YCLSA Eric Stalin Mtshali District

STATEMENT ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF "FOREIGN" NATIONALS AND THE MIGRATION QUESTION

SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY (SACP) - MOSES MABHIDA PROVINCE 2026/05/08

“Taking the Struggle to the Real Enemy”

The province of KwaZulu-Natal is not immune from South Africa’s profound social, economic, and political crisis whose effects are increasingly being expressed through deepening anger, instability, social fragmentation, and tensions within working-class communities. In KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, and other parts of the country, concerns relating to migration, unemployment, crime, social insecurity, economic exclusion, and the collapse of local livelihoods have become central questions in the daily lives of our people. The South African Communist Party (SACP) in Moses Mabhida Province cannot stand outside these developments as a passive observer nor a despondent complainant.

The vanguard of the working class must begin from the concrete realities experienced by the masses. If the Party fails to engage with the lived experiences, frustrations, fears, and aspirations of the people, it risks surrendering political and ideological ground to opportunism, chauvinism, criminality, narrow nationalism, and reactionary populism. Our task is therefore not to lecture the people from above, nor to dismiss their concerns, but to engage seriously with the material basis of those concerns and assist in directing popular anger toward its real structural causes. The starting point is to recognise that the anger expressed in communities is neither imaginary nor accidental. It is rooted in objective material conditions produced over decades of colonialism, apartheid capitalism, and the post 1996 neoliberal restructuring.

Despite important democratic gains and progressive labour legislation, sections of capital continue to undermine labour protections through labour broking, subcontracting, informalisation, union bashing, and the deliberate use of vulnerable labour to weaken collective bargaining. Across working-class communities, millions confront:

a) Persistent and worsening unemployment
b) Rising food, transport, electricity, and housing costs
c) Intensifying inequality
d) Collapse of local productive economies
e) Deepening hopelessness among the youth
f) Increasing competition over scarce opportunities and resources

These conditions are experienced daily in factories, townships, informal settlements, rural villages, schools, clinics, workplaces, and households. The South African economy itself was historically constructed on the basis of a migrant labour system designed to serve capital accumulation through cheap, controlled, racialised African labour. The mining industry, commercial agriculture, manufacturing, and urban services depended on a deliberately fragmented working class divided along ethnic, territorial, racial, and national lines.

The issue is therefore not nationality in itself. The issue is exploitation based on capitalist accumulation and the plundering of African natural resources by the multinational conglomerates in collaboration with the political elites in the form of the so-called African leaders. Criminal activities ranging from drug cartels, kidnapping, illegal production of food and other beverages are symptoms of a capitalist system in decay.

At the same time, the Party must openly acknowledge that serious weaknesses within sections of the democratic state have worsened the crisis. Institutions responsible for labour enforcement, economic development, migration governance, border management, small business support, and local economic transformation have not responded at the scale demanded by the present crisis.

Instead, corruption, patronage, weak enforcement, administrative inefficiency, and uneven access to state support have deepened public frustration and weakened confidence in state institutions. Under such conditions, informality, criminality, labour exploitation, corruption, and social instability become interconnected. It is therefore understandable that many South Africans are raising concerns regarding migration, access to economic opportunities, law enforcement, business ownership, labour market participation, and pressure on already strained public services.

The Party must not dismiss these concerns. However, the role of the Party is to assist society in distinguishing between surface
appearances and underlying structural realities. A sober materialist analysis demonstrates that migrants constitute a relatively small proportion of South Africa’s total population, including in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. This reality does not support simplistic claims that migrants are themselves the fundamental cause of unemployment, poverty, inequality, or collapsing public services.

At the same time, failures in migration governance, documentation systems, labour regulation, and anti-corruption enforcement have created conditions that intensify social tensions and create opportunities for exploitation and criminality. The Party shall continue to maintain a principled and balanced position. Criminality must be confronted decisively through lawful state institutions. Criminal activity cannot be tolerated regardless of whether it involves South African citizens, documented migrants, undocumented migrants, organised syndicates, corrupt officials, or exploitative employers.

Equally, those who are in the country illegally or who violate immigration laws must be dealt with through lawful constitutional processes, not vigilantism, mob justice, or social violence.
South Africa has both a sovereign right and constitutional responsibility to regulate migration in a lawful, developmental, transparent, and humane manner. The strengthening of immigration laws, border management systems, labour regulation, and anti-corruption mechanisms is therefore necessary.

Many communities correctly observe that countries throughout Africa and the world regulate migration and economic participation in accordance with national development priorities. In countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Nigeria, foreign participation in certain sectors is regulated through permits, local participation requirements, and economic controls. Similarly, European states maintain strict immigration systems linked to labour market needs and national economic priorities. These comparisons reflect deeper concerns among South Africans regarding fairness, reciprocity, state sovereignty, and uneven enforcement of laws. At the same time, public discourse often selectively focuses on African migrants while ignoring the broader structure of ownership and power within the South African economy itself.

The South African economy remains overwhelmingly dominated by monopoly capital, concentrated corporate ownership, financial power, and historically entrenched patterns of white and foreign economic control. Many non-African migrants, multinational corporations, investors, and foreign-owned interests operate within South Africa with far less political scrutiny despite their far greater influence over wealth accumulation and economic decision-making.
This selective focus risks obscuring the central structural reality:
The primary contradiction in South African society remains the contradiction between capital and labour. The fundamental question therefore becomes:

Who benefits from the current confusion, instability, division, and fragmentation within working-class communities?

A scientific analysis reveals that the principal beneficiaries are sections of capital and exploitative intermediaries who profit from cheap labour, weak regulation, social instability, divided communities, and fragmented worker organisation. Unscrupulous employers benefit from vulnerable labour conditions that weaken bargaining power and suppress wages. Criminal syndicates profit from irregular migration systems, documentation fraud, labour trafficking, and corruption. Monopoly capital continues extracting enormous wealth while communities compete against one another over shrinking opportunities.

The current crisis is therefore not fundamentally caused by migration itself. Migration is a social expression of a deeper structural crisis produced by uneven development, underdevelopment, imperialism, neoliberal restructuring, deindustrialisation, and global capitalist accumulation. Workers move across borders because of poverty, war, instability, economic collapse, dispossession, and the destruction of productive economies.

The contradiction is therefore not between South African workers and migrant workers. The contradiction remains between labour and capital. Capital survives through division. As Frantz Fanon warned, unresolved inequality in post-colonial societies can produce conditions where the oppressed turn against one another instead of confronting the system that reproduces their oppression.

This danger confronts South Africa directly. The expansion of monopoly retail, financialisation, and deindustrialisation has weakened township economies, displaced local productive activity, undermined small-scale enterprise, and intensified survivalist competition in working-class communities. Large corporations continue extracting profits from townships and informal economies while reinvesting very little into productive local development.

The Party must therefore assist in redirecting struggle toward the real centres of economic power. The immediate task is to stabilise communities, prevent violence, isolate criminality, defend lawful governance, and protect all residents living within South Africa.
But stabilisation alone is insufficient. The deeper strategic task is to transform the economic structure itself.
This requires:

a) Strengthening labour inspections and workplace enforcement
b) Enforcing equal pay for equal work
c) Defending collective bargaining structures
d) Building worker unity across nationality and sector
e) Expanding industrialisation and productive economic activity
f) Supporting township and rural economies
g) Breaking monopoly domination over supply chains and retail systems
h) Expanding developmental finance for cooperatives, informal traders, and small producers
i) Combating corruption decisively within both state and private sectors

The Party must further advance a developmental approach in which large corporations operating within township economies are compelled to contribute directly to local productive development, supplier inclusion, infrastructure support, and local economic participation. Townships cannot remain merely sites of extraction and consumption while productive ownership remains concentrated elsewhere. Migration governance itself must be restructured around efficiency, transparency, anticorruption enforcement, labour market regulation, and regional developmental cooperation within SADC.

At all times, SACP structures must engage communities patiently, politically, and organisationally. Our responsibility is not to inflame social anger, nor to dismiss it, but to organise it consciously toward structural transformation. The task of communists is to assist the working class in correctly identifying the forces responsible for exploitation and underdevelopment, while building disciplined unity across all artificial divisions. When workers are divided exploitation deepens; Labour standards decline; Wages collapse;
Collective power weakens and Monopoly capital strengthens. The working-class gains nothing from fighting itself.

South Africa now stands at a decisive historical conjuncture. The present crisis can either descend further into social fragmentation, instability, and reactionary politics, or become the basis for rebuilding working-class organisation, democratic accountability, productive transformation, and social solidarity. The outcome will depend on whether anger is allowed to drift toward division, or whether it is consciously organised into a disciplined force for transformation directed at the real structures of economic and political power. The SACP therefore calls upon all its structures, alliance formations, workers, communities, and progressive forces to engage actively with the conditions facing the people, reject violence and vigilantism, confront exploitation in all its forms, and unite around a programme of economic transformation, developmental state capacity, working-class solidarity, and
social justice.

The struggle must never be directed against the vulnerable. It must be directed with clarity, discipline, organisation, and revolutionary determination against exploitation, monopoly capital, corruption, inequality, and the system
that reproduces them.

Amandla!

For further enquiries about this statement please contact PILC:

Provincial Secretary Comrade Sikhumbhuzo Mdlalose on 078 427 0104;
Or
Provincial Spokesperson Comrade Molaodi Wa Sekake on 078 164 3668.

Eric Stalin Mtshali District, Statement on Deployment of military personnel in the civilian population, Immediate release, 14 March 2026

Eric Stalin has learn with grave concerns the deployment of military personnel in the civilian population when the country is not at war or under state of emergency,
This is an admission to failure and incompetent by the current administration in dealing with the crime,
The Young Communist League has always advise that one the source of crime in South Africa is Youth Unemployment, but the current administration is wasting tax payers money and deals with the surface of the issue, deployment of military personnel who are not trained to deal with a crime in communities is a serious deviation in admitting that the government is failing to develop and draft sustainable programs in dealing with social and economic challenges,

Young Communist League in Eric Stalin Mtshali District calls the youths to organize themselves and reject with the highest order the deployment of military personnel by the government instead of developing programs that will uplift the Youths of South African,

Issued by the District Committee,

District Secretary
Khethukuthula Jordan Shangase

Young Communist League in Eric Stalin Mtshali District, Immediate release, 29 January 2026.

Statement regarding Addington Primary School,

The Young Communists League in Eric Stalin Mtshali District note with serious concerns the ongoing situation in Addington Primary School,

As Young Communist we subscribe to international proletariat struggle where the enemy is the capitalist system not ethnicity or race.

What happens Addington Primary School contraven with the rights of those children, particularly the right to have education regardless of being documented or not, we urge for calmness and all school operations processes to be prioritized.

Yours in Revolutionary
District Secretary
Khethukuthula Shangase

Cosatu KZN

Today, Eric Stalin Mtshali District hosted a successful program in Folweni where the youths were assisted in their NSFAS and University status checks

Saturday we will be at Mkomelo Primary School assisting those who have applied

I YCL e Eric Stalin Mtshali District icela DUT, UKZN, MUT nama Colleges angaphansi kwe District isihloniphe, syacela bandla ngomoya wesonto, u Student housing dlalele kude no Landlord abenza lento 😕😕

The class of 2025, rise high and shine bright😊

The YCLSA in Moses Mabhida Province congratulates the Matric Class of 2025 .

Young Communist League Eric Stalin Mtshali District, Matric Results Statement, 12 January 2026, Immediate Release.

Revolutionary Greetings and Compliments of the New year to all, particularly the students of Eric Stalin Mtshali District who will be receiving their Matric Results today and tomorrow,

We wish you nothing but luck and joy as you will be receiving results that will shape your future and give gratitude of all your dedication throughout your entire schooling days.

To all those who will not make it, it's not the end of the world, you still have countless opportunities to try again and again, don't dispare, embrace all your strength and Eric Stalin Mtshali District will be with you all the way.

Hope this Statement finds you in joy and prosperity and good luck!

Issued by
Eric Stalin Mtshali District

Khethukuthula Shangase - District Secretary (0710043825)
Thandanani Zulu - District Spokesperson (0659328124)

Immediate release,
Young Communist League Eric Stalin Mtshali District Statement on "R22 Million rands" statues, 11 December 2025

Young Communist League of Eric Stalin Mtshali District is outraged by the news that were confirmed by Ethekwini Municipality Manager Musa Mbhele, that in a 56% youths unemployment country, where most of them comes from Ethekwini Municipality, they decided to build statues, this is not just act of ignorance but an insults to the whole of youths of Ethekwini District.

However, as much as we acknowledge the gesture of remembering our South African Anti-Apartheid heroes, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, but we believe the Municipality should've consulted or "Read the Room" especially, there are not many stable Youths opportunities created,

Issued by
YCL Eric Stalin District.

District Secretary
Khethukuthula Shangase
0710043825

District Spokesperson
Thandanani Zulu
0659328124