National Chairperson of the SACP, Professor Blade Nzimande, has proposed a Special National Congress to review the Party’s 2024 decision to contest the 2026 local elections independently of the ANC.
He warned that any implementation should rest on a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation.”
The announcement comes just days ahead of the SACP’s 6th Special National Congress in Johannesburg, scheduled for November 14 to 16, 2025.
Nzimande, who writes in his personal capacity, said the Party finds itself at “a decisive historical juncture that calls for sober reflection.”
He argued that reviewing the 2024 resolution “is not a matter of bureaucratic housekeeping, but a profound political necessity” given the evolving conditions in South Africa’s political economy.
He said the Party must reassert its revolutionary role “not through rhetoric, wishful thinking or revolutionary slogans, but through dialectical engagement with changing realities.”
According to him, the SACP must remain guided by “strategic consistency, analytical alertness and tactical flexibility,” while avoiding both right-wing and ultra-left tendencies that could weaken or break the Tripartite Alliance.
Nzimande cautioned that implementing the resolution to contest elections independently has far-reaching implications for the Alliance’s principle of dual membership.
“To argue that the ANC cannot simply abandon dual membership is an infantile position,” he said, warning that internal confusion and lack of coordination risk undermining working-class unity.
He also noted that the Party’s earlier congresses had instructed it to conduct a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” before deciding on contesting elections, but that this had not been done adequately.
“Without it,” he wrote, “strategy and tactics become detached from reality, akin to shooting in the dark.”
Nzimande acknowledged that while the 2024 resolution reaffirmed the SACP’s political independence and reinvigorated ideological debate within the movement, its implementation has exposed organisational weaknesses and internal contradictions.
“The first and most serious setback has been its misrepresentation as an anti-ANC posture,” he said, adding that both reactionary and ultra-left currents had sought to exploit the decision for their own agendas.
He said communication failures within the Party had led to confusion among cadres, especially those with dual membership in the ANC and SACP.
“The resolution was insufficiently contextualised as a tactical instrument to advance working-class hegemony within, not outside, the Alliance,” Nzimande said.
Nzimande added: “Internally, the Party now faces several structural and ideological challenges that impede full implementation. Chief among these is the erosion of internal cohesion. Democratic centralism, the principle of debate before decision, unity after decision, has been unevenly applied.”
He further warned: “In some structures, factional behaviours and personality-driven politics have supplanted collective leadership. This has weakened accountability mechanisms and fostered disunity, contradicting the Leninist conception of discipline vanguard.”
Some elements within the Party, Nzimande said, “have confused tactical independence with opportunistic adventurism. These elements have mistaken rhetorical radicalism for revolutionary praxis.”
He also highlighted a lack of political training and scarce resources, noting that the Party had struggled to translate its strategic resolutions and risked “devolving into bureaucratic proclamation.”
“Revitalising political education is thus essential to prevent voluntarism and ensure that tactics serve strategy, not the other way around,” Nzimande said.
On the state of the Alliance, Nzimande said relations with the ANC had become strained by “ideological and moral degeneration” within the ruling party.
He argued that the ANC’s reluctance to engage meaningfully on reconfiguration and its “rightward drift” had altered the political landscape. “Refusing to engage would amount to deliberately driving the Alliance toward division,” he cautioned.
He stressed that while the decision to contest elections was correct in principle, its success depended on the Party’s ability to build a mobilised working-class base and avoid both “left-wing infantilism” and “right-wing opportunism.”
“Elections are a terrain of struggle, not a substitute for struggle.”
Calling for a new Special National Congress, Nzimande said it must serve as “a forum for honest debate, theoretical renewal and strategic repositioning.”
The Congress, he said, should conduct “a concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” rebuild working-class power, reaffirm Alliance unity, and restore internal discipline through democratic centralism.
He proposed that the Congress adopt a “Programme of Revolutionary Renewal,” which should include reviving grassroots structures such as the Chris Hani Red Brigades, strengthening cadre development, linking electoral participation to class mobilisation, and developing a Socialist Municipal Charter to guide local governance.
Nzimande also urged the Party to lead in forging “a Popular Left Front” uniting COSATU, SAFTU, and other progressive movements, and to strengthen its digital communication to reach young and precarious workers.
He emphasised that the Congress must be “a festival of working-class democracy,” ensuring participation from all Party structures and reflecting the lived realities of workers and the poor. “Unity without ideological clarity is fragility, while ideological clarity without unity is futility. Our task is to forge both,” he said.
Nzimande said the call for a Special National Congress was “not a matter of organisational convenience but a matter of historical urgency.”
He said the SACP must “reassert its vanguard character, not in words, but in deed, by confronting both internal and external challenges with courage and ideological precision,” in order to renew its revolutionary integrity and reconnect with the struggles of the working class.
“The Special Congress must serve not only as a forum of reflection, but as a command centre for renewal,” Nzimande said.
“If we succeed, the SACP will re-emerge not as a commentator on crisis, but as its transformative agent, the disciplined, conscious and united vanguard of the working class.”
Politics
