Editorial – The South African Communist Party

This journal was founded during a period when the socialist transformation of newly independent countries of Africa and Asia was on the agenda and the existence of the communist party-led socialist state of Cuba was a reality in Latin America. We made no bones about aiming to produce a journal which would publish well-researched articles in solidarity with movements and parties working towards the liberation and transformation of Africa from imperialist domination. As observed in the last issue, in so doing the journal took up Fanon’s critical stance on the African regimes that dropped the struggle for the liberation of their peoples once they assumed office (Chukwudinma, Lee and Engels 2025). This issue focuses on the role of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the post-liberation government led by the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s main liberation movement. The SACP is the oldest such party on the continent and in 2021, almost three decades after the end of white minority rule and its entry into the ANC-led government, the party celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Three years later, the ANC faced a bruising election in which the tripartite alliance, of which the SACP was part, suffered a serious blow. Forced into coalition, the ANC chose the centrist Democratic Alliance as its partner. The left in South Africa is now reeling from challenges from populist, ethnic and xenophobic mobilisation as the working class and rural masses struggle to find political expression for their desperation and dissatisfaction. No clear socialist alternative was posed in the 2024 election, and the SACP chose to remain part of the ANC tripartite alliance, together with the labour federation COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The SACP has now decided to contest the 2026 local government elections independently of the ANC, posing a fundamental challenge to the party’s decades-long alliance with the liberation movement.

South Africa and its neighbours are suffering from structural socio-economic challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment, combined with the growing impact of climate change. What is the role of the SACP in this context ? Are its ideological positions and its strategies flexible enough to remain relevant, and even to play a progressive role in the future ?

As part of the SACP centenary events of 2021, an initiative of Wits History Workshop, South Africa History Online and academics from various universities put together a series of webinars under the overarching theme ‘Lineages of Socialism in Southern Africa : 100 years of the SACP’. The webinar hosted by Nelson Mandela University in November 2021 was the final one in the series. Entitled ‘Forward to Socialism/Socialist Futures’, it covered the period from the 1980s, through the unbanning of the SACP in 1990, to the present, and included some discussion of the future of the party and what form a socialist transition could possibly take in South Africa. Four of those papers are published here, together with an article especially written for this issue by Patrick Bond.

The vanguard party and politics from below

These contributions prompt reflection on the role of revolutionary vanguard parties and on the role and purpose of parties themselves as agents of radical change in the current global conjuncture. If parties are indeed the political vehicle of transformation, is vanguardism still the appropriate principle of party organisation, with a central committee determining the party line, or is democratic decision-making from below the way to embed a socialist party’s power to transform once it is in government ? Can democratic centralism ever be more democratic than centralist ? The victory of a declared democratic socialist both in the US Democratic Party primary and in the election for mayor of the biggest city in the USA last year may have begun to put socialism back on the agenda in the global North, but also suggests a new left politics from below. Whether the socialist party is a minority caucus within a large establishment governing party or a vanguard political party in government with a former liberation-movement-turned-party, the dilemma is the same : how to ensure that its influence on policy reflects its socialism and has a degree of success in moving the country or city in the direction of socialist transformation.

Those left-wing African liberation movements that then became one-party governments developed their versions of socialism in the context of non-alignment with the actually existing state socialism of the USSR and its allies and of its Chinese variant. They did this emphasising the African characteristics of their socialism and, in some cases, presenting a philosophical basis : Nkrumah’s consciencism, Nyerere’s ujamaa or Kaunda’s humanism. While there were Marxists within these liberation-movements-turned-parties, they often kept a low profile given the hostility to Marxism within the political leadership of the dominant parties, and of course they splintered into camps sympathetic to either of the two great socialist powers. The predominance of the imperialist global North in the former colonies’ economic and political relations ensured the failure of the socialist ‘experiments’, leaving liberation from neocolonial imperialism – let alone socialist transformation – still to be achieved.

Imperialism : war and inequality

Indeed, any discussion now of the prospects for socialism, let alone socialism itself, seems somewhat out of place in the current global conjuncture, in spite of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, now some 15 years ago, and most recently those in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger leading to their breakaway from the Economic Community of West Africa and formation of the anti-neocolonial Alliance of Sahelian States (AES). More than four decades of neoliberal global capitalism has reversed many of the advances of that earlier hopeful period, bringing increases in inequality both within and between countries. It has created, both in the global North and the global South, an elite of billionaires and millionaires, together with their well-paid corporate managerial and political minions at one end and, at the other, a global reserve army of labour. As the editorial in Issue 185 (Cline-Cole 2025) observed, although the inequalities of class and nation are at the root of the regular economic crises, little is being or can be done, given the system’s contradictions, to deal with these increasing inequalities.

The growth of the global economy has intensified dependence on fossil fuels and polluting chemicals, which in turn has created climate and health crises around the world. The climate emergency is already bringing regular flooding and droughts in countries with inadequate resources to deal with the consequent destruction and hunger, while inadequate controls over air and river pollution, and over poor diets and food hygiene, bring global pandemics and chronic diseases. The failure to deal with poverty and inequality has fuelled the rise of the far right around the world, with its demonising of the ‘other’ – whether, for example, Zimbabweans in South Africa or Muslims in the global North – as well as continuing the super-exploitation of an increasingly fragmented labour force. Setting these fragments against each other so that the most powerful class or class fraction rules over all of them is familiar divide-and-rule politics.

In a populist reaction to globalisation, the Trump regime prioritises the protection of its domestic manufacturing and agriculture sectors, whose working class formed the backbone of support for its election victories. Its tariff policy was never going to bring benefits to Trump voters and has had to be amended many times, since it has faced both domestic and international opposition, not least from US allies, but even from the US Supreme Court. The reported unwillingness of the Trump regime to get involved in military excursions overseas and a promise to end the Russia–Ukraine war by producing a peace deal is also responding to Trump voters’ demands to see resources spent within the USA and not abroad ; but this appears to be contradicted by recent foreign interventions. The war on Iran, the removal of Maduro in Venezuela by armed force, the bombing of Nigerian militants linked to Islamic State and the supply of arms to support the Israeli genocide are all demonstrations of US power and statements of its self-appointed role as world hegemon. Claims to Greenland and even Canada, and the oil blockade of Cuba reflect the US aim not only to exert control over the rest of the American continent and the Caribbean in order to build up security against their big power rivals and especially China, but also to have control over the supply of raw materials essential to the data-driven technology of the so-called fourth industrial revolution and to the potential lying under the surface of Greenland and the Arctic seabed, now made more accessible by climate change. Closing down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is another way of spending less abroad, especially in this case in the global South, for most of which Trump has almost total disdain. This has had dire consequences for people who have become dependent especially on the food supply and health services that go with USAID programmes.

The old imperialist story of interventions and regime change remains strikingly alive, both directly and indirectly. The USA, while experiencing the same decline in traditional manufacturing as elsewhere in the global North, maintains its hegemony through command over advanced technology and deployment of military power. It supplies the allied countries of its empire with arms which they in turn supply to their clients : in Sudan, where several countries, most notably the United Arab Emirates, have been supplying US and UK arms to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan ; Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is the conduit for arms used against the Houthi rebels ; Israel, where arms from the same sources have been used in the Gaza (and the West Bank) genocide ; and in Ukraine against the Russians. This last is a war provoked by the further expansion of NATO and the EU to Russian borders, an expansion that has occurred anyway, provoked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The USA has a military presence over most of the world outside mainland China and Russia, emphasising its status as global hegemon. Across Africa alone it has permanent and temporary bases in around 30 countries, ensuring that US raw material, military and security interests are protected. A recent example of this has been the deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where US support for the government is predicated on access to the DRC’s mineral wealth and support for a railway to take those minerals out through Angola for delivery to the USA. Africa still largely remains a source of raw materials exported for productive activity elsewhere in the global North and the more industrialised parts of the global South.

China, Russia and the US empire

But what of China and Russia ? Trump’s attempts to create divisions between the two by cosying up to Putin appear to have failed. Given that China produces many necessary inputs in US-manufactured products, it seems odd for the USA to pursue a hostile policy towards such an important power and source of wealth for its corporates. However, having China as a security threat in South East Asia, especially with its claims on Taiwan, justifies increasing US spending on arms and the rewarding of the military–industrial complex and its financial backers to cement the USA’s status as the global hegemon.

As for China’s increasing involvement in Africa, its one African military base in Djibouti appears to be there to protect China’s investments in the region and the shipping routes to the South. Its Belt and Road Initiative has been presented as a poorly disguised grab for the continent’s mineral resources, an argument well challenged by Caria and Ghinoi (2025) in Issue 185. They conclude that China’s strategy focuses more on African regime stability, as well as on infrastructural development, to underpin growth in trade to the advantage of both parties. China’s strategy will still of course reflect its own economic and geopolitical interests, which include not wasting their resources on failed states.

As was the case for the USSR, the supply of arms is the main trade connection between Russia and the countries of the African continent. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (George et al. 2025), Russia supplied 21% of the continent’s major arms imports over the period 2020–24, compared with 18% from China and 16% from the USA. Combined with Russia’s well-known sponsorship of private military companies and their mercenary armed forces such as the ‘Afrika Corps’ (formerly the Wagner Group) and some 30 or so military–technical cooperation agreements with African countries, these connections support Russia’s objective of being a global player yet still cannot match the hegemonic role played by the USA. Mercenary traffic is also going the other way as Russia recruits African soldiers to join its own forces in the war with Ukraine, sometimes reportedly on unfulfilled promises of payment and post-service jobs.

It is not at all clear that Russia has the same raw material objectives as the USA, because it has many of the minerals sought by the new green technologies within its territory. As yet, while there are reports of Russian instructors training African countries’ armies and agreements for a naval base at Port Sudan and military bases elsewhere, none of these appear to have come to fruition. Russia has nowhere near the power, economically or militarily, of the US empire to be otherwise attractive to emerging African economies, and so can largely only remain an arms trader and military ally. As we have seen in Ukraine, even that military power is limited.

Finally, there are the tensions within the US empire between most of Europe and the USA, especially when it concerns Ukraine and now Greenland. Trump’s performative politics means that there is an appearance of antagonism towards its empire, while the reality is a continuation of the central strategy of his predecessors. Those who believe that Trump is different have forgotten the US enforcements of the Monroe doctrine in, for example, Cuba and Chile, and the imperialist wars in Indochina and Iraq as well as its long-running support for apartheid South Africa and settler-colonial apartheid Israel. The prospect of a rupture of the Atlantic alliance, the lynchpin of US control of the European part of its empire, is unlikely given the strong military and security links between the USA and several countries in Europe, especially the UK. Were there to be such a rupture there might then be possibilities for African countries (and the global South generally) to exploit these frictions to their advantage, especially in areas of trade and investment.

The prospects for socialism

So, what of socialism now – and especially when the USSR is no more and socialism with Chinese characteristics seems more like (state) capitalism, even though socialist principles are embedded in every corporate structure with Communist Party of China representatives, ensuring they are respected ? Socialism in the classical Marxist schema was to arise from the contradictions of capitalism, principally that of the capital–labour relation, so almost every major economic and political crisis caused by these contradictions was hailed as the beginning of the end of the system. By the 1970s it appeared that capitalism’s sickness was terminal, with the share of profits in total value added depressed by organised workers’ power over the share of wages adding to Marx’s theory of the tendency of the falling rate of profit – the central contradiction of the capital–labour relation. However, as we know now, the neoliberal revolution restored profitability through financial liberalisation, deindustrialisation and the accompanying decline in the power of organised labour, all of these accelerated by the third and fourth industrial revolutions with their impact on labour productivity. The financial crisis of 2007/08 consequent on the deregulation of financial markets brought depression, an increasing number of proxy wars and calls for more military expenditure, with the threat of a third world war closer than ever, just as the Great Crash of 1929 brought the 1930s depression, the triumph of fascism in Germany and Italy, the Second World War and rearmament.

The other feature of global capitalist development which produces further contradictions in the system has been the rapid growth of the financial and technological corporates. The ever-increasing capital intensity of production reduces the potential for extracting surplus value from labour which, combined with the squeeze on consumption caused by the stagnation of incomes, has become another threat to the realisation of profits, thus leading to the potential breakdown of the system. With the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) there is another potential solution to the search for profit from increases in productivity. While AI is expected to reduce many jobs, like all previous major technical change it is also likely to produce new jobs and new opportunities to extract value from labour power.

The breakdown of the system and its logic can also be avoided through war (destruction and reconstruction), or even the threat of war, with demands for rearmament to deter the perceived enemy. Investment in building military power, with its multiplier effects on employment and consumption, is even proposed as a solution to the current stagnation facing much of the global North. Increasing emphasis on military ‘investment’ and the security of the state highlights not only the external enemy but also the internal collaborator, thus encouraging and justifying repression. The rise in the number of authoritarian regimes (including the USA) is a response to domestic crises and a common way to suppress domestic revolts. We have seen this development across the African continent, as well as in other parts of the global South, in the shape of military regimes or regimes with strong military forces and security agencies to keep any opposition under control and to ensure through rigged elections that they maintain their power. We now see this authoritarian trend across other parts of the global South and increasingly across the global North led by the new, some may say proto-fascist, face of US imperialism and encouraged by the increasing success of far-right parties in national elections.

The editorial in Issue 185 asked a number of questions, of which two are directly relevant here : first, whether global capitalism can be reformed so ‘that it works for Africa and its economies, societies and environments’ (Cline-Cole 2025, 281) and, second, how progressive African leaders can build a strategy of ‘resistance and decoupling based on genuinely popular democratic movements’ (ibid.). Before the neoliberal revolution, social democracy, especially in parts of Europe, did improve the lives of the working class and limit inequality. For Africa and the global South, it brought the commitment to transfer 0.7% of the global North’s gross domestic product to the global South. However, increasing social and economic infrastructural development could attract more foreign capital investment to grow economies and offer new and expanding markets, and at least bring a short-term resolution of the realisation problem. With China, Brazil and India investing across the African continent, this could be a way in which new markets are created, increasing global demand and giving a new life to foreign corporates (including those from the global North) and through them to manufacturing industry as a whole. However, even such a reformed capitalist imperialism will continue to threaten the future of life on this earth and produce the equally threatening poverty and inequality that affects so much of the Earth’s population.

The second question, how to build a progressive strategy of resistance and decoupling based on popular democratic movements, is much more relevant to the future of socialist transformation. Can African countries base a transformational industrial strategy on continentally focused industrial and agricultural strategies that involve delinking from the global capitalist economy alongside autonomous intra-continental development (also in collaboration with other countries of the global South) along the lines proposed by the late Samir Amin ? As such an approach is not advocating autarchy, a sub-question is how far would the empire of capital cooperate – or would it rather see this as another opportunity to expropriate value from the global South ? The AES, supported by its collective mineral resources, could represent a type of national sovereign project such as that advanced by Amin, focusing on food production and the internal market. Burkina Faso, for example, following such a strategy, claimed to have achieved food self-sufficiency in 2025 (Africanews 2026).

Socialism may now seem a distant dream, but socialist movements do exist all over the world, still promoting the view that the democratic control of the economy in the interests of all those who make it work is the only way to sustain the future of life on this planet. Across Africa, there have been a large number of protests against governments on issues around the cost of living, poverty and austerity, election fraud and corruption generally, water shortages and pollution, and poor public services. These protests have been variously led by trade unions, youth and students, and civil society organisations. The formation of the Kenya Left Alliance to unify left movements and parties around a socialist programme is a development that suggests that the struggle for a socialist future lies through the agency of combinations of movements and parties from below. How traditional parties of the Marxist left engage with these grassroots movements, as well as how movements and parties relate to state power, are serious questions that need to be fully thought out and may make the traditional vanguard party obsolete.

The articles in this issue

The SACP is one vanguard party that had the opportunity in government with the ANC to promote policies to shift the country in a socialist direction. The first two contributions to the issue speak to the role of the SACP in the democratic transition, and how South African communists have related to state power since 1994. The opening shot is fired, appropriately, by SACP leader Jeremy Cronin, who interrogates the outcome of the South African transition. Cronin’s significant reappraisal of the transition to democracy reinserts the masses into the analysis together with the SACP’s understanding of how this could influence the outcome of the transition. Was it in fact a ‘breakthrough’ (with reference to Maharaj and Jordan’s (2021) book of that title, published in 2021 and containing hardly a mention of the SACP), and what role did the SACP play in this ? Was there unrealised potential for a socialist transition ? Did an elite pact prevent this potential from being realised ? These questions are answered through Cronin’s insider critique of ‘stageism’ and of the SACP’s own strategic programme. Cronin contests the ‘two-stage’ theory of revolution as based in ‘Soviet-era formulaic Marxism’ and reflecting a ‘state-centric and instrumentalist perspective’.

What Cronin calls the ‘transformative capacity of popular protagonism’ has been lost in the decades since 1994. Cronin’s article is followed by Gary Prevost and Lolonga Tali’s evaluation of the role of the SACP in the ANC government from 1994 to 2014, interrogating the relationship of the SACP to the state concerning development policy. It follows on from Cronin’s discussion, examining the Macro Economic Research Group proposal, the abandoning of the Reconstruction and Development Plan in favour of neoliberal economic policies, and the subsequent return to a broadly inclusive social-democratic programme in the form of the National Development Plan (NDP). The shift was from a social-democratic to a neoliberal programme and back to a social-democratic programme. The overriding question remains : was there any possibility of a socialist transition in this process ? Did the SACP have any success in building elements of socialism within the framework of the national democratic revolution as the stated programme of the SACP and the ANC ? Prevost and Tali argue that the NDP does not contribute to the realisation of the socialist project of the SACP. There are surely some lessons to be learned regarding the relationship of communist parties to state power.

Looking at the SACP’s role in government through the lens of Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Rob Davies, three of its leading Communist Party participants, Patrick Bond offers a stark critique of the failure of the SACP to influence government in the post-1994 era, arguing that the neoliberal agenda has dominated, despite the presence of SACP members in executive positions in the ANC government. The SACP decision to independently contest the local government elections in 2026 raises new strategic questions about the relationship of the Party to the state. The role of SACP members in the implementation of programmes such as Operation Vala Umgodi, aimed at combating illegal mining and which led to the brutal deaths of over 100 mineworkers in January 2025, should surely give the SACP pause for thought.

Janet Cherry, host of the November 2021 webinar and guest editor of this issue, looks for some lessons through an historical reflection on the influence of Ruth First and Matthew Goniwe on socialist thinking and organisational strategy in southern Africa. In her article, she reflects further on the influence of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire and argues that the intellectual strands of socialism in the South African liberation struggle in the 1980s were more diverse and creative than is often portrayed. Linking forward to Devan Pillay’s reflection on the influence of democratic socialism, her article connects back to Cronin’s idea of popular protagonism, showing how activist intellectuals drew on both Gramsci and Freire. It posits an alternative way of thinking about and strategising the transition to a post-carbon, post-capitalist future.

Moving to ‘socialist futures’, new perspectives emerge, taking on board some elements of SACP discourse and abandoning others to the mists of history. Devan Pillay offers a trenchant critique of the Marxist-Leninist ‘trap’ that has continued to encumber the SACP and which has held back the project of socialist transformation in South Africa, arguing for the need for a ‘democratic ecosocialist working-class politics’. He offers a way forward in his analysis of feminist, eco-socialist and humanist strands of Marxism and their emergence in other parts of the globe. Cronin and Pillay both consider the politics of social reproduction, reflecting the influence of Marxist feminist thinkers such as Federici, as well as the critique of ‘productivism’. These articles reflect new strands of socialist thought and action in South Africa and globally, including the influences of Harvey and Bookchin, among others, pointing to the possibility of pursing alternative, possibly socialist, development paths in South Africa.

Remembering Ruth First in an edition of ROAPE published in 2014, Bridget O’Laughlin wrote (2014, 57) that ‘by the 1970s [First] had become a leading figure in the struggle to recapture Marxism as an open creative revolutionary tradition in southern Africa. That struggle is not over.’ This issue of ROAPE reflects on this tradition and demonstrates that a new frontier of struggle has opened up.

* * * * *

In addition to the articles on the SACP, we include in this issue two complementary contributions. In 1996, South Africa’s new post-apartheid Constitution was the first in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. In our Briefings section, Colin Wilson presents an account of the struggles of the lesbian and gay community in South Africa to win this prohibition and shows how it was achieved through the struggles of the black working class against at best disinterest across society, including in the ANC and SACP. Finally, we publish Pascal Bianchini’s review of Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s De la démocratie en Françafrique – Une histoire de l’impérialisme electoral. Bianchini regards this book as a ‘landmark contribution to radical scholarship on Africa’ and a departure from previous such histories. It seems particularly relevant now as some of the francophone states try to develop a national sovereign project which breaks with French neocolonial domination. It is good to see that Pluto Press will release an edition in English in August this year so that this history gets the much wider readership it deserves.

References
Africanews. 2026. Burkina Faso Hails Security Gains and Food Self-Sufficiency in 2025. January 2 Accessed March 17, 2026 https://www.africanews.com/2026/01/02/burkina-faso-hails-security-gains-and-food-self-sufficiency-in-2025
Caria S, Ghinoi S. 2025. Evolving and Differentiated Strategy ? A Network Approach to Understand Chinese Development Finance. Review of African Political Economy. Vol. 52(185):361–384. Accessed March 15, 2026 https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.62191/ROAPE-2025-0022
Chukwudinma C, Lee CJ, Engels B. 2025. Frantz Fanon at 100 : Class Struggle and the Future of African Liberation. Review of African Political Economy. Vol. 52(186):423–566. Accessed March 15, 2026 https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.62191/ROAPE-2025-0034
Cline-Cole R. 2025. Editorial : Revisiting Cracks and Crises in Capitalism’s Edifice. Review of African Political Economy. Vol. 52(185):277–286. Accessed March 15, 2026 https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.62191/ROAPE-2025-0027
George M, Djokic K, Hussain Z, Wezeman P.D, Wezeman S.T. 2025 Trends in International Arms Transfers 2024SIPRI Fact Sheet. March. Solna : Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Accessed March 17, 2026 https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/fs_2503_at_2024_0.pdf
Maharaj M, Jordan Z.P. 2021. Breakthrough : The Struggles and Secret Talks that Brought Apartheid South Africa to the Negotiating Table. Cape Town : Penguin Random House South Africa.
O’Laughlin B. 2014. Ruth First : A Revolutionary Life in Revolutionary Times. Review of African Political Economy. Vol. 41(139):44–59. Accessed March 15, 2026 https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.1080/03056244.2014.878076
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