South Africa is living through a deepening social crisis. Unemployment, inequality, hunger, state decay, ecological destruction, and violence continue to define everyday life for millions. The political formations that once claimed to represent the aspirations of the working class have lost legitimacy, while the Right – both neoliberal and authoritarian – has grown stronger. In this context, the call for a “Conference of the Left” will understandably resonate with many activists, trade unionists, intellectuals, and social movements. The need for Left regroupment is real. The fragmentation of progressive forces cannot continue indefinitely.

As important as regroupment is so is the issue of renewal. Precisely because the stakes are so high, Left organisations and activists must approach the SACP-led Conference of the Left with political seriousness and critical scrutiny. The issue is not whether Left unity is necessary. The issue is: what kind of Left, organised around what politics, convened by whom, and toward what strategic horizon? These are not secondary questions. They are decisive.

A Conference Without Political Accountability

The first concern is that the conference is being convened without any meaningful political reckoning by the SACP itself. In the longstanding tradition of criticism and self-criticism, it mast be acknowledged that for more than three decades, the SACP has been a central component of the governing alliance. It did not stand outside the neoliberal turn in South Africa; it participated in legitimising, stabilising, and managing it. During this period:

• the home-grown structural adjustment programme known as GEAR was imposed without the SACP breaking ranks;
• working-class organisations were progressively weakened, in part through the bureaucratisation of unions tied to the ruling party;
• unemployment and inequality deepened to among the worst levels in the world;
• the state increasingly became a site of elite accumulation and corruption;
• and the very institutions in which the SACP holds senior positions enforced austerity, evictions, and the suppression of working-class and community struggles.

When mineworkers rose at Marikana in 2012, the SACP defended the legitimacy of a state that massacred them and stood behind the very NUM bureaucracy the workers had bypassed. When Jacob Zuma was repackaged as a “left alternative” to Mbeki, the SACP carried him to power and stayed in the coalition that followed, complete with its plunder. When the wage struggles of public sector workers needed solidarity, SACP cadres in cabinet positions often led the assault on them.

Yet the conference presents the crisis largely as an external development – as if those now convening the process were not deeply implicated in producing the current political moment. A Left renewal process that avoids accountability risks becoming not a break with the past, but a mechanism for political rehabilitation.

Before speaking in the name of Left reconstruction, there must be honest engagement with how the liberation project was subordinated to neoliberal capitalism under ANC rule, and how the SACP repeatedly defended this trajectory in the name of alliance unity and the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).

Left Cover for a Transformed ANC

The most serious failure of the SACP is its inability to come to terms with what the ANC has become.

The ANC is no longer a movement of liberation. It is a vehicle of the petty bourgeoisie and a new predatory elite for capitalist accumulation. This transformation was not accidental. It was driven by deliberate policy: Black Economic Empowerment legislation, employment equity, the leveraging of a roughly R1 trillion annual state procurement budget, the use of state-owned enterprises and municipalities as platforms of primitive accumulation, and the absorption of former Bantustan elites and traditional authorities into the post-1994 state. What is glibly described as “state capture” is in fact the broader class project of a new elite that lacked a capital base at the moment of formal democratisation and turned to the state to build one – “dripping,” in Marx’s phrase, “from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

The class struggle in South Africa today is increasingly defined by an inter-capitalist rivalry: between this new, state-dependent black bourgeoisie struggling for a bigger share of the economy, and the established corporate capital – mining, finance, retail, agribusiness – that continues to monopolise the commanding heights. Anglo American, Old Mutual, Sanlam, Investec, SAB, and their successors globalised in the post-apartheid period, moved primary listings abroad, and detached themselves from the South African real economy while continuing to extract from it. The factional wars inside the ANC – Zuma versus Ramaphosa, “radical economic transformation” versus the Treasury’s neoliberal orthodoxy, Phala Phala versus the Zondo Commission – are largely expressions of this rivalry between fractions of capital. Both fractions are hostile to the working class. Both will sacrifice the poor without hesitation. The point of working-class politics is not to choose between them.

The SACP has not absorbed this analysis. Its strategic imagination remains stuck inside an outdated reading of the ANC as a contested terrain on which a “patriotic” or “popular” national bourgeoisie can be cultivated as an ally against monopoly capital. This is precisely the politics that has hollowed out the South African Left for three decades. Worse, it is not only a theoretical error. Many SACP cadres have been materially co-opted through state employment, parastatal boards, parliamentary salaries, mayoral office, ministerial positions, and the patronage networks that flow from them. They have become functional enablers of the new black bourgeoisie even as they speak the language of socialism. Frantz Fanon’s warning about the “national bourgeoisie” – a class destined to betray the revolution while wrapping itself in the flag of liberation – describes the SACP’s predicament too precisely to ignore.

Until the SACP confronts this material reality – not just rhetorically, but organisationally – any conference it convenes runs the risk of reproducing the very politics that produced the crisis.

A Litmus Test the SACP Has Refused to Take

The political precondition for a Party serious about initiating a Conference of the Left needs to commit itself, in advance and unambiguously, to:

• withdrawing its cadres from all levels of a government implementing a neoliberal, anti-working-class agenda – national, provincial, and local;
• publicly acknowledging its role over three decades in supporting and stabilising that agenda;
• accepting that those who have served and continue to serve in this state, on its terms, cannot simultaneously claim leadership of a movement of independent working-class struggle;
• and signalling, by these actions, a real preparedness to plot a new path of independent working-class politics, accountable to mass organisations rather than to the discipline of an alliance with a bourgeois ruling party.

None of this has happened. Leading members of the SACP continue to sit in the cabinet of a Government of National Unity that has deepened austerity, accelerated privatisation through public-private partnerships, weakened state-owned enterprises, and entrenched the dominance of finance capital. The Treasury, the Reserve Bank, and key state departments continue to set economic policy on terms dictated by capital, with senior Party figures in the room. To convene a “Conference of the Left” while remaining inside this government is not a contradiction the conference can resolve through declarations. It is a contradiction that travels with it into every plenary, every commission, and every working group.

The simplest test will come not in a conference hall but on the ground. When poor people occupy unused land or empty buildings – as they will, because they have no alternative – will a renewed SACP stand with the occupation, or will it stand with the state that sends in the Red Ants and the police to evict them? When informal traders are dispersed, when shack settlements are bulldozed, when workers strike against the public sector wage freeze its own cadres helped impose, which side will the Party be on?

The answer to that question is not unknown. Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Amadiba Crisis Committee have their dead. The municipalities co-governed by SACP councillors have their eviction records. SACP provincial ministers have the rural communities they have dispossessed. The Marikana mineworkers had their answer in 2012. A Left that cannot answer this question clearly in advance cannot credibly convene a class struggle Left.

The Problem of the National Democratic Revolution

The second issue concerns the continued dominance of the strategic framework of the National Democratic Revolution. The NDR has historically justified a “two-stage” conception of transformation: first, a national democratic phase led through alliance with nationalist forces; socialism deferred to a later stage. In practice, this framework has repeatedly subordinated working-class politics to the priorities of a nationalist governing bloc. Under contemporary global capitalism, the result has not been transition beyond capitalism, but accommodation to neoliberalism. The tragedy is that the language of transformation remains, while the material realities of capitalism deepen.

The historical record of stageism is grim. In China in 1927, the CCP’s alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang ended in the massacre of the Shanghai workers’ movement. In Indonesia in 1965, the PKI’s subordination to Sukarno’s nationalist project ended in annihilation. In Spain and Chile, similar compromises ended in tragedy. South Africa’s experience differs in form but is comparable in principle: the SACP’s loyal alignment with the ANC subordinated working-class independence to a “national democratic” project, led by the black bourgeoisie that predictably stabilised capitalism rather than challenging it. The 1994 settlement was hailed as the culmination of struggle rather than understood as the opening of a new phase requiring an organised, independent working-class push beyond it. The result was three decades of restructured but deepening dispossession.

Any meaningful Left regroupment today requires a serious reassessment of the NDR itself:

• Has it advanced socialist transformation?
• Or has it functioned as the ideological framework through which neoliberal capitalism was managed and legitimised under cover of “transformation”?

A conference unwilling to confront this question honestly risks reproducing the very strategic failures it claims to overcome.

Can a “Conference of the Left” Include Reactionary Nationalism?

Particularly troubling is the inclusion, in the opening plenary of the conference, of formations such as the MK Party, alongside other ANC-linked forces. The MK Party has increasingly mobilised through forms of politics associated with ethnic nationalism, authoritarian populism, militarism, and xenophobic rhetoric. These tendencies are fundamentally incompatible with emancipatory Left politics.

The Left, historically at its best, has stood for working-class unity across ethnicity,nationality and the plethora of other divisive Identities for internationalism, for democratic participation, and for opposition to chauvinism in all forms. A process that collapses distinctions between socialist politics and reactionary populism under a broad banner of “unity” risks political degeneration rather than renewal.

Equally important is the inclusion of ANC-aligned formations under the framing of “political formations” generally. The ANC remains the primary political force responsible for implementing the neoliberal order that has devastated working-class communities, and for incubating the predatory elite that has hollowed out the post-apartheid state. A Conference of the Left should be politically independent of – and willing to confront – the ANC, not seek accommodation with it under the polite fiction that all “political formations” stand on the same plane.

A Managed Process or a Democratic One?

Many activists have also raised concerns about the structure and organisation of the conference itself. The programme appears tightly controlled: a single framework document, drafted several times by the convening structures, is presented as the agreed basis for all discussion; commissions and their facilitators are predefined; even the outcomes – a Conference Declaration, a Council of the Left, thematic working groups, a first-phase campaign programme – are substantially pre-framed before the conference opens. Political formations are capped at 15% of the floor, but the convening body is the SACP, and the political and organisational template is the SACP’s.

This creates the danger that dissenting voices may be present symbolically, but without meaningful influence over the political direction of the process. A genuine process of Left renewal cannot be built through managerial choreography. It requires open ideological debate, democratic disagreement, and the possibility of fundamentally contesting dominant assumptions. Without this, “unity” becomes administrative rather than political.

Independent Working-Class Politics – or Rebuilding the ANC Bloc?

There is also a broader concern regarding the political orientation underlying the conference. Many activists suspect that the strategic horizon of sections of the convening forces – and possibly of sections of the institutional funders – is not the construction of an independent working-class project, but the reconstitution of a weakened ANC-led political bloc in the face of its electoral decline and the rise of the Right. The 2026 local government elections, explicitly named in the conference framework as part of the political terrain, sharpen this concern. A coordinated “Left” platform that ultimately funnels working-class energy back into rescuing the Congress tradition would deepen demoralisation rather than overcome it.

South Africa does not need a softer or more progressive version of the existing order. It needs the rebuilding of independent mass politics rooted in working-class organisation, democratic struggle, and social transformation from below. Any process that ultimately redirects energies back toward rescuing the ANC project will be a defeat dressed as renewal.

The Position of Independent Working-Class Formations

Another issue that cannot be ignored is the position taken by important independent formations and social movements. Organisations such as SAFTU, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and other grassroots movements have expressed serious opposition or scepticism toward the conference. These organisations represent some of the most important surviving centres of militant working-class and popular struggle in South Africa today. Their concerns deserve serious attention. Left regroupment cannot be built by bypassing or marginalising forces rooted in real social struggles while privileging elite political coordination at the top.

The Question of Funding

A further question concerns the resourcing of the conference and of the structures it intends to establish. Activists associated with the SACP have, over many years, raised pointed questions about the funding of progressive NGOs and independent left formations, and about the political conditions that international donor funding may attach. The implication has typically been that such funding compromises political independence and bends recipients toward liberal or pro-imperialist agendas. Whatever the merits of that critique in any specific instance, the principle it invokes is a serious one — and it must apply to the conveners of this conference as much as to anyone else.

Those being asked to invest political energy in this process therefore have every right to ask: who is funding the Conference of the Left, and how is the proposed Council of the Left to be sustained beyond it? Funding shapes structure, and structure shapes politics. The experience of recent left electoral and organisational initiatives, where opaque resourcing and outsized international influence ran ahead of any real mass base, is reason enough for caution.

If the convenors are serious about the political openness and independence of this process, the appropriate response is simple: disclose the sources of funding for the conference and the intended funding model for the structures it proposes to build. Transparency on this question is not a side issue. It is part of what political independence actually means.

The Real Question Before the Left

The central question is not whether Left unity is desirable. It is. The real question is this: Can genuine Left renewal emerge through a process led by forces still politically shaped by the strategic logic that contributed to the current crisis, and still organisationally embedded in the very government carrying out an anti-working-class agenda?

This is not a sectarian question. It is a strategic one.

A meaningful Left regroupment in South Africa would require:

• political accountability for the role played in the last three decades, not least by the SACP;
• the withdrawal of would-be Left leaders from the structures of a neoliberal state, as a precondition of credibility;
• a clear orientation toward standing with the poor when they undertake struggle for the basic conditions of life, not with the state that represses them;
• a rejection of xenophobic and ethnic chauvinism in all its forms, including its electoral expressions;
• a democratic and contested process, not a managed one;
• and independence from the ANC, from its successor factions, and from the state.

Without these foundations, there is a danger that the “Conference of the Left” becomes less a rupture with the past than an attempt to reorganise its fragments under new conditions – a Left convened by people who continue to hold office in the government the Left must oppose.

The Left should therefore engage this process critically, cautiously, and without illusions. The call for Left unity is the right call. It has been made, for now, on the wrong terms. Our task is to fight for the right terms – in the conference if we choose to attend, outside it if we do not, and above all in the workplaces, communities, occupations, and movements where independent working-class power is actually built.