during one of these meetings?
Just for argument sake, if he wrote this piece recently, or now, then his becomes a question of a lack of revolutionary discipline. All communists are expected to observe revolutionary communist discipline, the basics of which among others includes political discipline, ideological discipline, organisational discipline and personal discipline. As for the time it was written, let's agree that Cde Manamela as a CC member is expected to defend, advance and implement Congress's decision – but now this! A clear sign of failure to observe both political and organisational discipline.
And now let's come to some of the points he makes in his piece. He opposes the Party's contestation of state power resolution mainly on the basis of organisational capacity.
Let's talk about this organisational capacity. When this resolution was made, very thorough discussions were undertaken on the political and organisational reports of the SACP in almost all the meetings referred to earlier, and the Party honestly admitted our organisational weaknesses - and resolutions as well as plans to rectify all these weaknesses and to strengthen the Party were made and are being implemented at the moment.
SACP activists are rebuilding structures of the Party in all our Provinces, Districts, branches, YCLSA, Chris Hani Red Brigades etc. So, the question of the Party's organisational capacity can't be approached mechanically like Buti Manamela and all those who agree with him are doing. A dialectical and materialist analysis of the Party's capacity would not only concentrate on weaknesses but would also look at strengths and all that is being made to improve the capacity of the Party. And it's also a narrow analysis that overlooks the fact that the Party's approach to contestation of state power will include forming Popular Left Fronts, because this is also an element of capacity building for the Party.
Lastly, Cde Manamela again speaks about what should structures of the Party be doing to mobilise and do work amongst the masses as well as in the sectoral struggles of our people, and correctly we'll agree with him there, surely. And these struggles will surely be ongoing, whether we contest state power or not. The Party will continue to mobilise the masses for a socialist future.
Cde Segalo is District Secretary of Caleb Motshabi
Rebuilding with clarity, not illusion
Masonwabe Sokoyi
Cde Buti Manamela ’s recent reflection, An Army of Generals? Reflections on the SACP ’s Political Capacity and the Crisis of Hegemony, comes at a critical juncture for the SACP and the broader liberation movement. It is a sincere intervention that advocates for political realism, ideological sobriety, and revolutionary humility.
The tone and content convey an urgent warning: we must not conflate mere movement with genuine momentum, nor should we presume that we can contest state power solely based on historical legacy or sentiment. These assertions are valid and warrant a response not from a place of defensiveness, but from a commitment to truth and the struggles of the working class.
Let me start with this: the SACP's decision to contest elections was not a spontaneous reaction to contemporary frustrations. It represents one of the most thoughtfully considered and debated decisions in the post-apartheid history of the Party. As early as 2002, during the 11th National Congress, the Party began to seriously reflect upon the nature of state power and whether the Alliance as it was then constituted remained the most effective vehicle for advancing the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
Over the past two decades, this debate has matured, deepened, and sharpened, culminating in the firm decision by the 5th Special National Congress to contest the 2026 local government elections. To characterise this decision as illusory or ill-timed is to disregard the political journey that has led us here.
For 22 years, the SACP remained within the Alliance, advancing proposals for its reconfiguration in good faith. The 2019 Alliance Reconfiguration Document, ratified through collective processes, was one such attempt. However, it was met with dismissal and undermined by a unilateral shift towards a vague “Renewed Alliance” concept an evasive manoeuvre designed not to enhance working-class power, but to centralise elite control.
The SACP ’s electoral decision does not constitute a betrayal of the Alliance; rather, it reaffirms the very principles upon which the Alliance was founded. We remain committed to the Alliance as a strategic instrument of the NDR. We assert that the Alliance must be upheld not merely as a symbolic arrangement, but as a living expression of class cooperation rooted in mutual respect. This necessitates the protection, rather than the dilution, of the independence of each constituent. The notion that effective allies must forfeit their own identity or programme is fundamentally anti-revolutionary.
Unity cannot be established based on silence, nor sustained through one-sided discipline. Often, the Alliance has become synonymous with deployment, dual membership, and political patronage, thereby undermining its revolutionary significance. The Alliance is not a mechanism for deployment; it was forged in the crucible of the people's struggle not for positions, but for power. If the Alliance cannot evolve to reflect this original mandate, then the SACP must take action. Our decision to contest elections is not intended to weaken the Alliance, but to restore its credibility by affirming that our loyalty lies with the working class, not the management of the capitalist state.
Cde Buti rightly reminds us that the enemy is not Cyril Ramaphosa, nor Jacob Zuma preceding him. The enemy is the capitalist system - its exploitative logic, institutional power, and domination over the working class. On this issue, we are in full agreement. However, the political managers of this system cannot be divorced from it. When our comrades in government implement austerity measures, weaken the public sector, privatise strategic assets, and demobilise the working class, they do not act in isolation. These are class-based decisions, not neutral ones. Our analysis must remain structural, but our critique must also be specific.
The Party has no illusions about its current state. We are not entering the electoral arena as a fully functioning machine. Our branch activities have been inconsistent, our ideological work has diminished, and our presence in key sites of struggle is uneven. These are not new challenges, but they should not serve as reasons for retreat. Revolutionary organisations do not await perfection before taking action; they grow stronger through struggle. We do not contest elections as an alternative to mass mobilisation but to deepen it.
The 5th Special Congress commits the Party to a multidimensional programme of action: rebuilding Red Brigades, reviving the Young Communist League (YCL), engaging with informal workers and social movements, and using the campaign trail not to make promises but to organise.
The working class is not waiting passively; it is seeking political leadership rooted in its lived experience. Whether in the form of precarious workers, township youth, overloaded nurses, or landless families, the need for a militant, organised force has never been clearer.
Thus, the capitalist crisis continues to intensify while the space for working-class voices within formal institutions diminishes. If the SACP fails to rise to this moment, we risk ceding that space to populists, ethnic entrepreneurs, or religious conservatism.
Cde Buti ’s metaphor of “an army of generals without soldiers” is evocative, but it does not convey the complete narrative. There are indeed soldiers. They may be dispersed, disillusioned, and at times disorganised, but they exist. The Party's responsibility is not to mourn their absence, but to reforge the bond between the vanguard and the masses. This necessitates humility, discipline, and struggle not mere rhetoric or nostalgia.
Now is not the moment for delay; it is imperative to act with revolutionary clarity. The SACP contests the 2026 elections not as an act of desperation, but as an act of determination. We do so not in opposition to the ANC, but to serve the working class. We do so not out of ambition, but out of duty. Furthermore, we do so not to undermine the Alliance, but to salvage it from degeneration.
Cde Sokoyi is the SACP Western Cape Deputy Provincial Secretary. He is completing a PhD in Theoretical Economics at Peking University, China
Marching towards the SACP electoral contest – despite the army constrained by some reluctant or conflicted generals
PJ Mnguni
"We are not militarists but armed militants" Amílcar Cabral
Recently, an article circulated in the media penned by Cde Buti Manamela. The piece is titled “An army of generals? Reflections on the SACP’s political capacity and the crisis of hegemony”
Notwithstanding the shenanigans about how a product by a Party leader critical of the Party can be launched in public without the benefit of it being channelled intra-Party, the article has subsequently landed in the Party following its tabling within the ANC. An array of responses to Cde Manamela by comrades in their own capacities has since flooded the public domain.
The last Central Committee meeting, in discussing the Political Report, also saw some further reference to the article, in obvious engagement. This is a response meant for Party debates on Cde Manamela’s article.
The long background to the Party resolution on contesting state power
The debate about whether the SACP should contest Elections in its own right has a history spanning beyond two decades, with various epochs and milestones. Since the unbanning, during the Interim Leadership Group period preceding the 8th Party Congress of 1991, through the 8th Congress Central Committee, to the SACP-published resignation letter by the late Cde Mlaba Molantoa following the Party decision to contest through the ANC platform. The then CC’s decision is well documented in Party journals of the time.
For purposes of this piece, however, one jumps to capture the latest Party Resolution to independently contest Elections starting from the 2026 Local Government Elections. This position had particularly gained the majority support since the 14th Congress in 2017, and it was crystallised in the 15th Congress. The subsequent Augmented Central Committee and the 5th Special National Congress held in December 2024 sealed the position further, refining the parameters of wall-to-wall contesting and setting the timeline as the 2026 local government elections.
All said and done, notwithstanding their individual pre-resolution debate positions, this is where the Party stands, and it is where all disciplined Party members as revolutionaries, are expected to be - in outlook, articulation/s, and public postures - to the best of their abilities!
Admittedly, throughout the debate, Party leaders had been more cautious of the Party contesting than the rank and file membership in leading up to the final resolution. Yes, this may be interpreted to suggest that the ‘army’ has been more resolute than its ‘generals’. This has not been without its consequences, though, be it the Metsimaholo case or various splinters like in the Alfred Nzo District, or the case of Numsa-aligned Socialist Workers’ Party.
The glaring shortcomings of Cde Manamela’s article:
1. Space and time dimensions of the disciplinary lapse
It is absurd for Cde Buti, a CC Member, to spectacularly miss the timelines within which to pen and submit his thoughts to his Party. He writes as if he was neither at the 15th Congress (2022), nor Augmented CC (April 2023), nor at the 5th Special National Congress (December 2024) - how absurd. Can this be an honest political timeline miss by such an otherwise towering intellectual?! Here it is strongly suggested that such an article has no more space to be entertained by the Party, in relation to the resolutions the Party took, which are there and binding.
The other dimension worth critiquing is the space aspect of the article. Very rarely has it ever happened that a national leader of the Party engages in a critique of its Congress resolution, first and foremost in public platforms, then in the ANC where he also leads, and very lastly in the Party itself. Communists are meant to be very alert to spatial manifestation of their engagements. How absurd it is for this particular leader to go out and criticise the Party in public for all to see (is it perhaps for some forces out here to see him as messiah to redeem the Party from his imaginary demise?!).
All said and done and as illustrated by the above two paragraphs, the Manamela article is a piece demonstrating a lapse of communist discipline, otherwise it couldn't have come into the public by March 2025, and still be deemed a proper communist intervention. It simply fails the time-space discipline test tool in the revolutionary fraternity. The Party song that goes "aqeqeshiwe amakomanisi … ngendlela yawo eyodwa" (communists have the highest levels of training and discipline) couldn't have been negated more than by this unfortunate lapse of discipline.
1. Content deep-dive on some substance-free aspects of the article
It is unimaginable-cum-perplexing, how such negative insinuations could be implied by a cadre of Manamela’s calibre in his article while referring to the Party. He insinuates a range of far-fetched propositions from - “illusions”, “ruptures that aren’t revolutions”, “capacity shrink” for the Party, “depoliticised YCL”, “lack of strength and ideological cohesion”, “army barracks fixing with lost sight of the enemy”, “lack of strategic vision”, praise-singing “the enemy not being CR or JZ”, and so on - this is the political terrain on which the “Army Generals” author swings. Where has he been? Has he been hibernating or sleepwalking? Can this author have been part of Party life in the recent past? The questions beg!
In the article, Cde Manamela subtly challenges the Alliance reconfiguration that is espoused even by his ANC that he also leads, by denouncing electoral contests, and even parliamentary representation. He sets himself apart from the Marxist-Leninist principles of understanding the state as the greatest concentration of power in society, or as an organ of class rule, and the like. The “Army Generals” author clearly should be keen to visit recent electoral contests by communists in England and Canada, for instance (both in April 2025) and denounce those Communist Parties as engaging in a futile exercise.
The author suggests that some correct on-going work among the working class masses is equal to socialist transformation of society, the classrooms, clinics, townships, etc, so all that as long as you don’t tamper with political power, political representation. Really?!
Space will not permit an exhaustive reflection on the Party posture, the local government electoral contest resolution, the Party’s current location in working class struggles and society - thus separate work is necessary for such stock-taking, especially to really update the public. Post all CC Meetings, press briefings have been held, outlining in concrete ideological terms of the Party’s reports, environmental scanning, and course-of-action to be pursued by the Party. Contrary to Cde Buti’s assertion of the decline in the Party and YCLSA (which decline he sees to have happened over the last 10–15years - since he left as its YCLSA’s National Secretary?!).
In short, the 15th Congress appreciated the Party to have grown from 284,000 at the time of the 14th National Congress of July 2017 to 339,000 in July 2022 at the 15th Congress to 370,000 in membership at the 5th SNC - so where is the decline, if not imaginary?!. It would be Hegelian (upside-down) to project such impressive growth as a decline. The Party and YCLSA, with the Red Brigades on board across the country, have been hard at work campaigning for the ANC right up to the 2024 National and Provincial Elections. Did the author not see them? Day in, day out, the Party and YCLSA are holding programmes across the districts though there may be some weak areas, and we need to consolidate this work even deeper.
As part of Cosatu, the communists’ guidance and ideological grounding stand rooted. Has Cde Buti’s critique not followed the recently held elective congresses in the provinces? A closer examination shows ideological work taking place among the organised workers led by the Federation, while it is correct to concede there’s room for further consolidation.
The Party itself has been embarking on community development work in villages, leading to self-sustainability initiatives, be it in Matibidi in Mpumalanga, Tseseng in the Free State, Dzumeri in Limpopo, and in countless other communities across the country - all without even the state’s involvement. The Party is alive, the Party has taken engagements with the poor to new levels – the Party stands as their beacon of hope.
It is absurd to receive an article by a Party leader, that is deafeningly silent about the massive unemployment, the sky-high cost of living, the crisis of social reproduction (with such high crime rates), the ever-increasing denial of access to equitable health care for the majority, and such deep, deep realities that the working class faces against the backdrop of the highest Gini co-efficient in the World.
3. Army Exists Albeit with Reluctance of Some Generals (to heed the Call to War)
Whatever happened to him, Cde Buti doesn’t conceive of the existence of the working class as the big army poised to fight until it defeats capitalism and imperialism. Well, Marxism-Leninism spells this clearly! The Party whose vanguard role he questions is historically tasked to spearhead the revolution by the masses themselves, and, thus, if Cde Manamela concedes the existence of such “generals”, it is prudent to show him the existence of the “army”, and thus his proposition stands disproved!
Are the generals combat-ready?! Where the stock of all objective factors is taken, clearly the trend would be to the state of “generals”. While disciplined, dedicated Party Leaders are busy cascading the resolution on election participation and mapping the best ways to chart the way forward, some generals are sleeping on duty. These are the generals who have not explored the terrain, have not serviced their army units, have not led by any example, are groping in the dark about the state of the Party, and are ultimately mechanical in conceiving Party building and campaigning as preconditions to the Party engaging in revolution. The dialectical method instructs that while the “barracks are fixed”, in the same vein, the ideological and strategic tasks are unfolded, in an integrated manner.
The conjunctural imperatives and the peace war morale
With this caption goes the long-standing slogan of “Forward to the War against War, to End all Wars, Forward!”. This merely depicts a revolutionary/ defensive war meant to defend the working class against the neoliberal/ bourgeois war agenda, such that from the point of victory of the working class, a peaceful society would be born where no more war would be desirable or necessary. Of course, veering away from the war-talk, this means the revolutionary activism or movement against the counter-revolutionary (imperialist, capitalist, neo-colonial) onslaught.
The conjuncture, as having been characterised by the Party all along, consists in our rejection of neoliberalism in the political-economic space underlying the national and gender questions. Poor black women continue to bear the brunt of triple oppression by which is meant race, class and gender exploitation. The fundamental structure of the South African economy merely remains slightly modified with elements of the Irish-coffee syndrome than being transformed to any useful extent since the dawn of the democratic breakthrough. For us as Marxists, the base being the mode of production defines the nature of the superstructure, ranging from media, education, religion, health, political system and all such major facets of Society.
The GNU (Government of National Unity) has been rejected by our Party, especially because of its espousal of the mouthpiece of our class enemy, capital. Thus, the DA, being our strategic opponent, cannot have our blessings to form part of our acceptable government. Various other factors underlie our rejection of the DA and thereby the GNU. The Alliance reconfiguration has been our call for close to a decade now. Through this, we seek to define the Alliance as the political centre of the revolutionary forces. For quite a long period, the ANC, as the party under whose banner we contest the elections as the Alliance has, however, conveniently run away with our collective power, leaving the components on the sidelines.
The local government terrain remains the coalface of governance, closest to our people. The fiasco at that level of our governance system continues to be very strife-torn with shrunk budgets, inaccurate assumptions in its White Paper, and overall carrying the weight of the failures of the government system. Everything and anything that our people need seems to be directed at the door of this face of government, which itself leads to so many unfunded mandates. The higher levels of government often pose as big brothers ready to whip the “black sheep” with Section 139 interventions and such punitive measures rather than assistance. It is here that the Party has to politically contest in the first instance in order to rise against the big elephant in the room. The Party has to be the last line of defence of our people who face the government ills like corruption, silo-planning, tenderpreneurship, inefficiencies, and so forth.
Consciousness: Self Service or Selflessness?!
Rise Up or Forever Keep Your Peace, as the saying goes, is the moment facing the Party now. This testing moment could have defined whether the Party is going to continue to exist (perhaps as some weak lobby group and/or debating society) or to rise up and stand on its feet as the vanguard of the working class struggles, also through raising the independent voice of the class in the contested terrain of governance power relations.
The dual membership system (ANC and SACP), while brought about through the historical evolution of our revolution, was also influenced by the nature of our society. It has meant that some Party leaders doubled up as ANC leaders in their own right, right through to national level. This means that with the dual membership system, some Party leaders (generals), especially those serving in government deployments, have tended to have their consciousness informed by their location.
So now with the Party contesting, some of those affected cadres have tended to be biased towards their personal interests - self-service. Proper political consciousness dictates that the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary has to at all material times subject their personal interests to those of the vanguard Party of the class. Now in traversing this discussion, it is to be proven ultimately whether some of our Party leaders (generals) have become confused, conflicted or biased towards their self-interests/ self-service.
Drawing towards a conclusion, therefore, it stands to be tested by time whether the national aspects of the class struggle and class aspects of the national struggle would sway the balance in any particular manner for communist revolutionaries, to align in the Party Elections work. Every cadre stands to be tested and recorded by history - the army exists, is there and awaits the readiness of generals to lead the army.
Cde PJ Mnguni is an SACP Central Committee member
An army without generals – a reply to Cde Manamela.
Mabuse Mpe
The SACP articulated the need to maintain the anti-capitalist class struggle by defending the working class and the poor. The 15th National Congress reshaped the Party, remodelled it in line with the teachings of our former General Secretary, Cde Chris Hani on what we mean by socialism in South Africa. Amongst the adopted programmes, came the Community Development Programme as part of the South African Struggle for Socialism document, as with the document Going to the Root. Our decision to contest elections is not for ourselves but for the elevation of the working-class voice and against the crisis of its representation.
To adhere to accountability to the people and control of the Party, it was envisioned that this is a people’s cause. Linked to a popular base, this is the idea that the SACP is now shifting from a mere passive participant to an active electoral contestant on behalf of the class it represents.
Consolidation of the SACP’s political strategy is to advance socialist ideals and move away from ideological weaknesses and firmly represent the working class through the forms of mobilising society and our people to rally behind the struggle for socialism. Through the Community Development Programme, we can safely say the army is there - maybe the debate can be: do we have the generals to issue instructions and guide the army?
For the SACP to have an electoral platform is an alternative path of people's representation in local government, as part of transforming it to serve the people and not the political elites. The other trend, first outlined by Marx and Engels, and then elaborated by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, argues for a revolutionary overthrow of the state, based upon the mass struggles of the working class, and its replacement by new organs of workers’ power. The implementation of the 2024 Special National Congress resolutions, especially on electoral contestation, is aimed at reshaping the organs of people's power from the grassroots level. Grassroots consolidation of power deals with our people’s daily efforts to overcome the brutal reality of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
The Party has acknowledged some organisational weaknesses which in fact all other political parties may be facing; however, our intention is to assert the independent profile of the Party and reaffirm the working class as the motive force of the revolution.
Our resolution to contest the local government elections and beyond is the task to organise the working classes politically and develop them as conscious socialist activists to fight for the people's peace and democracy and intensify efforts to transform the state in the direction of a people's democracy.
Throughout their political lives, Marx and Engels argued that the working class – whatever its size and state of development – must organise itself independently as a class "and consequently into a political party," as the Communist Manifesto states. Just months later, during the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe, Marx and Engels, as leading members of a small group of socialists in the Communist League, participated in the revolution in Germany as the far-left wing of the radical bourgeois-democratic movement. With only a few hundred members across Europe, the League was simply not big enough to assert itself as an independent force. But during the revolution, it became clear to Marx that, due to the cowardly and tentative nature of the radical middle-class elements, it would be necessary for the working class to organise independently to safeguard its own class interests.
The electoral platform serves as a place to manoeuvre and safeguard the rights and dignity of our people. As over the years we moved away from being a people-centred democratic government and transitioned to being a bureaucratic elitist state that only serves the few privileged.
If the army general issues wrong instructions or lacks the political will to engage in a battle, this may be detrimental and demoralise the soldiers.
Over the years, Party structures, including the YCLSA (from the time of its re-establishment congress) called for the SACP to contest elections, unfortunately the Army Generals always demobilised the soldiers for socialism. In essence, taking some points from comrade Buti Manamela’s article, probably his theming was wrong. The party cadres as activists must allow themselves to be the primary agents of change for the revolution. The Party at this conjunctural phase has developed new forms of asserting itself amongst the people through its unique campaigns that directly respond to the daily struggles of our people.
This will overcome the captured neoliberal institutions of local governance ideologies, rules, policies and practices, which serve to rot and decay our democratic institutions. Through the SACP we will witness the social accountability of a Left-rooted form of local government, which is a product of consensus engagements and not imposition of the decisions on the people.
The SACP is asserting itself in the working class through hegemonic programmes such as the People's Red Caravan programme, which is a response to the dire situation facing our rural communities. We have a responsibility to defend and advance the National Democratic Revolution in the quest for a socialist society. In the year in which we celebrate 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, we commit to reconnect with our people and build a strong Party presence in different communities.
Our communities must be part of providing solutions to the challenges facing them and the need to change our weaknesses into strong points.
However, that doesn’t translate into the Generals that are without an army. Rather, we are building socialism from the grassroots and taking a collective journey with the people. Go to a battle with the army instead of helicoptering community interventions.
Comrade Mpe is a Central Committee member
Advancing the National Democratic Revolution: the urgent case for the SACP to contest state power
Dloze Matooane
The National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the lodestar of South Africa’s liberation struggle, stands at a perilous crossroads. Envisioned as the vanguard of a transformative project to dismantle the edifice of racial capitalism and forge a non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic society, the NDR is today imperilled by the very organisation entrusted with its stewardship – the ANC.
The ANC’s descent into factionalism, indiscipline, corruption, and ideological duplicity - professing left-wing rhetoric while embracing right-wing praxis - has not only compromised the NDR but threatens to derail the historic mission of the South African working class. As the SACP, the vanguard of the proletariat and steadfast ally in the Tripartite Alliance, confronts this betrayal, the revolutionary imperative is clear: the SACP must contest state power independently, starting with the 2026 local government elections, to rescue the NDR and deliver on the promises of the Freedom Charter.
The NDR – a revolutionary framework betrayed
The NDR, as articulated in the ANC’s 1969 Morogoro Conference and refined through the SACP’s theoretical contributions, is a Marxist-Leninist strategy rooted in the two-stage theory of revolution. The first stage, the national democratic struggle, seeks to dismantle colonial and apartheid structures, establishing a democratic state as a precondition for the second stage: the socialist revolution. Cde Joe Slovo, in his seminal 1988 work The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution, underscored that the NDR is not merely a stepping stone but a class-driven project requiring the leadership of the working class to prevent bourgeois co-optation.
Cde OR Tambo, in his 1985 address to the ANC’s NEC, affirmed that the NDR’s success hinges on the unity of revolutionary forces, particularly the ANC, SACP, and Cosatu, to advance the Freedom Charter’s vision of shared wealth and power.
Yet, South Africa’s contemporary challenges - persistent inequality, high unemployment exceeding, land dispossession, and crumbling public services - reflect the NDR’s stagnation. These are not mere policy failures but systemic betrayals of the revolutionary project. The ANC’s governance has entrenched a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, a parasitic class dependent on state tenders and corruption, as noted in the ANC’s own 2007 Strategy and Tactics document. This class, far from advancing the NDR, entrenches capitalist exploitation under the guise of “transformation.” The ANC’s failure to nationalise key industries, redistribute land, or decommodify public goods like healthcare and education, as envisioned in the Freedom Charter, reveals a deliberate retreat from the NDR’s socialist horizon.
The ANC’s counter-revolutionary conduct
The ANC’s current behaviour is a frontal assault on the NDR’s principles. Factionalism, as seen in the vicious contests for power since the 2007 Polokwane Conference, has fractured the organisation, prioritising patronage over revolutionary discipline. The Moerane Commission (2018) exposed how factional battles in KwaZulu-Natal, driven by control over resources like eThekwini’s budget, have fuelled political assassinations, undermining the ANC’s claim to moral leadership. Corruption, epitomised by the Zondo Commission’s revelations of state capture under Jacob Zuma, has siphoned billions from the public purse, eroding service delivery and public trust.
The ANC’s electoral decline - plummeting to 40.18% in the 2024 general election - signals mass disillusionment, yet the party remains impervious to self-correction.
Most egregious is the ANC’s ideological duplicity: speaking left while acting right. While mouthing commitments to the NDR, the ANC has embraced neoliberal policies, from Gear (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) in 1996 to the austerity budgets of the Ramaphosa era. These policies, which prioritise fiscal discipline over social investment, contradict the SACP’s vision of a socialised economy where private profit is subordinated to public need.
The ANC’s claim to revolutionary credentials is further undermined by its opportunistic alliances, notably the Government of National Unity (GNU) with the DA, a reactionary force committed to preserving white monopoly capital. The ANC’s failure to consult its Tripartite Alliance partners before entering this coalition, its insistence on retaining the DA despite COSATU and SACP opposition, and the DA’s reaction to the 2025 budget, reveal a contemptuous disregard for revolutionary unity. As Cde Tambo warned in 1979, “Unity is the weapon of victory”; and the ANC’s actions fracture this weapon, treating alliance partners as orphans rather than comrades.
The DA’s brazen opportunism and shameless hijacking of collective victories expose its reactionary character. From the defeat of apartheid to the establishment of democratic institutions and the progress of progressive policies since 1994, these triumphs were forged through the blood and sacrifice of the broader liberation movement, including the SACP’s intellectual leadership and COSATU’s mass mobilisation.
Yet, since entering the GNU in 2024, the DA’s propaganda machine has audaciously claimed credit for progress achieved by prior administrations, peddling a revisionist narrative that erases the contributions of revolutionary forces. This deceitful appropriation not only distorts history but undermines the collective spirit essential to the NDR‘s advance, revealing the DA as parasitic hijackers of progress who serve the interests of white monopoly capital.
The SACP – vanguard of the NDR
The SACP, as the ideological and organisational vanguard of the working class, is uniquely positioned to rescue the NDR from the ANC’s betrayal. Rooted in Marxist-Leninist principles, the SACP has consistently advocated for a radical restructuring of South Africa’s political economy. Its 2017 decision to contest by-elections in Metsimaholo municipality marked a historic break from the ANC’s electoral monopoly, demonstrating the Party’s readiness to challenge the status quo. The SACP’s programme, articulated in documents like The Road to South African Socialism, prioritises decommodification, nationalisation of strategic sectors, and land reform - policies that align with the Freedom Charter and address the material needs of the working class.
Contesting state power independently is not a rejection of the Tripartite Alliance but a revolutionary necessity. The ANC’s co-optation by capital and its alienation from the masses have rendered it an unreliable vehicle for the NDR. As Cde Slovo argued, the working class must lead the democratic revolution to prevent its dilution by bourgeois forces. By entering the electoral arena, starting with the 2026 local government elections, the SACP can mobilise workers, youth, and the marginalised to reclaim the NDR’s transformative agenda. Local government, where service delivery failures are most acute, offers a strategic entry point to demonstrate the SACP’s commitment to participatory democracy and accountability.
Challenges and the path forward
The challenges facing the NDR mirror those confronting South Africa: entrenched inequality, unemployment, and the persistence of colonial economic structures. The ANC’s compromises with capital have exacerbated these crises, deepening the chasm between the ruling elite and the working class. The GNU with the DA threatens to further entrench neoliberalism, undermining the NDR’s goal of economic emancipation. The SACP must counter these threats by building a mass-based movement that galvanises workers, rural communities, and the urban poor around a socialist programme.
The SACP’s electoral strategy must be accompanied by robust grassroots organising, as seen in the 1980s “people’s power” movement. By fostering participatory structures, the SACP can empower communities to hold elected representatives accountable, countering the ANC’s top-down vanguardism. The Party must also strengthen its alliance with COSATU, leveraging the trade union movement’s organisational capacity to mobilise workers against austerity and corruption.
A revolutionary call to action
The time for half-measures is over. The ANC’s betrayal of the NDR demands a bold, revolutionary response. The SACP’s decision to contest state power is a clarion call to every worker, revolutionary, and South African committed to justice and equality. As Cde Tambo declared in 1986, “The struggle is our life.” By supporting the SACP in the 2026 local government elections, we reclaim the struggle from the clutches of opportunists and liars. We honour the sacrifices of those who fell under the banner of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Freedom Charter, and the red flag of socialism.
Some of us from within the movement openly call for all progressive forces to rally behind the SACP, the true vanguard of the NDR, to build a South Africa where the wealth of the land is shared by those who work it, where the doors of learning and culture are open to all, and where the people govern. The revolutionary road is arduous, but as Cde Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” With the SACP at the helm, the NDR will triumph, and the socialist future will dawn.
Cde Matooane is the former National Spokesperson and International Relations Secretary of the Liberated Metal Workers Union of South Africa (LIMUSA), former National Spokesperson of the YCLSA, and current Assistant Editor of The International Magazine.
Clarity in the storm: the SACP, elections, and the working class – a rejoinder to An Army of Generals
Buti Manamela
“We march along a difficult and narrow path, surrounded by enemies. Some urge us to abandon the struggle and retreat into the marsh of compromise. But we chose this path — not to retreat, but to fight.” — After V.I. Lenin, What is To Be Done?
There are those who believe this debate belongs in backrooms and boardrooms, confined to the internal processes of plenaries and leadership structures. That strategy should remain the domain of committees, that clarity must await consensus from above.
But, as The African Communist reminded us in 1992 in introducing the debate on the ‘Sunset Clauses’— and as we must reaffirm today — the debate belongs to the people. It belongs to the working class and the poor, in whose name we speak. Not to self-replicating elites, nor insulated leadership circles. This rejoinder is offered in that spirit.
My earlier intervention was never about opposing the decision to contest elections — that much should be clear. If anything, the reactions it sparked — from comrades Segalo and Masonwabe’s concern for organisation, Lazola’s call for audacity, Barry’s plea for dialectical balance, Mafika’s caution, and even Sifiso’s ideological wanderings — reflect precisely why the debate needs to happen. It was not about whether to contest, but rather how to contest, for whom we contest, and on what basis the SACP ought to enter the electoral terrain.
What is emerging, and what must be grasped clearly, is that revolutionary strategy is neither an act of adventurism nor an exercise in eternal caution. We cannot simply declare readiness because of the weight of a resolution, nor can we delay action endlessly for fear of missteps.
Revolutionary organisation requires revolutionary clarity — the hard, disciplined, patient, but courageous work of building structures, earning trust, educating the working class, and rooting our electoral input in the living struggles of the working class and poor. This is not about clever slogans or tactical flexibility alone. It is about forging a Party that is ready not just to contest for votes — but to contest for power.
But my intervention, as I will show, was about raising hard questions about our readiness — organisationally, ideologically, and politically — to make our electoral decision count for the class. Much of the debate it provoked has been helpful, even where sharp - a longstanding communist tradition. But we must now move beyond the polemics of timing or tone. The decision has been made. The real task lies ahead: translating that decision into disciplined, rooted, revolutionary work — not by imitating bourgeois parties, but by building a Party of the working class, for the working class.
Any Fool Can Charge Into a Lion’s Den Armed with a Toothpick
Contesting elections is not difficult. Setting up election structures, filing candidate lists, printing pamphlets, even winning a few seats — this is not the challenge. Anyone can charge into a lion’s den armed with a toothpick and call it courage.
The real question is: what of the working class? What of the Party as a reliable and trusted weapon of the working class and the poor — not only towards elections but beyond them?
If we do not confront this question now — theoretically, politically and organisationally — then the danger is clear: we may find ourselves on the ballot in 2026, but absent from the hearts and minds of those we claim to represent.
A Resolution is Not a Revolution, Nor an Article of Faith
This is not a debate about should we or should we not contest. That debate has long been settled, going as far back as the 2005 Special National Congress. We debated. We resolved. We assessed readiness. We delayed — not out of fear, but because the objective conditions, organisational capacity and strategic timing were not aligned.
What is new is the context: a fragmented working class (Masonwabe), a deteriorating Alliance (Lazola), a crisis of political legitimacy, and an ANC losing its electoral grip. But a new context does not automatically mean new capacity (as I assume we all agree).
To march ahead without rebuilding our organisation — ideologically, politically, and structurally — would be to repeat the very mistakes we warn against.
As Lenin cautioned in What Is to Be Done?, we must not confuse movement with progress. The “marsh” he warned of is precisely the descent into electoralism without mass work, slogans without political education, visibility without roots.
Beyond the Ballot: Will the Working Class Be With Us?
Our most urgent question is not whether the Party will be on the ballot in 2026. It is whether the working class will be with us.
Are we contesting to ‘show' the ANC? To 'teach it a lesson'? Or are we contesting to build and assert working-class power in every site of struggle — workplaces, communities, campuses, unions, informal settlements, and in the everyday life of the poor?
Without mass work, without a compelling socialist alternative, without visibility in the lived struggles of the class — we risk becoming just another electoral option, not a revolutionary force.
We have avoided much of the populist rot and ideological bankruptcy that defines South Africa’s political space. But consistency alone cannot shield us from strategic drift. Nor can it compensate for organisational atrophy.
Urgent Strategic Tasks: From Resolution to Revolution
The Central Committee has mandated us not just to implement a resolution, but to ready the Party for revolutionary work in the electoral terrain. That work is urgent. It is serious. And it cannot be improvised.
Some critical tasks before us:
- Feedback from the Ground: Engage workplaces, unions, student formations, street committees, community structures. Test whether the class recognises itself in us and develop an appropriate programme to build support.
- Clarify Our Message: Why are we contesting? What kind of governance do we stand for? What is our socialist/communist alternative to, for instance, austerity, unemployment, hunger, and inequality?
- Rebuild Organisational Discipline: Our headquarters must become a campaign centre — integrating communications, education, mobilisation, research, and legal support.
- Appoint Full-Time Organisers: District organisers must drive both branch revival and campaign discipline. The Central Committee itself must lead branch rebuilding.
- Launch the People’s Red Caravan: Use this as a platform for political education, community profiling, mobilisation, and parliamentary engagement.
- Engage the Non-Voting Majority: 27 million South Africans did not vote. Who are they? Where are they? Why did they stay away? If we do not understand them, we cannot mobilise them – again, we need the right sort of programme to accomplish this.
- Candidate Development: Vetting, training, and accountability mechanisms must be clear. Where community activists seek to contest under our banner, we must develop criteria to enable this.
- Popularise Our Identity: A clear visual and political identity, rooted in mass work, must accompany this campaign.
This is not about being perfect but about being serious.
Avoiding the Marsh, Holding the Red Line
There is a temptation to blend in. To dilute our politics. To retreat into easy populism or electoral sloganeering. Some even suggest that if other political parties could muster a respectable electoral showing without having the organisational muscle that we currently have, then we should basically be okay, thus entrenching the narrow paths of bourgeois electoralism. Calling for the SACP to adapt to contest elections not in its own terms, but copying its logic, chasing visibility, seats, coalitions, instead of building independent working-class power. As Rosa Luxemburg warned, ‘the worst thing that can befall a revolutionary movement is not defeat, but by becoming indistinguishable from its enemies’
The working class does not need ‘just another party’ on the ballot. It needs a weapon — one it can wield, trust and recognise as its own.
Let’s not confuse being on the ballot with being in the class. Let’s not substitute electoral presence for revolutionary work. Let others peddle promises that they cannot deliver. Our task is to build working-class power, not only to enter the state but to transform it.
If we are to hold the red line — against neo-liberalism, against what our SACP General Secretary refers to as betrayal of the NDR, against the crisis of working class representation — we must do so with discipline, courage, and unity.
The path ahead is difficult. But it is the only one worth walking. A journey that will require more than just a toothpick.
Umsebenzi Online is an online voice of the South African working class
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