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In a bold May Day message QIBLA calls on South African workers to unite, organise and challenge capitalism to overcome inequality and reclaim economic power.
May Day is not a celebration. It is a warning – a line drawn in blood, sacrifice, and struggle. Everything workers have ever won was taken through organisation and collective power. Nothing was handed over, and nothing ever will be. Power does not negotiate out of goodwill. It concedes only when it is forced to.
Workers are not a section of society – they are its foundation. Without labour, nothing moves. The workplace is where unity is forged and the future is shaped. If we do not organise there, we will not succeed anywhere else. Trade unions must continue to organise, educate, and mobilise workers for dignity, equality, and power, while building solidarity across borders amid global crises.
Our power is real, but it only exists when organised – through trade unions, through communities, and through political formations rooted in working-class struggle.
We live in an economy organised for profit, not for people. A small elite owns what the many produce. Apartheid-era capital continues to thrive, while the victims of Apartheid and its aftermath are pushed deeper into desperation. Change the party, change the faces, but the system remains untouched because no one in power dares confront it. Wealth is concentrated. Labour is exploited. Inequality is protected. This is not democracy. This is capitalism in its racial form.
We are told the market must rule. That investors come first. That business defines the national interest. The promises of transformation – from the Freedom Charter to the RDP – were abandoned when GEAR was imposed without the people. That moment marked a continuation of class war, now carried out in the name of stability and growth. Since then, healthcare has been commodified, transport privatised, and basic services turned into profit streams. This is not reform. It is the systematic transfer of public wealth into private hands.
They call this political economy the ‘centre’, yet there is nothing neutral about it. Across the political spectrum, the message is the same: the state must retreat and the private sector must rule. Public services are handed over, and rights are turned into commodities. Citizens are reduced to customers, and only those who can pay are allowed to live with dignity. Government can be challenged, but corporations hide behind secrecy while shaping the very conditions of our lives. This is dressed up as ‘balance’ and ‘responsibility’, but it means one thing – profit before people, wealth for the few before dignity for the many.
The same leaders who speak of responsibility defend the fortunes built on Apartheid exploitation while telling the majority to wait. Our struggles in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s were meant to dismantle this system of racial capitalism. Instead, it was preserved. This is not moderation. It is class war – waged by the few against the many. The retreat of the state is not natural or inevitable. It is a political choice to abandon the working class. Some among us joined the old elites, and together they have deepened inequality and expanded poverty.
At the same time, divisions are encouraged among ordinary people. Instead of confronting capital, we are pushed to fight each other via political parties and civic organisations. We are told to punch sideways and never upwards. We must reject that confusion. Real transformation is not about placing a few black faces in high places while the system remains intact. It is about building collective, community wealth and sovereign wealth.
Political freedom in 1994 was a victory, and it must in no way be dismissed. But economic power did not change hands. The mines, the banks, the land remain controlled by a small minority. Racial capitalism did not collapse – it adapted. A small well-connected layer was absorbed into its structures, while the majority remained excluded. For 30 years we have been told there is no alternative, yet inequality has worsened, unemployment has grown, and workers have been pushed to the margins.
Every day, working people resist. Across the country, communities rise for water, housing, jobs, and dignity. The response they receive is repression, criminalisation, and containment. This system cannot solve the crises it creates. It produces them by design.
Capitalism in South Africa means wealth for a few and poverty for millions. It means permanent unemployment, insecurity, and collapsing public services, alongside rising corporate profits. This is not a failure. It is how the system is meant to function. It was built on dispossession, exploitation, and violence, and it continues to operate on that foundation.
The alternative must be stated clearly. It is to restore public ownership of the key sectors of the economy and democratic control over production. It means social ownership of wealth, land redistribution, and an economy planned to meet human needs rather than profit. Workers must not remain sellers of labour alone. Workers must exercise power over production itself. Those who work must own.
Trade unions remain central to this struggle. They have won the rights workers rely on today – decent wages, safer workplaces, limits on working hours, paid leave, protection against discrimination, and the right to organise. These gains were not gifts from employers. They were victories won through sacrifice and solidarity. They must be defended and expanded.
At the same time, trade unions must sharpen their role as instruments of working-class power. Investment strategies must serve workers, not weaken accountability or blur political purpose. Worker pension funds carry immense power and must be directed towards building long-term, productive assets that serve society – through infrastructure, energy, and development that creates jobs and strengthens communities. These investments must advance collective wealth and social transformation, not deepen dependence on existing capitalist structures.
May Day reminds us of a simple truth: a vote without economic power is not freedom. Democracy without control over wealth is hollow. The struggle did not end in 1994. It has entered a new phase – the struggle for public ownership of the means of production and for real economic democracy.
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Wherever they defend profit over people, wherever they protect wealth over dignity, wherever they insist there is no alternative – we must answer clearly: WE DO NOT AGREE there is another course of action.
It is built by workers. Through organisation. Through struggle. Through reclaiming what has always been ours.
Those who work must own. Build communal wealth. Enrich the many, not the few.
May Day is a day of remembrance and recommitment. It is a day to honour the victories won by workers through trade unions and to strengthen them for the battles ahead. Workers must join, organise, and hold their unions accountable. Trade unions must speak truth to power – whether that power sits in government or in boardrooms.
The challenges ahead are real. Technological change, including artificial intelligence, will reshape work and deepen inequality if left in the hands of capital. We cannot fight tomorrow’s battles with yesterday’s strategies. The movement must evolve, renew itself, and find new forms of organisation and resistance rooted in the realities of today.
The struggle continues. And it will be won – only if workers organise, unite, and fight.
Issued by Yusuf Patel, Aziz Kader, Reederwaan Craayenstein on behalf of Qibla
