Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor

18 July 2022

South African Communist Party

15^th National Congress

Boksburg, 13 to 16 July 2022

Declaration, adopted on 16 July 2022

We, the 400 voting delegates representing approximately 340,000 members of the SACP, as well as members of the Young Communist League of South Africa across the country, met from 13 to 16 July 2022 in Boksburg, constituting the historic 15^th National Congress of our Party.

In attendance were our Alliance partners, the ANC and COSATU, and formations of the mass democratic movement, as well as other fraternal organisations and distinguished guests from our country.

Also in attendance were representatives of communist and other anti-imperialist fraternal organisations from other countries in Africa, South America, North America, Europe, and Asia.

We met in the centenary year of the Young Communist League of South Africa and as we complete the Communist Party’s hundred years of unbroken struggle to advance, deepen and defend the national democratic revolution and an advance towards socialism.

This has been a centenary of communist struggles to educate, organise and mobilise the working-class and its allies against a system that puts profits before people, a system that puts private accumulation before the environment, the crisis-ridden system of capitalism. It is this exploitative system that breeds the crisis-levels of racialised and gendered mass poverty, unemployment and inequality, as well as the associated crises of social reproduction and rising cost of living.

We met against the background of nearly 30 years since our April 1994 democratic breakthrough, which marked the end of decades of white minority rule and three hundred years of colonialism in our country. The April 1994 democratic breakthrough opened the prospects for a new, radical phase of the national democratic revolution, our strategy for democratic transformation and development towards socialism.

Many political and social gains have been made by the working-class majority over the last 30 years, but so have many opportunities been lost in deepening a radical structural economic transformation in favour of the workers and poor.

The country’s economy remains dominated by monopoly capital, with the continuing colonial and apartheid legacy deepening its multiple systemic crises, including inequality, unemployment, poverty, and the associated rise in cost-of-living. This situation has now been worsened by the crises of health pandemics, such as the deadly COVID-19 virus, and climate change.

Major aspects of working-class lives are in a crisis, mostly hitting women and youth the hardest, as the income of workers and poor sharply decline because of the crisis of rising cost-of-living.

In the circumstances, the main question that Congress focused on is what is to be done?

Roll back the neoliberal macroeconomic framework

Our national democratic revolution is threatened by the very things it seeks to overcome—the monopoly capitalist domination of the economy, its colonial and apartheid legacy, including the reproduction of crisis-high levels of inequality, unemployment, and poverty. Related to this, the financialisation of our economy undermines our ability to advance the programmes that the workers and poor need, such as industrialisation, a major infrastructure development programme, a universal basic income grant, and a National Health Insurance.

The working-class or proletarian communities—mainly in urban townships and informal settlements, as well as in former bantustans—are torn apart by the daily struggles for survival. The increasingly exploited and unemployed workers and poor are more and more becoming disillusioned with electoral politics because of the impact of policy failures, the impact of neoliberalism and the consequences of corruption.

Therefore, the SACP rejects the call for a “social compact” that is aimed at co-opting the working-class to advance neoliberal policy reforms originating from the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, imperialist credit rating agencies and other supranational bodies controlled and wielded by the US-led imperialist forces. Such a “social compact” excludes the crucial imperative to change the macroeconomic framework under which South Africa failed to reduce unemployment, eradicate poverty, and bring down the astronomical levels of inequality.

For the past 26 years, since the government imposed the neoliberal economic policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), the SACP and other militant working-class formations have been calling for a change in the macroeconomic framework. Without a fundamental shift in the macroeconomic framework, South Africa will continue to experience the problems of the crisis-high levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality that it has failed to address since 1996 after the government-imposed GEAR. The persistence of these problems directly results from GEAR and its lasting legacy, including its shock therapy, besides the persisting legacy of colonialism and apartheid, and the impact of global capitalist crises.    

Emerging from the 15^th National Congress of our Party, we will intensify this struggle for a change in policy content and direction, most especially challenging neoliberalism.

The SACP rejects the dogmatic and widely discredited neoliberal macroeconomic framework and other policy measures which undermine our efforts to drive democratic transformation and developmental programmes of benefit to the workers and poor.

We reject the agenda of neoliberal austerity pushed by the National Treasury, which has meant massive budget cuts spending on public services and goods, resulting in a social crisis in working-class communities and affecting working-class women and youth, mostly black.

The SACP says no to the hyper-financialisation of our country’s economy. Financialisation has shifted financial resources away from the productive economy and social investments to speculative investments in the casino economy, the financial markets. These resources include retirement funds and other financial assets held by the banks and financial institutions, and many are controlled by financial services “providers”.

Workers need to assert their control over investments by their pension funds. Investing in the productive sector to drive major industrialisation and infrastructure development programmes towards expanding access to work for all should be an apex priority. This is one reason the government, with mobilised working-class support, needs to enforce prescribed assets on financial sector investments through legislation. This should include investments in areas of critical public developmental importance, such as a just, green transition.

It is critical to strengthen public financial institutions—the DBSA, the IDC, the Land Bank, the PIC, the Postbank, and provincial financial entities—to play a developmental role. This should be guided by a clearer mandating of the South African Reserve Bank to support the public development finance institutions. 

In intensifying our campaign for a fundamental change in economic policy, including macroeconomic policy, we will push to dislodge neoliberalism in our national economic and social policy space. Without such a change, the masses of young people and women, who are black in their majority, will continue to be devastated by the high levels of unemployment, poverty, inequality and the crisis of social reproduction, and South Africa will not turn the tide against de-industrialisation. 

To advance our policy objectives, we will build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor, guided by the 2022 iteration of the SACP programme titled The South African Struggle for Socialism, inclusive of our Strategic Perspectives and Tasks. Immediate key priorities of our programme in the face of the catastrophic and unsustainable reality confronting most South Africans and around which we need to prioritise our mobilisation of the workers and the poor include:

A powerful, class conscious trade union movement

SACP reaffirms its support for democratic worker control of trade unions, trade union resources and workers’ funds. We will work to build the unity of workers in action, across trade unions and across federations.

The SACP says to the workers, together:

“Let us build workers’ powers in the workplace and in the economy at large.”

“Let us fight outsourcing in the economy.”

“Let us fight labour-brokering in the public and private sector and build the unity of workers in the formal and informal sectors.”

“Let us build worker-controlled co-operatives in all sectors of the economy as an instrument of structural economic and social transformation and development.”

Working-class and popular power in our proletarian communities

Proletarian communities are the historic sites of militant class struggles. However, over the past three decades, they have been ravaged by neoliberalism. We will continue to deepen our campaigns in working-class communities to win the following demands.

- The struggle for a universal basic income grant, which should lift working-class households out of absolute poverty and help build capacity for the broad working-class to become the collective agents of fundamental change.

- The struggle for the right to work for all—beginning with the massive expansion of public employment programmes:  where the work is not just temporary, but ongoing;  where we care for infrastructure that makes our communities cleaner and safer places to live; where collective work rebuilds social cohesion and overcomes the huge despair and sense of alienation amongst millions of unemployed youth; where public employment work is productive and addresses the crises of social reproduction and poverty. This will include campaigning for an expansion of public employment in the caring economy, in early childhood learning, in the provision of collective food gardens and food kitchens, in sustaining places of safety for women and children.

- Build and strengthen the networks of community-based co-operatives, including organising community-owned stores and community-owned banking institutions, savings and burial societies.

- Active working-class involvement in the many institutions of participatory democracy, such as the community policing forums, school governing bodies, neighbourhood watches and street committees.

- Rebuild trade union locals in our communities as key points of focus from which we can help co-ordinate popular activism and rebuild workplace–community solidarity.

- Support government efforts directed at the township and village economy and the District Development Model, ensuring that these programmes impact positively on the lives of the working-class and poor.

Land reform for urban and rural transformation

South Africa needs radical land reform for both urban transformation, where 70 per cent of our people now live, and for rural development and transformation. Besides rural areas, and mainly the bantustans, the working-class and poor remain largely confined to peripheral townships and informal settlements that were designed as dormitory locations for the reproduction of cheap migrant black labour.

Apartheid legislation has been removed, but now the financialised property market acts with equal brutality in forcing the majority of workers and poor to live on the margins, in poverty traps far away from resources, amenities, and recreational facilities. While we seek to transform the reality within these settlements, we will equally strive to transform the overall spatial design of our towns and cities.

Land reform in our rural areas must be guided by the Freedom Charter’s clarion call for land to be shared among those who work it. Rural land reform, development and transformation must be directed to the population still living in the former bantustans as a priority.The SACP will campaign for:

-    A land reform programme which focuses on providing infrastructure, water rights, agricultural extension officers and veterinary services to the most marginalised.

- Security of tenure for small and subsistence farmers, giving full recognition to a variety of tenure, including communal land tenure rights.

- Unscrupulous evictions of farmworkers and their families from farms to stop.

- The evictions of labour tenants and their families from farms on which they have lived and worked to cease. These evictions are nothing less than an ongoing colonial expropriation. As the SACP we say: “EXPROPRIATE THE EXPROPRIATORS…and without compensation! Return the former labour tenants as rightful owners to what are, in reality, their OWN farms.”

A radical transformation of the financial sector

In the 2000s, the SACP launched the Financial Sector Campaign as part of its Red October Campaign. Through the campaign, the SACP successfully mobilised over 50 other formations.

The Financial Sector Campaign culminated in a Financial Sector Summit, convened by the government. Its most important achievements are those that immediately impacted positively on the working-class and the precarious strata of the middle class. These include transparency and regulation of credit bureaux, access to banking facilities, and the regulations of loans, clamping down on reckless and predatory lending practices, and addressing unregulated and unscrupulous home repossessions by the profit-driven exploitative commercial banks.

The National Credit Act and Regulator (now the Financial Sector Conduct Authority), which cushioned South Africa from the impact of the 2008 global crisis, were the direct achievements of the SACP-led Financial Sector Campaign. We also drove the passing of legislation on co-operative banking through the campaign.

The time has come to intensify the Financial Sector Campaign. But this time, while mobilising based on financial consumer issues (for debt relief, against repossessions, and against the high transactional costs charged by the banking oligopolies), we will more militantly address the larger structural issues. The SACP, together with other working-class formations, community organisations, sectoral organisations, among others, will:

-    Campaign to stop the massive illicit flows of capital from South Africa. The SACP will deepen the campaign for tight regulation of the capital account, cross-border capital transitions, and to roll back the erosion of exchange controls to protect our economy against exposure to the unbridled volatility of the dog-eat-dog insatiable pursuit of private wealth accumulation. Our efforts will include measures to direct investment into the productive sector to industrialise our economy, create employment, drive poverty eradication, and tackle inequality and uneven development. The South African Revenue Services, the South African Reserve Bank and other key state institutions in the financial sector must up their game.

- Campaign for the enforcement of prescribed asset requirements on the banks and financial institutions, to ensure that a significant proportion of their investments goes to the productive sector to build national production and create employment and infrastructure development.

- Campaign for the consolidation of a strong, developmental public banking sector, comprising national, provincial and sectoral state-owned banks and financial institutions, which the South African Reserve Bank MUST actively support. In terms of articulation, this will be buttressed by the national democratic revolutionary imperative to achieve the Freedom Charter’s vision of the state banking sector—the common property of all—to breakdown the monopoly of profit-driven, commercial banking interests.

- Campaign for the mandate of the South African Reserve Bank to target inclusively economic growth and moderate interest rates.

- Campaign for a thriving co-operative banking sector at all levels, national, provincial and local.

Dismantling the networks of state capture and clamping down on other forms of corruption

As the SACP 15^th National Congress, we welcomed the submission made by the Central Committee to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, the “fraudulent alienation of the state”. In campaigning to dismantle the networks of the fraudulent alienation of the state and to clamp down on other forms of corruption, the SACP will strengthen its capacity to advance the way forward proposed in the submission.

We mandate the 15^th National Congress Central Committee of the Party to complete studying the entire text of the commission’s report, its orientation, findings and recommendations, to produce a comprehensive political and strategic response, to contribute to the programme of action required to dismantle the networks of the state capture corruption and to ensure that state capture does not rear its ugly head again.

We reiterate the Party’s call, for the state to move decisively with prosecutorial investigations to hold those who were involved or complicit in the state capture corruption to account, to the full extent of the law. We expect prosecutions and maximum sentences. In addition, holding to account those who were involved or complicit in the state capture must include using asset forfeiture processes to seize the assets, the proceeds, the ill-gotten wealth that they gained from the corruption

Workers of the world, unite for peace and development

We express our solidarity with the people of Swaziland struggling for democracy, against the repressive monarchy, with the people of Zimbabwe who are facing human rights violations in a country devastated by virtual economic collapse.

We denounce imperialist aggression by the blood thirsty and trigger-happy United States-dominated NATO. The expansion of NATO, which is an instrument of war, represents the greatest threat to world peace and equality in our time. At present, this is manifesting itself through the NATO-provoked war in Ukraine. The impact of the war, including NATO’s weaponisation and wielding of extraterritorial sanctions, includes the global cost-of-living crisis.

We reiterate our call for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine and for an end to the war on all fronts. 

We pledge our solidarity with the people of the world amidst the United States imperialist aggression and foreign occupation, including but not limited to the people of Palestine, Western Sahara, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

The SACP reiterates its support for the Cuban people and government in their struggle for the United States to lift its unilateral and illegal blockade against Cuba and unconditionally end its occupation of the Cuban territory of Guantanamo Bay. The United Nations General Assembly must make its voice consistent and louder, once again, by voting for the lifting of the blockade.

Build the SACP as a vanguard party of the working-class for socialism

We will strengthen the vanguard character of the SACP in this extremely challenging national and global context. Over the years, the Party has grown in membership from around 10,000 members in 1998 to approximately 340,000 by July 2022.

Over the next five years, we will deepen our work to build and strengthen the independent voice of the SACP and strengthen our political, ideological and organisation capacity to mobilise popular forces and build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. This will include deepening political education within the ranks of the Party, to ensure that its membership growth is accompanied by a qualitative growth. We will build the SACP as a campaigning Party of the working-class and poor for socialism.

As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels state in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “the first step in the revolution by the working-class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy”, to build the supremacy of the proletariat, and to organise the proletariat to become, and afterwards as, the ruling class. The questions of the class character and leadership of the state, and the societal power concentrated, organised and exercised in the state, are crucial to every working-class revolution, including the national democratic revolution, our advance to socialism.

Therefore, we directed the newly elected Central Committee to consolidate and strengthen for finalisation by the next Augmented Central Committee the roadmap of the Party on building working-class leadership of society and hegemony over the state. In carrying out this task, the Central Committee must pay particular attention to the strategy and tactics suitable for active engagement in the electoral terrain of the class struggle. This work must be guided by the key task of the SACP arising from the Congress, “TOGETHER, LET’S BUILD A POWERFUL, SOCIALIST MOVEMENT OF THE WORKERS AND POOR”: SOCIALISM IS THE FUTURE—BUILD IT NOW!

SACP 15^TH NATIONAL CONGRESS CENTRAL COMMITTEE

1.    General Secretary – Cde Solly Mapaila

2.    National Chairperson – Cde Blade Nzimande

3.    National Treasurer – Cde Joyce Moloi-Moropa

4.    1st Deputy General Secretary – Cde Madala Masuku

5.    2nd Deputy General Secretary – Cde David Masondo and

6.    National Deputy Chairperson – Cde Thulas Nxesi

Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, SACP Central Committee Member: Media & Communications, 18 July 2022