Towards a Red Horizon – The Working Class, Youth, and the Task of Building Popular Power in South Africa by Lindokuhle Mponco

I. Introduction: The Revolutionary Spirit of Workers’ Day

“We want no condescending saviours. We must save ourselves.”

— The Internationale

International Workers' Day is a commemoration and at the same time a celebration of the working class. It was established by the Second International which was under the theoretical leadership of Karl Kautsky. The Second International was a global organisation of socialist parties and trade unions. In July 1889, a resolution was taken to celebrate the working class on the 1st of May. The day was originally chosen to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, where workers were killed while protesting for an eight-hour workday. The eight-hour workday movement finds its roots in Australia in 1856, eight years after the Communist Manifesto was published. This was led by stonemasons in Victoria who led a mass stoppage, leading to an entire movement which has largely been successful in the capitalist world especially after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution triumphed.

The year 2025 is the 108th anniversary of the Russian revolution which was led by the workers in Petrograd and Moscow, and by peasant communes which saw the overthrowal of the Tsarist regime, and subsequently the bourgeois Russian Provisional Government. As we honour this day, we do so with burning clarity: the South African working class is under siege. And yet, the flame of revolution is not extinguished - it smoulders in the streets, in classrooms, in the informal settlements, and in the hearts of a new generation. As we commemorate this day, we must remember that workers in Russia gave birth to the Soviets (Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Councils) which were a product of mass discontent and anger towards the bourgeois parliamentary system, the Provisional government, Tsarism, the capitalist system and all things that benefit the ruling class. The Soviets due to their organised will, remind us that under the right conditions, the oppressed can become the ruling class. In South Africa, the conditions of crisis are maturing - but revolutionary leadership, strategy, and unity remain in deficit.

 

II. The State of the South African Working Class in 2025

After three decades of neoliberalism, state capture, and the betrayal of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the proletariat of South Africa finds itself in an acute struggle of survival. In sum, the South African working class is suffocating in a myriad of burdens which include high taxes, inflated cost of living, and increasing alienation from the productive centres and economic centres of decision making. Union membership is rapidly declining if not at an all-time low rate in post-1994 South Africa, wages are stagnant, and precarious labour - outsourcing, gig work, EPWP jobs - has become the norm. COSATU is a shell of its former self and is politically irrelevant, neutered by their proximity to the ANC and their degenerate bureaucracy. The SACP, once a guiding light, a beacon of Marxist clarity, and vanguard of the working class, has been fully absorbed into the parliamentary machinery of bourgeois power. As a result, workers feel neglected, and their demands have been reduced to bargaining chips in elitist negotiations for political office.

However, this despair must not paralyse our efforts to organise ourselves. From SAFTU-aligned unions who have kept the spark alive despite their own internal contradictions, to the continued and sustained resistance of community forums and shack dweller associations in Soweto, Tembisa, and Mdantsane, the spirit of defiance and resistance continues to live. We must be clear, we are not facing apathy, but a lack of ideological coordination and revolutionary leadership which will organise the working class anew into a confident revolutionary class which can decisively shift the dynamics in our neocolonial state. 

 

III. Youth Unemployment: A Social Time Bomb

If the working class is under siege, the youth are already under occupation with South Africa's youth unemployment rate sitting above 60%, which puts it among the highest in the world. Tens of millions of young people remain locked out of both the labour market and the formal economy. They are told and encouraged to 'hustle' while inflation soars, and basic public services continue to collapse without any care or regard. Many are classified as overqualified and inexperienced, while others are criminalised, policed, and left to drown in drug abuse and gangsterism. The youth of South Africa find itself living in a Reagan-like economy of drugs, poverty, and hopelessness as illustrated in movies like New Jack City, Paid in Full, and Boyz 'n The Hood. That reality we used to see in American movies has become our reality in the inner-city, CBD areas, and in townships. However, the deeper we stare into the abyss is the more we realise that the youth are not merely 'unemployed' - they are structurally excluded from the economy by a system designed to reproduce the contradictions that continue to bedevil our country: unemployment, poverty, and inequality. 

In this state of exclusion, we find that there is a potential, a radical potential at that. It is this group of young people that should be the battering ram of the revolution. They should spearhead, lead, and direct the revolution to its necessary and logical conclusion, and that is the total overthrowal of the liberal-bourgeois capitalist economy which manifests itself in the tendency called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the guiding socio-political and socio-economic ideology of the GNU and the State. It promotes crass individualism, vulgar consumerism, and normalises inequalities under the guise of 'meritocracy' while claiming that wealth will eventually trickle down to the most oppressed layers of society, the working class, and the peasantry. Who are in their majority young, poor, and excluded from the day-to-day economic centres of decision making and production outputs. But rage is not enough. Organisation is key.

 

IV. Students & Learners: The Vanguard of the Youth

Students and learners are often dismissed by elites as 'immature' or ‘disruptive’ while pseudo-lefts and left-wing infants claim that students are too detached from the masses without acknowledging that students exist within communities, and within the masses because they are part of the masses. History in South Africa and indeed across the globe, particularly in the labour movement, teaches us that it was schoolchildren of 1976 who ignited the uprising that revived the armed struggle and begun the rapid decline of the apartheid regime. To stretch it more backward we must remember that it was students that kept the fires burning against the Batista regime before the arrest of the M-26 leaders and during the revolutionary war against the Batista regime in Cuba. In 1917, the February revolution which was started on International Working Women's Day (March 8th) by female textile workers gained momentum the next day when students and learners from universities and schools in Petrograd joined the protest with slogans like "Down with the Tsar" and started defacing Tsarist monuments and symbols. To bring it closer to the contemporary period, it was #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, #RegisterOneRegisterAll, and #DirectPaymentMustFall that played a role in re-politicising a generation and shattered illusions about a 'rainbow' capitalism.

It is ironic that this period stems from 2015 to 2025, a ten-year period of moulding revolutionary consciousness. As a result, today University and TVET SRCs, High School, youth brigades, and radical academic circles despite most of them being obscure, remain the most ideologically advanced and organised section of the youth. The task ahead is to link the student movement to the labour movement and convert the temporary protests into permanent revolutionary organisation. 

 

V. Why We Must Build a Civic Front of Communists

In every township, in every informal settlement, in every struggle for housing, land, electricity, and clean water—there are isolated but determined communities fighting back. The missing ingredient in this is a coherent revolutionary programme and a united front to bind these struggles together into one mass revolutionary struggle against capitalism. It is on this premise that I continue to make the call that a civic front of Communists must rise - not as a new political party, but as a mass, grassroots, revolutionary alliance rooted in:

• Workers' Councils and Factory Committees,
• Student and Learner councils,
• Land occupations and urban community assemblies,
• Popular education centres and street schools,
• Unemployed people's movements and informal workers' associations

This civic front must centre its politics in Scientific Socialism, Pan-Africanism, and Decoloniality - not academic radicalism or NGO reformism. It must be the new school of cadres; it must build new institutions of dual power and develop the necessary capacity to govern from below. 

 

VI. Strategic Alliance with the EFF Towards 2027

Despite its recent internal ructions caused by MKP sponsored sabotage which serves the interest of the ruling class, and its other internal contradictions, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) remain the largest mass-based Black majority radical formation in the country. The base of the EFF is overwhelmingly youthful, working-class, and anti-establishment. While the leadership has in prior instances fallen prey to electoral opportunism, and tactical mistakes, the objective path and development of the EFF cannot be ignored, downplayed, or reduced. The EFF is the only party in South Africa, and dare I say in Africa that openly, bravely, and steadfastly calls for a socialist reconstruction of society like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Fanon, and Nkrumah. It is the only Party that can comfortably associate and claim to be the natural successor of the modern historical labour movement which finds its roots in the days of Owenism in the UK, prior to the scientific interventions made by Marx and Engels. 

I propose that a principled revolutionary alliance with the EFF be formed, not to be a tailist junior partner, but to be in a dialectical relationship of mutual transformation. This alliance will have more ideological legitimacy than the current iteration of the tripartite alliance and the feudal-socialist alliance of MKP and ATM, and will have class approval due to the substance, character, and form of the partnership. Revolutionaries must enter the terrain of popular politics with clarity, discipline, and a programmatic vision - not to dilute their politics, but to deepen the revolutionary line among the masses. The goal is to capture the imagination and consciousness of the masses by building working class power and preparing for a historic rapture in 2027 - 110 years after the revolution led by the Bolsheviks under the guidance of Lenin & Trotsky, and the Soviets. This is not a mechanical rapture or an event, but 2027 is the ideal time to assess our readiness to capture the state, and economy by any revolutionary means necessary. 2027 in South Africa will also mark 20 years after the most radical conference of the ANC in terms of resolutions, which was the 2007 Polokwane conference, and 10 years after the most reactionary conference of the ANC in terms of political leadership outcomes, the 2017 NASREC conference which has intensified our slide to economic death. 2027 must be the year we halt neoliberalism for good! 

 

VII. The Road Ahead: Revolutionary Tasks for the Masses

• Establish workers’ and students’ councils in every city, town, and university.
• Launch a national Popular Education Campaign for revolutionary literacy and ideology.
• Form cadre schools and revolutionary youth brigades to build discipline, commitment, and strategy.
• Strengthen community assemblies as organs of local resistance and prefiguration of people’s power.
• Link all local struggles to a national revolutionary programme with clearly defined goals: land reform, democratic planning, and socialist governance.

 

VIII. Conclusion: A Call to Organise, Agitate, and Build

We mark this Workers’ Day not with nostalgia, but with purpose. We are not merely honouring the past—we are preparing for the future.

Let the workers rise, not to demand crumbs, but to seize the bakery. Let the youth rise, not to beg for jobs, but to build a new economy. Let the students rise, not only to protest, but to lead.

Let 2025 be the year we begin building the Red Horizon—a mass civic front of communists, revolutionaries, and fighters for a truly liberated Azania.

As Lenin said:

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”

Now is the time to think, organise, agitate, and fight.

Not for reform—but for revolution.