Council of the Left constituted: Now we must organise

Tuesday, 25 August 2026: The inaugural meeting of the Council of the Left took place on Friday, 21 August 2026, at Birchwood Hotel, bringing together representatives of political organisations, trade unions, social movements, community organisations and other progressive formations that participated in the Conference of the Left held in May this year.

The meeting formally constituted the Council of the Left and began the important task of translating the Declaration and Programme of Action of the Conference of the Left into organisation, campaigning and collective action.

This inaugural Council meeting committed to unity in action, working-class organisation and an immediate programme of struggle focused on:

• Joining the ongoing mass campaign to reject and defeat the anti-poor Prevention of Illegal Evictions Act Amendment Bill,
• Defending the Expropriation Act against attacks from the DA, Afriforum, Die Vaderland Stigting and the Free Market Foundation through a combination of court action and mass mobilisation.
• Mobilising for the Equitable Access to Land Bill to become an effective law for land redistribution and the security of tenure.
• Using the coming Budget days to campaign for fiscal resources to meet basic needs and address the cost of living.
• Mobilisation for Parliament to debate and adopt a Cuba Solidarity Bill, together with continued material support for the people of Cuba.

The establishment of the Council is not an end in itself. Nor is it the creation of another political party, another umbrella organisation or another leadership structure standing above existing organisations and struggles.

The Council is a political and coordinating platform through which different formations of the left can build unity in action while retaining their organisational independence, political identities, programmes and democratic mandates.

Its success will ultimately not be measured by the number of meetings it holds, statements it issues or structures it creates. It must be measured by a much harder test: does the Council help workers and poor communities become better organised, more confident and more capable of changing the balance of forces in society? This is the challenge we have set ourselves.

Build unity through struggle

The Council agreed that its Programme of Action must connect national political questions to the actual struggles taking place in workplaces and communities.

The Programme includes workers' organisation and workplace struggles; community mobilisation and basic services; public healthcare; land and agrarian transformation; food security and the cost of living; housing, evictions and security of tenure; energy and basic needs; gender justice; youth and student struggles; climate and environmental justice; international solidarity and anti-imperialism; and political education.

But the Council also recognised a danger familiar to the South African left: adopting an impressive list of resolutions without building the organisation and power required to implement them. We will therefore prioritise a limited number of areas for common action during the first 100 days.

The point is not to manufacture struggles from above. Across the country workers and communities are already organising against retrenchments, unemployment, evictions, unaffordable electricity, water cuts, hunger, corruption, gender-based violence, environmental destruction and the collapse of public services. The Council must strengthen these struggles, connect them and help them develop into a wider working-class challenge to the existing balance of power.

Defend the poor: reject the criminalisation of land and housing struggles

The proposed amendments to the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act - the PIE Amendment Bill - will be one of the Council's immediate areas of intervention.

The starting point must be the material reality producing land occupations. People do not occupy land because millions of South Africans have suddenly developed contempt for the law. People occupy land because apartheid geography remains substantially intact; because land reform has failed to redistribute land at the necessary scale; because affordable housing close to jobs is unavailable; because rural livelihoods have been systematically weakened; and because unemployment and poverty force millions of people to construct lives in the spaces from which the formal property market excludes them.

It is therefore fundamentally wrong to turn a social crisis into a criminal justice problem. The proposed amendments raise profound concerns about arbitrary eviction, homelessness, security of tenure, the rights of occupiers and the criminalisation of people organising around land and housing. The gains won through decades of struggle and constitutional litigation must not be rolled back.

No person should be arbitrarily evicted. Eviction must remain just and equitable. Human dignity must remain central. Meaningful engagement cannot be discarded. The state cannot solve its housing failure by pushing people from one condition of desperation into another.

The Council's intervention will therefore examine the Bill from the standpoint of the constitutional rights and material needs of poor and working-class people.

We will support ongoing mass campaigns against the Bill with an appropriate combination of popular education, parliamentary and policy engagement, legal and constitutional scrutiny and mobilisation from below.

But we must go further. We need to move the national conversation towards the much more important questions: Why, more than thirty years after apartheid, are millions of people still landless and homeless? Who owns South Africa's land? Who controls well-located urban land? Why has government failed to redistribute land at the required scale? And what programme can finally begin to dismantle apartheid spatial geography?

Defend the Expropriation Act and advance land redistribution

This wider land struggle necessarily places the Expropriation Act and the constitutional mandate for land reform firmly on the political agenda. The present constitutional litigation over the Expropriation Act demonstrates why this struggle cannot be left to lawyers, political parties and property owners alone. Expropriation is not alien to the Constitution. The Constitution expressly recognises expropriation for a public purpose or in the public interest, including land reform and equitable redress.

The Council of the Left calls for mass action to defend the Expropriation Act during the next court dates of 15-16 October and 7-9 December.

The struggle cannot stop with defending legislation. Legislation must become an instrument in the hands of an organised people demanding actual redistribution. Therefore, the Council of the Left supports the Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development's piloting of the Equitable Access to Land Bill. We call on landless communities and all progressive organisations to support the Bill and ensure that it achieves effective state-led land redistribution.

The Equitable Access to Land Bill must become a central part of the next phase of the land struggle. Section 25(5) of the Constitution places a positive obligation on the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to foster conditions that enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis.

For the Council of the Left, the Equitable Access to Land Bill must not become another narrowly administrative instrument for managing the existing distribution of land. It must provide a serious legislative basis for large-scale redistribution, secure tenure, access to well-located urban and rural land, affordable housing, agrarian transformation and the dismantling of apartheid spatial geography. It must give practical meaning to the constitutional promise that access to land will not remain determined overwhelmingly by inherited wealth, market power and the ability to purchase property. The recent Constitutional Court judgment on the Tafelberg site reinforces this principle by rejecting approaches to housing that reproduce the relegation of working-class people to the urban periphery. Equitable access must therefore mean changing who has access to land, where that land is located, for what purposes it is used and who has power over its allocation.

The Council will support efforts by land movements, rural organisations, housing struggles and public-interest organisations to develop a people-driven response to the anticipated Bill. The legislation must be shaped by those who experience dispossession, eviction, insecure tenure and exclusion from land, rather than being left to negotiations between the state and established property interests. This struggle must also connect the Equitable Access to Land Bill to the defence and implementation of the Expropriation Act, resistance to regressive changes to PIE, and a broader programme of land redistribution and spatial justice. The constitutional promise of equitable access to land will not implement itself. It requires legislation, state capacity and resources, but, above all, an organised social force capable of ensuring that land reform moves from constitutional promise to material redistribution.

Meet basic needs now! The cost-of-living crisis is not over

The Council also identified the provision of basic needs and the direction of economic policy as central questions for the left.

Working-class people experience economic policy not through Treasury presentations or movements in economic indicators, but at the supermarket till, in taxi fares, in prepaid electricity meters, in municipal accounts and in the daily struggle to feed a household.

Lower inflation does not mean lower prices. Poor families and workers cannot eat an inflation statistic. A household cannot pay its electricity account with a favourable CPI announcement. The cumulative increase in the cost of food, transport, electricity and other necessities remains embedded in household budgets even when the rate at which prices increase begins to slow. Millions of people remain unemployed. Millions more survive on poverty wages or precarious employment.

The Council therefore believes that the struggle around basic needs must become a central site for rebuilding working-class politics.

This necessarily requires a confrontation with austerity. South Africa cannot cut its way out of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Years of fiscal consolidation have weakened public institutions, constrained municipalities, left hospitals and schools understaffed and undermined the capacity of the democratic state precisely when millions of people need that state most.

Fiscal policy is never merely technical. A budget answers fundamental political questions: Who pays? Who benefits? What social needs receive priority? What kind of economy are we trying to build?

A society characterised by mass unemployment and enormous concentrations of private wealth cannot make a fiscal surplus the supreme measure of economic virtue while hospitals lack personnel, schools lack teachers, municipalities cannot maintain infrastructure and millions of people go hungry.

The Council calls for united working-class action in the lead-up to the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (the mini-budget) to be released at the end of October and the 2027/2028 budget, which will be released in February 2027. In addition to mass action, the Council will therefore work towards a working-class alternative to austerity. Such an alternative must include substantially greater public investment in social and economic infrastructure; the rebuilding of state and municipal capacity; expansion of public employment; properly staffed health and education systems; expanded social protection; and a serious programme of state-led industrialisation capable of creating decent work.

We must also confront the revenue side of the budget. The enormous concentration of wealth in South Africa means that progressive taxation of wealth, high incomes and corporate profits must form part of the discussion about financing reconstruction.

The burden of adjustment cannot continue to fall disproportionately on workers and poor households.

Beyond the budget, the Council will develop a left and working-class response to reforms associated with Operation Vulindlela, particularly where they concern water, electricity, energy, transport, housing and public infrastructure. We reject the idea that the failure of public institutions automatically proves that markets and private capital must replace them. There is nothing inherently efficient about privatisation.

Public institutions weakened through austerity cannot then be presented as evidence that public provision has failed.

Among the demands requiring further common mobilisation and development are:

• a decisive end to austerity and increased public investment in basic services.
• expanded zero-rating of essential food and household goods.
• stronger action against profiteering and excessive prices in essential food and household markets.
• movement towards a Universal Basic Income Grant capable of guaranteeing a minimum floor of dignity.
• substantial improvement of existing social grants.
• affordable and reliable public transport.
• affordable electricity and expanded free basic services for poor households.
• filling critical vacancies in health, education and other public services.
• large-scale public employment linked to socially necessary work.
• progressive taxation of wealth and the super-rich.
• state-led investment in industrialisation, infrastructure, food systems and a just transition.

These demands cannot simply be handed to government as another memorandum. They must become organising demands around which workers, unemployed people, women, young people and communities can build collective power.

Internationalism and solidarity

The Council also reaffirmed the importance of international solidarity and anti-imperialism. Immediately, the Council will mobilise for Parliament to debate and adopt a Cuba Solidarity Bill. We also call on all progressive forces in South Africa to urgently mobilise material support for the people of Cuba.

Build a mass-rooted left

South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of political organisations, manifestos, conferences or leaders. What is desperately weak is the organised power of the working class across workplaces and communities. This is the terrain on which the Council of the Left must prove its relevance. The Council must help overcome fragmentation without pretending that political differences do not exist. It must help connect organisations without swallowing them. It must support existing struggles without capturing them. It must create spaces for political debate without becoming a debating society. Most importantly, it must help restore confidence that ordinary people can organise themselves and change their conditions.

The struggle over the PIE Amendment Bill must therefore become part of rebuilding a movement for land and housing.

The struggle over the Expropriation Act must become part of rebuilding a movement for redistribution and spatial justice.

The struggle against austerity must become a struggle to rebuild public services and the developmental capacity of the state.

The cost-of-living crisis must become an organising terrain linking wages, social grants, food, transport, energy and public services.

The fight against privatisation must become a struggle for democratic and effective public provision.

This is what we understand by unity in action. We invite trade unions, community organisations, social movements, women's organisations, youth and student formations, organisations of unemployed people, rural movements, climate justice organisations and other democratic and socialist formations to engage this process. We will not overcome the fragmentation of the left through declarations about unity.

Unity must be constructed through common struggle. We will not defeat austerity by demonstrating that another economic policy is intellectually preferable. We must build the social forces capable of imposing another economic direction. We will not resolve the land question through legislation alone. Land redistribution requires organised social power from below. That is the work the Council of the Left has begun. The future will not be given to us. It must be organised.

Issued by the Council of the Left

Contacts:

Thami Hukwe - General Secretary, Socialist Party of Azania, 062 309 0468

Sam Matiase - EFF MP and Mayoral Candidate for Mangaung, 082 468 0823

Mazibuko Jara - Zabalaza Pathways Institute, 0839879633