First of all, I must thank—nay, express profound gratitude—to Comrade Buti Manamela (SACP Central Committee Member), who at great personal cost cracked open this discussion. He risked the venom of ad hominem insults for shattering this ceiling of debate, while others preferred the cowardice of sneering on WhatsApp and hushed personal calls—an arena of gossip, not bold engagement. Your courage, Comrade Buti, has lit a fuse, and for that, we owe you a debt.

Comrade Buti Manamela has unfurled a tapestry of searing truths, woven with the threads of a revolutionary realism that demands our unflinching gaze. His missive, “An Army of Generals? Reflections on the SACP’s Political Capacity and the Crisis of Hegemony”, is a clarion call—a trumpet blast against the creeping illusions that threaten to smother the South African Communist Party (SACP) in this so-called historic moment. Yet, in the spirit of comradely engagement, allow me, in the robust timbre of polemical flourish, to wrestle with his meditations—not as a foe, but as a fellow traveler on this jagged road to emancipation, and more importantly, as a comrade. For while Manamela’s diagnosis stings with the precision of a surgeon’s blade, there are currents beneath his words that shimmer with possibility—currents of agency, of rupture, and of a Party unshackled from the parasitic grip of opportunists who have long choked its revolutionary breath.

Manamela laments the SACP’s shriveled capacity—its thinning base, its quiet branches, its ideological drift—and he is not wrong to name this atrophy. But let us not merely mourn the Party as a wounded giant, staggering under the weight of its own history. Let us instead seize this moment of apparent weakness and inject agency, a chance to cast off the suffocating rubble piled high by those who have ridden the Party’s coattails not for the cause of the masses of the oppressed, but for the narrow altars of their own ambition. These compradors—these petty generals of self-interest—have repurposed the SACP’s machinery to a degree, turning its once-mighty engine of struggle into a vehicle for their personal ascent. They have tethered it to the ANC’s bourgeois circus, diluting its Marxist fire with the tepid waters of factional haggling. In their hands, the Party has been buried beneath the debris of ANC intrigues and ministerial appointments, its revolutionary soul gasping for air. But now, in this rupture—this bold step to contest elections independently—lies the possibility of unshackling: they will walk out in numbers. The haemorrhage of the early ’90s will be like a Sunday picnic and I say: good. For to shed these vampires who have sought to feed on the carcas of the Party will breathe new life into it; in fact, it will not merely survive—it will get a chance to reclaim itself as a weapon of the dispossessed, sharpened anew for the war against capital. Ideologically and intellectually weaker, yes, as it may well lose some of its most politically developed cadre, but it will benefit from this new lease on life.

Manamela warns of the illusion of readiness, and he is right to urge caution. Yet, let us not mistake his plea for a retreat into paralysis. The decision to stride into the electoral arena does not signal a surrender to parliamentary fetishism—far from it, though some singing songs in Congress may well have harbored this, who knows! Parliamentary politics is but one theater in the sprawling drama of revolutionary struggle, a single site among many where power is contested. The mines, the classrooms, the clinics, the townships—these are the true battlegrounds where the oppressed forge their destiny, and the SACP must plant its flag there with unrelenting ferocity. To contest elections is not to abandon these fronts, but to amplify them, to wield the ballot as one blade among many in the arsenal of revolutionary war. Comrade Manamela fears we may lose ourselves in the bourgeois game of votes and seats, but let us remember: even the Bolsheviks, those titans of the October Revolution, did not collapse when electoral triumph eluded them post-revolution. Their power was not in the Duma’s tallies, but in the Soviets, in the streets, in the relentless organization of the proletariat. The SACP need not fear losing itself in this electoral gambit, for its soul lies not in Council’s chambers, but in the hands of the masses it must rouse from slumber.

Here, then, is the dialectical dance: contesting elections and heeding Manamela’s call are not mutually exclusive—they are entwined in the same revolutionary rhythm. To step boldly into this moment is to confront the very weaknesses Manamela decries, not to flee from them. It is to force the Party to reckon with its dwindled base, its fragmented hegemony, its reliance on generals without soldiers. But it is also to wield agency—to break free from those who have hijacked the SACP for their own ends, who have smothered its radical pulse beneath the weight of their personal aspirations. This rupture can be the furnace in which we reforge the Party, not as a shadow of the ANC, not as a factional cheerleader, but as the vanguard of the working class, its gaze fixed unflinchingly on capital as the enemy. Ah, does this bear all the hallmarks of voluntarist action? And yet, Comrade Buti, permit me to press further: at face value, this leap into electoral contestation might smack of careless voluntarism—a reckless plunge into the abyss. But revolutionary movement is not propelled by the rigid arithmetic of positivism, where outcomes are neatly posited and predicted with precision before action is dared. No, it is decisive action itself that cracks open history’s shell! This is a leap of faith, yes, but what will liquidate the Party—slowly, insidiously—is not this audacity, but the paralysis of being frozen in time. The SACP must hurl itself headlong into the maelstrom of change, not seek solace in the warm, suffocating embrace of conservative inertia.

And what of revolutionary praxis, that beating heart of our struggle? The very act of contesting elections might jolt the SACP from its slumber, forcing it to stare into the cracked mirror of its current existence and a moribund class alliance—a pact that has dulled its vision, blinding it to the revolutionary potential that flickers even now amidst the debris. This alliance, with its suffocating embrace, has tethered the Party to a role as the ANC’s left watchdog, a toothless conscience barking at the edges of bourgeois power. But the triumph of the revolution will not come from such timid posturing. It will erupt when the SACP thrusts its ideas into the crucible of the masses, letting them chew and wrestle with the vision of socialism—not as a distant dream, but as a living, breathing alternative. It will come when the Party seizes revolutionary initiative, not shying from the storming of our own Winter Palace. Recall the July 2021 uprising: while the Party fixated on the spark that lit the fuse—the arrest of Zuma—and not the cause of the looting, chaos, it failed to grasp the common thread: the seething rage of the dispossessed against capital’s yoke and poverty. That was a moment to lead, to channel that fury into a battering ram against the edifice of exploitation. Instead, we hesitated, and the opportunity slipped through our fingers like sand—I personally was seething with rage.

Yet, Comrade Buti, I stand shoulder to shoulder with you in naming the slow liquidation of the Party of yore—a rot festering not from without, but from within, at the hands of some of its leading cadre, perched at the highest echelons. For over fifteen years, ideological pragmatism has been their stock-in-trade, a shameful opportunism that has seen them entangle the SACP in corporate capture (most glaringly under the Zuma presidency) and neoliberal plunder of our country, only raising a feeble critique when an ANC president casts them out of favor. Internal democracy smothered, organisational work traded for the plump perks of government office, and recruitment left to wither on the vine. Incapable of adapting to new methods of mobilisation or concretising Marxism to the jagged realities of the 21st century, some of these leaders have turned the Party into their personal fiefdom, bleeding it of legitimacy until it was outflanked by proto-fascist and ethnonationalist vultures. They reified the universal franchise as it manifests itself in South Africa hoisted as a universal, trans-cultural, classless will of the people, despite the actual realities of what constitutes the will of the people, clinging to the electoral route through the ANC-led alliance as a panacea for democratic governance, forsaking the very possibility of a revolutionary seizure of power and other forms of access to power. Thus, revolutionary upswings—Marikana’s blood-soaked cry, FeesMustFall’s defiant roar, and the July 2021 inferno—have been met not with leadership, but with disdain from a Party elite complicit in the systematic destruction of organised labour, reducing it to the fractured husk we see today.

So, Comrade Buti, let us heed your summons to political honesty, but let us not shrink from the boldness you also invoke. The task is not to choose between electoral contestation and mass organizing, between Alliance reconfiguration and electoral contestation, between loyalty to a historical ally and forging a new path—it is to do both, and more. Let us rebuild the Party’s hegemony not by retreating from the fray, but by charging into it, by rooting ourselves in the struggles of the casualised, the informalised, the discarded. Let us name capital as the foe, not with mere rhetoric, but with campaigns that bite, with education that awakens, with an organisation that moves like a living thing among the people. This moment, frail as it seems, is not just a fork in the road—it is a chance to burn away the dross and emerge leaner, fiercer, truer. An army of generals, yes, but one that can yet summon its soldiers—not for the next election alone, but for the next revolution, which beckons from the horizon. If we drown, what use was our living if it meant being on life-support machines as we already did, surviving only on the goodwill of the ANC that treated us as an organisation when we’d fast become an organised faction of ANC cadres seeking a shorter route to upward class mobility, with an independent ideological platform from where to criticise without accounting for our actions in what we criticised?

My final word on this SACP electoral contest debate is: truth is the forcefield between subject & object. It’s a space where the limits of the real (object) meet the drive of the possible (subject), and something emerges from that collision. Truth is no lifeless monument, no mere ledger of objective woes, nor is it the fleeting dream of a solitary mind. It is the living, breathing tension, the electric dance where the iron weight of the real collides with the soaring arc of the possible. From this clash, a spark—nay, a blaze—erupts, illuminating paths unseen. To our objectivist kin, this forcefield bows in respect: yes, the terrain matters, its ruts and ridges carve the boundaries of our march. Public disdain is no trifling ghost; shaky structures are no mere inconvenience—they are the very ground we tread. But to our subjectivist comrades, it sings a hymn of validation: agency is no idle hope, conviction no hollow echo. These are the hands that knead the clay of reality, that bend the arc of history toward a dawn yet unborn. Weak support may shackle us today, but the sweat of struggle can melt those chains; ideological frailty may hobble us now, but in the crucible of battle, a sharper creed is forged. This, then, is the fragile yet fierce common ground we might claim—if only we dare to embrace it. The forcefield hums with mutual alchemy: neither the sterile reign of conditions nor the unmoored flight of will can alone birth the new world. Recall the thunder of 1917, when Russia’s frozen misery met the molten resolve of the Bolsheviks—dismal horizons shattered by the audacity of the deed. So it has been, so it must be. Onward.

Lazola Ndamase is former 2^nd Deputy Provincial Secretary of the SACP Eastern Cape