Building on our organisational progress
The second day of APDUSA’s 2025 National Conference was for members only to collectively deliberate on how to build on our strengths to overcome some internal weaknesses. The energies from day-1 (when we dissected major political questions that confront anti-capitalist forces in South Africa and the world) continued to manifest in the spirited but frank contributions of members in attendance.
Day-2 deliberations were marked by the same intensive participation and lively debates that characterized day-1. Against the backdrop of making sense of current global and South African class wars, members turned their minds to the state of the organisation since our 2024 conference. Speaker after speaker delved into what the past 12 months taught us about building our structures to radicalise unfolding liberatory protests.
A report from the national secretariat, one from the publications officer and the treasurer’s financial report surveyed and highlighted a compelling range of organisational initiatives in APDUSA branches and its central executive committee. Overall, these reports sketch the ways in which APDUSA advances our common political objectives and principles across different regions of our country. The three reports stimulated introspections and a search among members for answers to a wide range of internal organisational questions. A healthy dose of self-criticism radiated from the reports and exchanges they ignited.
Unity with anti-capitalist protest movements
If branches constitute the vital organs of our organisation, as the national secretarial report underscores repeatedly, then its militant activists are its lifeblood. Any vital organ starved of its lifeblood faces death that, in turn, threatens the entire organism with its own demise. The vitality of APDUSA as an organised radical left force, thus depends on the health of its vital organs and lifeblood. A growing membership with heightened political consciousness and training will be essential to bridge the organisational and leadership crises that stifle movements of the exploited and repressed majority in this period.
In addition to these compelling messages, the secretarial report also opened a much broader conference debate on boosting the vitality of the branches for the maximum influence of APDUSA politics in mass struggles. Inside our branch meetings members must discuss and implement the lessons in ‘Organising for Freedom’, a classic APDUSA booklet written to foster conscious self-organisation. Furthermore, bolstering the numerical strength of the organisation, which is an ongoing recruitment duty, is inseparable from all other political efforts.
Our political education, extensively discussed on day 2, has multiple sources. Elementary training, for instance, can come from battles for better working conditions and wages, housing and basic municipal services and other bread-and-butter demands. Conference urged members to actively participate in all forums for our political training, whether inside our branches or the dedicated political schools. In the final analysis, however, the value and testing the depth of our political understanding stems from its practical use, such as writing to publicise working class struggles.
Consistency in implementing APDUSA’s political programme, as observed in our secretarial report, has brought us in contact with new generations of activists and potential recruits. Executing our politics in daily practice also exposed us to forms of united action with social movements, trade unions and political groups. Mass resistance in defence of the labouring majority and poor is becoming increasingly explosive and involves more activists. These defensive battles often pose progressive demands, but are trapped in a fragmented, sporadic and ad hoc blockage. A major axis of our organisational tasks is to find linkages with these protests and work with others to politically generalize such issue-based resistance movements. In 2 regions our comrades are actively involved in embryonic ‘united fronts’, with real possibilities of grounding these fronts on a sound political basis and rapidly expanding them.
Amplify the voices and struggles of the labouring majority
The report of the publications officer was a powerful and clarion call to counter the bombardment of bourgeois propaganda. This requires an independent system of publications by working people for working people. All APDUSA publications, emphasized throughout this report and the plenary discussions, seek to amplify the political demands and struggles of the landless peasants and workers. Speakers who contributed to this session urged every member to see our publications as a revolutionary priority of the highest order. When comrades write, they are countering the ruling class media empires established to profiteer from censoring and silencing the toiling masses through a relentless misinformation war on society.
The publications officer acknowledged the urgency of training anti-capitalist militants who can confidently write and explain APDUSA politics. Immersing ourselves in this core organisational responsibility and learning from experienced cadres in branches, remains a crucial aid in developing this self-confidence to contribute to our own publications. The comradely solidarity that lives within our political collective includes learning from each other on how to agitate for principled and programmatic action. Every progressive activist knows that all organisational activities demand time, discipline and effort. As an essential component of this activism, writing is no different.
More can and must be done to reap lasting benefits from APDUSA’s growing online presence, allowing activists easy access to our literature through the internet. Our website has evolved into the main transmission channel of a vast number of documents from our rich archives and analyses of topical political questions.
If one considers day 2 of the 2025 national conference in its entirety, then it helped us work out concrete ways of sharpening our strategies of resistance for today. Conference called on all members to answer an old pressing question: what must the exploited, dispossessed, impoverished and repressed majority do to liberate society from capitalism? As a minimum, this demands the highest levels of programmatic clarity, political training, self-organisation, revolutionary courage and organisational discipline from all. Towards this end, our 2025 Conference adopted achievable organisational resolutions to bolster this axis of our radical political actions.