SACP Politburo Statement

Tuesday, 4 November 2025:- The Political Bureau (Politburo) of the South African Communist Party (SACP) convened in Stilfontein in the North West province from Friday, 31 October to Saturday, 1 November 2025. The Politburo discussed economic, political and organisational matters of importance for the working class that the SACP is concerned about as it continues to implement its programme, decided by the Party's National Congress through declarations and resolutions. This statement conveys the key outcomes of the discussion on the government's Growth and Inclusion (GAIN) strategy, the People's Red Caravan and international solidarity.

GAIN, the Same aGAIN

While we have not yet seen the detailed strategy, we have come across a detailed presentation circulating through instant messaging platforms. It appears to be what others have referred to as the leaked GAIN strategy and we focused our discussion on it. There has been no consultation on the GAIN strategy within our Alliance.

In this statement, we are extending our initial critique issued on 12 October 2025, denouncing compradorial policymaking. This refers to the adoption and enforcement of foreign determined policy directions, undermining what should be democratic policymaking sovereignty.

Our initial critique reiterated our rejection of the neo-liberal policy paradigm, altogether with its imperialist, foreign origins and neo-colonial research domination. Our reading of the leaked presentation confirmed the analysis we advanced in the critique. We shall therefore not repeat ourselves, except where it is necessary to emphasise our observations and what needs to be done.

We note with deep concern that the so-called Growth and Inclusion (GAIN) strategy, presented as a framework to revive economic growth and create employment, represents neither a new direction nor a break with the failed economic paradigm that has entrenched unemployment, poverty and inequality crises since 1996. Far from being transformative, the GAIN strategy reproduces the same old economic framework that the SACP has consistently critiqued since at least 2019 and going back to 1996. It is the same as before, merely repackaged and rebranded. Hence the SACP's description of the GAIN strategy as the Same aGAIN.

The GAIN strategy particularly recycles the 2019 National Treasury document entitled "Economic Transformation, Inclusive Growth and Competitiveness: Towards an Economic Strategy for South Africa", itself a replication of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Economic Policy Reforms 2017: Going for Growth prescriptions. This is the same neo-liberal agenda, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that has generated one of the world's highest unemployment rates in the Global South and the world over.

The supposed new framework relies on the concept of "binding constraints", compradorially adopted from the Harvard Growth Lab in the United States. This framework conveniently shifts attention away from the structural contradictions of a capitalist economy marked by deepening labour exploitation by capital, dominance of private over public interest and a neo-liberal macro-economic policy under whose auspices macro-economic problems such as unemployment entrenched and worsened to become a crisis. It is under this paradigm that South Africa has seen continued de-industrialisation and rising dominance by imports as a result, among others, of the trade liberalisation shock therapy implemented under Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR).

Under the neo-liberal paradigm, the economy has recorded devastating unemployment minimum levels above 20 per cent and worsening, defined by the narrow definition that excludes discouraged work seekers. This has been entrenched since 1996 after the adoption of GEAR. Inequality has widened and poverty is persistently high.

In the second quarter of 2025, the narrow, official unemployment rate stood at 33.2 per cent, representing 8.4 million unemployed people who are actively looking for employment, while the expanded rate stood at 42.9 per cent, affecting 12.6 million people active and discouraged work seekers combined. These figures are not the outcome of slow implementation but the direct result of the chosen macro-economic paradigm, including rapid trade and financial liberalisation under GEAR, among others. The failure is structural and systemic. It lies in the logic of profit accumulation that most of all prioritises the interests of finance capital while sacrificing productive investment and social well-being and development.

Those who are not excluded from employment are included through being locked into the yoke of exploitation by the capitalist bosses. Like those locked into unemployment, they too remain excluded from ownership and management control. They have no means of production of their own and no share in the profits and capital their labour creates. In its logic of "inclusion", the Same aGAIN says absolutely nothing about this economic and social injustice. It does not see it. Hence, it is devoid of a strategy to redress the historical injustice. What inclusion is this?

The Same aGAIN strategy maintains fiscal consolidation as its cornerstone. This is austerity dressed up as prudence and fiscal discipline. It is presented as a path to stability, yet in practice it has suppressed growth, not to speak of shared growth as the cornerstone of inclusion. Fiscal consolidation has constrained public investment and maintained under-resourcing in public healthcare, education and social services, leading to underperformances with far-reaching implications. These include patients who die as a result of overcrowding and under resourcing in hospitals, with long waiting lists for critical healthcare.

The government's continued adherence to self-imposed "fiscal anchors" to enforce austerity under fiscal consolidation demonstrates its surrender to the dictates of monopoly finance capital. Austerity has created a vicious cycle in which expenditure cuts suppress growth, slower growth reduces revenue, and declining revenue leads to further cuts. This cycle has trapped the economy in stagnation and deepened the suffering of the working class and poor in a situation where the government has to intervene to turn around domestic productive capacity, raise the levels of national production and create employment at a scale that will resolve the unemployment crisis.

The fiasco around the proposed value-added tax increase in the first half of 2025 revealed the contradictions within the government of coalition unity designer-labelled "government of national unity". While the proposal was publicly opposed by the DA, its leadership simultaneously demanded deeper cuts inspired by the extremist austerity of Argentina's Javier Milei administration.

Behind closed doors, as the public has heard from their government of coalition unity allies, the right-wing, neo-liberal DA opposed to the Freedom Charter supported the VAT increase in exchange of power accumulation favours. It was after their demand was not met that they seemed to strongly advance their gimmick in the public.

The VAT fiasco exposed austerity as not merely a technical adjustment but a political weapon that constrains transformation and narrows the role of the state. It has prevented the state from using fiscal policy to drive shared growth, industrialisation and employment creation at the scale that can resolve the unemployment crisis, condemning millions of our people to perpetual stagnation.

The Same aGAIN framework further entrenches privatisation through liberalisation in favour of private profit interests and competition in network industries, presenting this as "modernisation". Calling state control "monopoly", as the Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongana, did in his letter of policy commitment to the World Bank, the approach chosen is an attack on the Freedom Charter's clarion call that "… monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole". He signed the sell-out letter to the World Bank on 3 December 2021.

Instead of the neo-liberal agenda preferring private profit-seeking interests, the targeted industries must be owned by the people as a whole through the state under democratic control and developed further. This is what the Freedom Charter calls for, not the opposite for the GAIN of the tiny minority of the capitalists, whom the Same aGAIN and its base document from Havard treat as synonymous with society or the people as a whole. Whenever the name "private sector" is used, reference is to the tiny minority of the capitalist class in terms of ownership, management control, the accumulation of wealth and its meaning of inclusion, while the overwhelming majority of the people, being the working class and poor, is locked out of the four aspects.

The Same aGAIN strategy calls for a so-called "big bang" reform of energy, logistics, water and ports, which in reality means accelerating privatisation in the targeted infrastructure networks to private accumulation. The restructuring of Eskom and the establishment of a competitive wholesale electricity market by April 2026, along with private participation and competition in water infrastructure by September 2026, are part of this agenda.

Such measures, while marketed as efficiency improvements, will reproduce what has already occurred in the telecommunications sector, where the 2022 auction of high-demand radio frequency spectrum enriched the duopoly of Vodacom and MTN, which captured the lion's share, all in the name of de-monopolising the sector. Data in South Africa remains exorbitant, contradicting the promised cost reductions for consumers.

Privatisation now takes many forms, including outsourcing, concessions, public-private partnerships and liberalisation in favour of profit-seeking private interests. These guarantee profits for private operators while shifting long-term risks onto the public. The private power producer models called the "Independent Power Producers" (IPPs) is a clear example. Although later renewable energy bid rounds achieved lower tariffs, Eskom's 2024 report showed that IPPs generated only 9 per cent of electricity while consuming 27 per cent of Eskom's energy budget.

The issue is not renewable energy itself but the contracts that guarantee private returns at public expense. Experiences from other countries, including the United Kingdom's rail privatisation, show that such policies lead to fragmentation, inefficiency and rising public subsidies for private profit. South Africa risks repeating these failures in rail and other infrastructure sectors.

The Same aGAIN strategy also leaves monetary policy untouched. A mere mention of the benefits of low interest rates without changing the monetary policy mandate to ensure this and to establish a framework of moderate interest rates with a dual mandate that supports productive investment, public infrastructure development, maximum sustainable employment creation and affordable home loans will only reproduce the same neo-liberal and compradorial status quo mainly serving the interests of finance capital and imposed through external policy discipline that has blocked shared growth.

The South African Reserve Bank remains fixated on narrow inflation targeting while it is invisible in the national development imperatives to achieve industrialisation and large-scale employment creation. It has failed to achieve its constitutional mandate of sustainable and balanced economic growth as a policy objective in exercising its powers and functions.

The high interest rates regime and interest rate hikes that the Reserve Bank has been using as inflation targeting policy instruments have constrained productive investment, maintained de-industrialisation and kept unemployment at crisis-high rates. A central bank that pursues this neo-liberal model and fails to help advance industrial development and maximum sustainable employment cannot fulfil the developmental constitutional mandate of balanced and sustainable growth, which must include maximum sustainable employment as a key performance indicator and therefore an explicit monetary policy mandate. The record speaks for itself.

A particularly regressive element of the GAIN strategy is the proposal to link the Social Relief of Distress Grant (SRD) to employment. This idea emerged from the DA's attempts to roll back the grant and has already resulted in bureaucratic red tape that has reduced the number of beneficiaries.

Linking the grant to employment assumes that work opportunities exist in abundance and that the unemployed are unwilling to work or look for work. This is an ideological distortion. The economy has not been generating employment on any meaningful scale to overcome the unemployment crisis. Millions of people have become discouraged work seekers not because they prefer idleness but because they have found no opportunities to work during the Labour Force Survey's reference period.

Graduate unemployment at 12.2 per cent and unemployment among those with other tertiary qualifications at 21.7 per cent reveal the structural nature of the crisis. In this situation, although their unemployment is higher, by no means are those who have not completed secondary schooling or who do not have a post-school qualification the only ones affected. It is clear that while still important, having a graduate or other tertiary qualification alone is not enough to secure employment and overcome the systemic barriers created by an economy that reproduces exclusion from access to work, ownership, management control and accumulation of wealth.

To restrict access to the SRD Grant under such conditions is both irrational and unjust. It punishes the unemployed for an economic crisis they did not create and undermines the constitutional imperative of social protection. The grant must be expanded, strengthened and transformed into a universal basic income grant, not reduced or tied to conditions the state itself cannot meet and has failed to meet for 29 years since the adoption of the neo-liberal GEAR.

The Same aGAIN strategy is rooted in what progressive observers call the transition from the Washington Consensus to the Wall Street Consensus. The former demanded fiscal austerity, deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation to please foreign investors. The latter adds the expectation that governments should actively create profit opportunities for, but by no means only, financial capital through blended finance, public-private partnerships and further privatisation through liberalisation. In both cases, the outcome is the same.

Under the capitalist regime of neo-liberalism, public policy is shaped to serve private wealth accumulation, not the needs of the people. The guarantees given to attract private participation and competition in the targeted network infrastructure raise public costs or contingency liability. South Africa's own experience over the past five years, in which massive infrastructure build promises have failed to materialise, confirms this reality. The billions or trillions of rands in infrastructure pronouncements within the State of Nation Addresses, medium-term budget policy statements and annual budget speeches have virtually never been seen in any meaningful way, on a large-scale in particular, across the country, covering every district, systematically eliminating uneven development.

The Same aGAIN strategy makes no attempt to examine the flawed framework that underlies the persistent failures of the policy trajectory that the government has chosen dating back to the adoption of GEAR in 1996. It merely asserts that the framework is sound and that only implementation is lacking. This is a dangerous illusion. South Africa requires not faster implementation of the same failed ideas but a decisive change in direction.

The SACP calls for a developmental alternative anchored in protecting public property rights, building and diversifying thriving public ownership, and advancing democratic control and planning. This must include expansionary fiscal policy to finance public infrastructure, productive and social investment, and a monetary policy that supports industrialisation, public infrastructure and large-scale employment creation. South Africa needs more progressive taxation and domestic resource mobilisation, and a state that leads in building a diversified and shared economic growth. The economy must serve the people, and to do so it must be transformed to become the people's economy.

Without structural transformation, South Africa will remain trapped in serious economic challenges. The country needs a revolutionary break with neo-liberal conservatism and a reassertion of public purpose in the service of the majority of the people, being the working class and poor. Only through such a break can we build a democratic developmental state capable of guaranteeing the right of all to work and live in dignity.

Last month, the SACP established a Conference of the Left process, among other objectives, to build the widest possible working-class unity in action. We invite more Left organisations to join this process as we broaden working-class power to secure a decisive change in policy direction, placing at the forefront the interests of the workers, the unemployed and the poor in general. To the extent that the April 1994 transition from the colonial and apartheid era represented a radical democratic breakthrough, it was the first one.

What is clear now is that South Africa needs a second, more radical democratic breakthrough to bring about a fundamental policy shift and address its principal economic development problems while advancing broader social transformation. This will not come easily, given that the alignment of forces has changed and we are now confronted not only by the primary strategic class adversary but also by a range of comprador policymakers, including those emerging from the same historical background.

We are determined to build a popular Left front and a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. We have reaffirmed, as we said back on 8 October 2023, emerging from our Central Committee Plenary then, that the popular Left front, and this goes for the mass socialist movement of the workers and poor, must grow out of popular mobilisation and campaigning. In this regard, the Conference of the Left is crucial as a democratic consultative process. Therefore, it does not seek to first cobble together a variety of formations at leadership level that merely proclaim themselves "Left" or "socialist" and only thereafter launch a programme of mobilisation and action. The forging of a popular Left movement, as with the mass socialist movement, must be rooted in an active network of struggle - "feeling the stones to cross the river" - as we are doing, for example, through advancing and expanding the People's Red Caravan. In the same vein, the working-class campaign for a policy shift towards a second, more radical democratic breakthrough is a crucial element of a Left popular front programme of mobilisation and action, in the policymaking space and on other fronts of the class struggle.

The People's Red Caravan, Mqhekezweni, Eastern Cape

The programme of the SACP, The People's Red Caravan, stationed for a week in Mqhekezweni village in the OR Tambo District in the Eastern Cape Province. The Politburo considered the People's Red Caravan and its activities observing important political issues that require the attention of the SACP as an organisation. The Red Caravan is built on working with the communities to enable self-reliance, to fight against poverty and hunger as well as to mobilise communities to build solidarity for sustained development of those communities.

Among aspects of self-reliance is the aspect of community safety. In this regard, the SACP observed the harshest conditions in Mqhekezweni. On the basis of repeated and systematic engagements, it is clear to the SACP that the scourge of crime in the Mqhekezweni area is beyond human imagination. The repeated incidents of rape have completely traumatised the community in general and the women of that community in particular. The community is inundated with nearly daily incidents of untold incidents of crime, from murders to house breakings, stock theft, vandalising of public facilities from schools to clinics, rape of elderly people and school children and everything in-between.

The SACP is gravely concerned about this crisis and is acting to seek immediate intervention to protect the community from what amounts to unbearable conditions of community vulnerability perpetuated by criminals. Despite recent interventions from the provincial government, it remains clear that the crisis continues and that greater and more sustainable solutions are necessary. The SACP calls for a national and systemic intervention in the general OR Tambo district and KSD sub-region in particular to combat egregious levels of crime.

International solidarity

The Politburo discussed the international situation, including the United States' imperialist military and other forms of aggression against Venezuela, the war crimes in Sudan, the apartheid Israeli regime's genocide on the Palestinian people, the United States' illegal blockade against Cuba, the Western Saharan people's struggle against Moroccan colonialism, and the struggle for democracy in Swaziland.

Venezuela

The Politburo strongly condemned the encroachment of Venezuela's sovereign territory by the imperialist regime of the United States. The whole series of actions by the United States reflect a clear provocation of war, with military invasion, foreign capture and control over Venezuela's oil, minerals, fertile land and the economy at large - Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves by country. In the past week, the United States through its military has gone beyond posturing but advancing on to the doorstep of Venezuela. The United States has no legal standing whatsoever in international law to tamper with the sovereignty of Venezuela and the fundamental right of its citizens to self-determination. None of the propaganda that the United States spreads can justify its invasion of Venezuela.

Sudan

The SACP condemns the barbaric massacres and systematic violence unleashed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) against defenceless civilians in El Fasher, Bara, and other regions of Darfur and Kordofan in Sudan. These atrocities - summary executions, arbitrary detentions, looting, property destruction, and forced displacement - are nothing short of war crimes and genocidal acts, as corroborated by United Nations reports, human rights organisations, and credible media.

The SACP stands in unwavering solidarity with the Sudanese people. The SACP calls on the Sudanese working class, peasantry, and revolutionary forces to unite in a resolute struggle to end the war and seize power from the reactionary regimes in Port Sudan and Nyala. The path of the December Revolution must be reclaimed to build a civil, democratic state that guarantees human rights, social justice, and the sovereignty of the Sudanese people. This struggle is inseparable from the global fight against capitalism and imperialism to justify or obscure these crimes against humanity.

Palestine

The SACP continues to advocate against the Zionist oppression against Palestine and the ongoing genocide despite the ceasefire signed recently. The Israeli violation of the ceasefire indicates the well-known immorality of the Zionist state and their clear lack of willingness to abide by any agreements founded on seeking peace. We continue to pledge our solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemn the genocide conducted by Israel.

Cuba

The Politburo welcomed the resounding United Nations General Assembly resolution, adopted on 29 October 2025, calling upon the imperialist United States government to unconditionally lift its illegal and criminal blockade on Cuba. The resolution marked the 33^rd consecutive time the United Nations has expressed a strong opposition to the United States government's economic blockade against Cuba.

The United States policy towards Cuba is underpinned by a supremacist belief that originated during the colonisation of South America by European governments. While the majority of countries in the Americas have abandoned colonial mentality in their relations with South America, the United States maintains a position of violent suppression of South America in general and Cuba in particular. This repression has led to increased economic challenges for Cuba, placing its people in increasingly difficult economic and social conditions.

The Politburo urges our government to deepen its relations with Cuba on various fronts. This collaboration will drive shared development for both countries and contribute to the prosperity of the Cuban people. We remain steadfast in our opposition to imperialism and its actions towards Cuba.

Western Sahara

The SACP stands in solidarity with the people of Western Sahara against the imperialist-backed occupation by Morocco. The SACP will continue to participate in practical solidarity activities in support of the people of Western Sahara's struggle for national sovereignty and self-determination.

Swaziland

The SACP stands in solidarity with the people of Swaziland struggling for democracy, and to that extent supports the people's demands for the unbanning of political parties, release of political prisoners and return of political exiles.

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

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