Below is the keynote address by Solly Mapaila, General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. It was originally published by MR Online here with the following editorial.
We present here the keynote address by Solly Mapaila, general secretary of the South African Communist Party to the Global South Academic Forum, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, October 17–18, 2026. In the face of the global crisis, the call for the political organization of the Global South is a major step toward a meaningful global response. The recent lesson from Brazil is that today the political mobilization we desperately need must dispense with top-down decrees, calls for rigid discipline, etc. The “mass line” now requires trust in the knowledge and initiative of the base, a youthful global environmental proletariat that is increasingly aware of the enemy of life on our planet and what must be done. —The Editors
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The Global South, Political Parties, and Pathways to Modernization: History, Theory and Practice
By Solly Mapaila, General Secretary of the South African Communist Party
Comrades, distinguished scholars, esteemed representatives of political parties and movements, colleagues and friends,
We bring you militant revolutionary greetings from South Africa and from the struggles of the African working class. We meet in Shanghai at an extraordinary historical moment. An old-world order is in crisis, a new one is struggling to be born, and the decisive question is whether the peoples of the Global South will merely witness this transition or organize themselves to shape it.
The center of gravity of the world economy is shifting. Artificial intelligence, automation, advanced computing, biotechnology and new energy systems are expanding humanity’s productive powers. Yet these achievements coexist with war, ecological destruction, grotesque inequality, technological monopoly and a renewed arms race. The contradiction is unmistakable, production is increasingly social and global, while ownership, appropriation and political power remain concentrated.
This is a Marxist question before it is a technological question. Multipolarity is an important advance against unilateral domination, but multipolarity by itself is not socialism. A multipolar capitalism can remain exploitative. Sovereignty without transformation can coexist with labor exploitation. Modernization without working-class power can modernize capitalism. Our task must therefore be larger: to convert the opening created by a changing world balance into organized popular power, sovereign development, peace, and socialist advance.
Modernization is not synonymous with capitalist modernization
Modernization, in its broad historical meaning, can refer to the development of productive, scientific, technological, institutional and social capabilities. It can mean industrialization, modern infrastructure, scientific research, advanced manufacturing, mass education, modern healthcare, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and increasingly sophisticated forms of social organization and productive capability. There is nothing inherently capitalist about these developments.
Yet capitalist modernization theory, particularly in its Cold War form, presented the historical experience of Western capitalist countries as a universal pathway that other societies were expected to follow. For example, Walt Whitman Rostow’s stages of economic growth, notably subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto, provided one influential expression of this conception. From a Marxist perspective, this approach is inadequate because it turns a historically specific experience into a universal model, while obscuring the relations of power and class through which development takes place.
Modernization, productive forces and social emancipation
Marx and Engels did not reject modernity, industrialization, or technological progress. On the contrary, the Manifesto of the Communist Party recognized the revolutionary transformation of production, including modern industry, machinery, communications and world trade. One of the key historical tasks that the Manifesto identifies for the proletariat, after winning the battle of democracy, is to “increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
The question is therefore not whether productive forces should develop. It is who owns them? Who controls them? Who benefits from them? And toward what social purpose are they developed?
The development of productive forces is necessary for human advancement, but productive-force development alone does not constitute social emancipation. Advanced technology can coexist with poverty, inequality and exploitation, as we see from worldwide experience today. Much of the Global South, shaped by a history of global inequalities, including power relations, is a typical example of this situation. For the Global South, this distinction is particularly important.
Our nations did not enter the world economy under conditions of equality. Colonialism incorporated Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean into an international system structured by political and military domination and economic exploitation. In many cases, productive capacities in the Global South were organized primarily around extraction, the export of primary commodities and the supply of labor.
We should therefore be cautious about describing Global South countries as nations that “failed to modernize.”
Our analysis asks instead:
What historical relations produced global uneven development?
Colonialism, imperialism, unequal trade, financial power and the international division of labor that prevailed all form part of the answer.
The problem is therefore not that the Global South has failed to imitate the capitalist core; we do not need to. The deeper problem is that Global South countries have historically been incorporated into the prevailing international economy in subordinate positions, dominated, exploited and prevented from both exploring their own, independent development paths and choices, and from exercising their fundamental right to self-determination, their democratic sovereignty. This imperialist foreign dictatorship continues to this day. It is what the people of Cuba face under the economic, financial, investment, trade and political blockade imposed by the imperialist regime of the United States. This is one of the worst-case scenarios.
The imperialist center is striving to maintain its global hegemony and dominate the affairs of other countries, including by seeking to dictate which laws they should adopt and which they should not. This is what South Africa is confronted with from the imperialist regime of the United States.
Modernization as national-revolutionary transformation
For this reason, modernization in the Global South should mean advancing, deepening and defending national-revolutionary, democratic transformation and development. It should mean overcoming and dismantling the legacy of colonialism and semi-colonialism; in countries like South Africa and Palestine, the legacy of apartheid; and globally, imperialist domination and exploitation.
It should mean developing national productive forces, including through industrializing, strengthening science and technology, building infrastructure, transforming agriculture, securing energy supplies, expanding manufacturing, increasing domestic value creation and achieving greater technological and economic sovereignty. All this while integrating environmental needs and protection.
Our modernization pathways require mutual benefit, rather than greater levels of exploitation by foreign capital. The critical question is whether integration into the world economy strengthens or weakens national productive capabilities? The prevailing paradigm, dominated by imperialist forces, including monopoly-finance capital, suggests otherwise.
We cannot complete national liberation and achieve social emancipation while remaining permanently dependent on exporting raw materials and importing high-value manufactured goods and technologies. The strategic objective must be to transform natural resources into expanding productive capabilities. The difference between exporting iron ore and developing integrated capabilities in mineral processing, metallurgy, engineering, advanced manufacturing and research is not merely a difference in commodities. It is a difference in the level of productive development.
As we develop our total productive forces, we must do so for national liberation and social emancipation, not for the accumulation of private-monopoly capital.
China and the question of socialist modernization
This is one reason why China’s experience is of particular importance to this discussion.
China’s conception of modernization explicitly connects modernization with the development of productive forces as rapidly as possible, scientific and technological innovation, industrial upgrading, infrastructure, education, talent and the improvement of people’s lives. In this regard, the success achieved by China, when its government, led by the Communist Party of China, officially declared in February 2021 that the country had eradicated absolute poverty nationwide, is a great source of inspiration.
China’s experience demonstrates that modernization does not have to mean Westernization. Nor does it have to mean reproducing the historical trajectory of Western capitalism. The Chinese experience is historically specific, relevant to China’s unique conditions and cannot simply be transplanted elsewhere. However, it holds important lessons for the Global South. At the center of these lessons are the fundamental rights to self-determination and democratic national sovereignty, in a context where the Chinese people themselves determine the content of democracy rather than having it decided and imposed by a foreign power according to its notions and agendas, including regime-change agendas.
The relevant question for the Global South is therefore not how to become China, but what principles, experiences and lessons can be learnt from China’s development and transformation while each country follows a pathway appropriate to its own historical conditions through the effective exercise and defense of self-determination and democratic national sovereignty.
Fragmentation of the Left forces: The central weakness in a well-organized capitalist world system
The Global South has developed important institutions of interstate cooperation. But communist parties, workers’ parties, liberation movements and progressive political formations remain inadequately coordinated. We meet, adopt declarations, express solidarity and return home. Too often the machinery required to translate agreement into common action does not exist.
“The Party has not ceased to exist, it has only withdrawn into itself in order to gather strength and put the unification of all Russian Social-Democrats on a sound footing.” —V. I. Lenin, “Our Immediate Task” (1899)
Lenin was confronting the “isolated functioning of separate local organizations.” The form is different today, but the organizational lesson is enduring, fragmentation produces fragmented power. International finance coordinates continuously. Transnational corporations plan globally. Technology monopolies operate across borders. Military alliances possess permanent command structures. Capital maintains research institutes, media systems, universities, financial institutions and digital infrastructure. Yet forces representing billions of workers and oppressed peoples still too often confront this organized power through episodic conferences.
We therefore need to move from a network of meetings to a network of action: not a new ceremonial international, not command from one center, and not the export of one national model, but a disciplined architecture of cooperation capable of turning political agreement into material capacity.
From declaration to a standing architecture of action
We propose that we seriously explore a Global South Progressive and Workers’ Political Cooperation Platform. Its purpose should be coordination with institutional substance: a small permanent secretariat; an annual assembly; regional mechanisms linking Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; and standing commissions on political economy, ideological education, technology and artificial intelligence, peace and anti-imperialism, climate and ecology, gender emancipation, and organizational development.
Every major meeting should conclude with more than a communiqué. It should produce an agreed program, assigned responsibilities, deadlines, resources, reporting mechanisms and review. The revolutionary sequence must become: analysis, decision, implementation, measurement, criticism, correction and renewed action. A movement unable to implement its own resolutions cannot transform society.
This is also a question of political governance. Governance is not merely what a party does after winning state power. It begins with whether the party can govern its own program, cadres, finances, institutions and conduct.
Ideological capacity: A material force
Organization without theory becomes administration; theory without organization becomes commentary. Marxism-Leninism insists upon their unity. Today the battle of ideas is intensified by the digital transformation of ideological production. Millions of young people receive political education not from parties, unions or revolutionary literature, but from commercial algorithms designed for attention, prediction and profit.
“No investigation, no right to speak.” —Mao Zedong, “Oppose Book Worship” (May 1930)
Mao’s injunction is decisive for the modern revolutionary party. We cannot substitute slogans for investigation or inherited formulas for concrete analysis. We require cadres who can analyze the real movement of capital, the changing composition of the working class, new technologies, national conditions and the consciousness of the masses.
We should build a Global South Political Education Network linking party schools, Marxist institutes, universities, trade-union education centers and progressive research bodies. It should develop multilingual basic and advanced programs in Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, imperialism, political economy, national liberation, socialist construction, African and Latin American revolutionary experience, Marxist feminism, ecological questions, digital capitalism, AI, organization and governance.
A twenty-first-century cadre must be theoretically grounded, technologically literate, ethically disciplined, capable of investigation and rooted among the people. Revolutionary theory must again become a material force through organization.
Modernization of revolutionary organization
Political organizations cannot transform twenty-first-century society with methods frozen in the twentieth century. But modernization must never become ideological liquidation. It does not mean turning communist and workers’ parties into electoral marketing agencies. It means increasing their capacity to understand society, organize people, develop cadres, communicate, govern, remember, evaluate and correct.
Modern parties require secure membership systems; political-education platforms; research and data capacity; transparent financial systems; rapid communication between national and grassroots structures; digital archives and institutional memory; measurable programs of work; and early-warning systems capable of detecting organizational decline before it becomes crisis.
Technology must strengthen democratic centralism, not replace democracy with digital bureaucracy. Data must inform political judgement, not substitute for politics. Artificial intelligence must assist the cadre; it must never become the cadre. The revolutionary party must master modern tools without becoming mastered by them.
Governance, discipline and revolutionary self-correction
A party seeking to govern society must first show that it can govern itself: discipline, accountability, ethical leadership, financial integrity, cadre development, collective leadership and continuous political education. Jiang Zemin expressed the organizational principle with clarity.
“Party organizations at all levels and all Party members, leading cadres in particular, must strictly abide by Party discipline. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to go their own ways in disregard of orders and prohibitions.” —Jiang Zemin, Report to the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, November 8, 2002
A party unable to enforce collective decisions becomes a federation of personalities. A party tolerating corruption loses moral authority. A party that stops educating its cadres becomes ideologically dependent on its opponents. A party disconnected from the masses becomes bureaucratic.
I therefore propose revolutionary self-correction as a central organizational principle of our time. Organizations rarely decline because of one error. Decline deepens when leadership becomes insulated, criticism is treated as disloyalty, information travelling upward is distorted, privilege separates cadres from the people, and obsolete methods are defended because correction threatens established interests.
“Unity–criticism–unity.” —Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (February 27, 1957)
Mao explained this as starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new basis. This is not ritual humiliation. It is a revolutionary method of learning. Self-correction means the organized capacity to detect contradiction, permit truthful information, criticize error, correct practice, evaluate results and renew leadership and methods without surrendering strategic purpose.
Artificial intelligence: Who owns the machine and system
Artificial intelligence is one of the great class questions of this century. We should reject both technological romanticism the belief that technology automatically produces progress and technological reaction of the belief that workers must oppose technological development itself. The Marxist questions are: Who owns it? Who controls it? Who benefits? For what social purpose is it deployed?
AI can expand healthcare, education, scientific discovery, agriculture, climate modeling, public administration, and socially useful production. Under monopoly capitalism, however, it can also intensify surveillance, displace labor without protection, concentrate wealth, manipulate political behavior, industrialize misinformation and automate warfare.
The choice is not humanity versus AI. It is monopoly appropriation versus social ownership and democratic control. The Global South must resist technological colonialism in which our peoples provide minerals, data, labor and markets while technological sovereignty is concentrated elsewhere. We need sovereign public digital infrastructure, shared research capacity, open scientific cooperation, public-interest regulation and worker participation in technological restructuring. Productivity gains must become gains for civilization: shorter working time, stronger social provision, universal access to knowledge and richer human development not unemployment for millions and unimaginable wealth for a few.
Hyper-imperialism, the arms race and the struggle for peace
Technology is also transforming war. Autonomous weapons, drones, cyber warfare, hypersonic systems, the militarization of space and nuclear modernization are creating a dangerous new arms race. Humanity has acquired extraordinary powers of destruction while the capitalist system continues to generate conflicts over markets, resources, strategic territory and geopolitical domination.
Lenin’s analysis remains indispensable because imperialism is not simply an aggressive foreign policy. It arises from monopoly, finance capital, the export of capital and the struggle to divide and redivide the world. Its forms have evolved: military force now operates alongside sanctions, financial coercion, technological monopolies, information warfare, political destabilization and control of strategic supply chains.
Fidel Castro repeatedly connected imperial domination, underdevelopment and the danger of annihilating war. In 1989, discussing nuclear disarmament and the Third World, he warned that imperial power did not require nuclear weapons to dominate poorer nations because fleets, bases and increasingly lethal conventional weapons already served that function. Fidelism therefore teaches us that peace cannot be separated from justice, sovereignty and anti-imperialism.
The Global South must become an organized force for peace: not passive neutrality, but active, principled peace; not submission, but peaceful coexistence based on sovereign equality; not a balance of terror, but a movement of peoples capable of restraining militarism and defending humanity.
Make the working class a global political force
Capital is global. Finance is global. Production chains are global. Digital platforms are global. Climate catastrophe and war are global. Yet working-class organization remains overwhelmingly national and often fragmented even within national borders. This contradiction must be overcome.
Workers extracting critical minerals in Africa, manufacturing electronics in Asia, producing agricultural commodities in Latin America, moving goods through ports and logistics networks, and supplying digital services across continents are participants in one integrated system of production. Their organization must begin to reflect this material reality.
We should develop transnational worker networks across strategic value chains critical minerals, energy, logistics and ports, food systems, digital platforms, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and public services combining research, political education, organizing and coordinated campaigns.
“Workers of all countries, unite!” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Our task is to turn that historic call into twenty-first-century organizational practice, internationalism not as sentiment, but as material coordination of working-class power.
National liberation, popular sovereignty and socialism
For the Global South, the national question remains inseparable from the class question. Political independence without economic sovereignty is incomplete. A flag without productive capacity is insufficient sovereignty. Democracy without control over strategic economic resources remains vulnerable.
But we must also reject narrow nationalism. Our objective cannot be to reproduce capitalist exploitation under different national ownership. The working class must lead the struggle for sovereignty precisely because it can connect national liberation with social emancipation.
“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.” —Nelson Mandela, Make Poverty History address, Trafalgar Square, London, February 3, 2005
Mandela’s formulation must be internationalized. There can be no sustainable global peace while billions confront deprivation beside extraordinary wealth. There can be no genuine modernization that leaves the majority behind. Development must be judged by whether it enlarges the material, democratic and cultural power of the people.
Seven instruments for Global South political cooperation
Let us therefore move from diagnosis to construction. I propose seven practical instruments.
- A permanent coordination mechanism: a professional secretariat connecting participating communist, workers’, liberation and progressive parties continuously rather than episodically.
- A common minimum political program: sovereignty, peace, development, workers’ rights, equality, technological justice, ecological responsibility and opposition to imperial domination without demanding ideological uniformity.
- A Global South political school: a multilingual physical and digital institution for cadre education, exchange and the systematic study of revolutionary experience.
- A shared research and strategic-analysis network: capable of rapid work on political economy, sanctions, technological change, geopolitical developments, working-class conditions and emerging crises.
- An organizational modernization program: exchange on membership systems, political education, digital organizing, governance, financial accountability, campaigning, mass communication and cadre development.
- A Global South working-class observatory: continuously mapping wages, employment, automation, migration, inequality, labor organization and the changing composition of the working class.
- An annual accountability and self-correction mechanism: reviewing what was agreed, who assumed responsibility, what was implemented, what failed, why it failed and what must change.
The mass line in the digital age
Mao’s mass line remains indispensable, from the masses to the masses. Investigate the conditions and ideas of the people; synthesize them through revolutionary theory; return them as a coherent program; test that program in struggle; and learn again from practice. Digital technology can strengthen this process, but it can also corrupt it.
A party measuring popular consciousness only through social-media engagement will eventually confuse algorithms with the masses. The people are not an online audience. They are historical actors. Political organization therefore requires physical roots in workplaces, villages, communities, universities, factories and neighborhoods, combined with sophisticated digital capacity.
This is the modern revolutionary synthesis we require: modern technology plus mass organization; scientific analysis plus revolutionary theory; political discipline plus popular democracy; strategic firmness plus tactical flexibility; organizational continuity plus continuous self-correction.
Conclusion: Organize the new world or perish
Comrades, the question before us is larger than the future of any single party. It is the future of humanity. The productive forces created by human civilization could abolish hunger, reduce unnecessary labor, universalize healthcare and education, restore ecosystems and unleash unprecedented scientific and cultural development. The same productive powers, governed by accumulation and geopolitical domination, can generate mass unemployment, ecological breakdown, permanent surveillance and automated war.
The choice before humanity is becoming sharper: socialism or barbarism. Our response cannot be nostalgia. It cannot be ceremonial internationalism. It cannot be revolutionary vocabulary without revolutionary organization. The Global South must organize. Its working classes must organize. Its progressive and revolutionary parties must organize. Its intellectuals must reconnect knowledge with struggle. Its youth must become producers of history rather than consumers of algorithms. Women must stand at the center of transformation. Our organizations must recover discipline, ideological clarity, accountability, the mass line and the courage to correct themselves.
Fidel’s revolutionary internationalism reminds us that our horizon cannot stop at national borders when humanity itself is threatened. Lenin reminds us that imperialism must be understood as a system, not merely denounced as behavior. Mao teaches us that correct ideas arise from social practice and must return to the masses as organized practice. Jiang Zemin’s emphasis on strict Party discipline reminds us that a political organization seeking to transform society must possess the capacity to implement collective decisions. Mandela reminds us that justice, not charity, must define the struggle against poverty.
Our answer to hyper-imperialism must be internationalism. Our answer to war must be organized peoples’ power for peace. Our answer to monopoly AI must be technological sovereignty and social ownership. Our answer to organizational decay must be discipline, criticism, self-criticism and revolutionary self-correction. Our answer to fragmentation must be organization. And our answer to capitalist barbarism must be socialism.
The future must not be surrendered to monopoly capital, algorithms, weapons systems or imperial power. The future belongs to the peoples, but only if the peoples are organized to take responsibility for it.
References
Fidel Castro Ruz on ideas as revolutionary weapons (Fidel’s framing used throughout). Fidel Castro Ruz, address to the 7th Congress of the Union of Young Communists (UJC), Havana, 10 December 1998, later recalled in speeches on the “Battle of Ideas.” Castro stressed that in ideological struggle “ideas are our fundamental weapons” and that cadres must be armed with ideas. This informs the address’s emphasis on ideological capacity, political education and internationalism.
Fidel Castro Ruz on imperialism, militarism, and the Third World. Fidel Castro Ruz, speech of December 7, 1989, commonly published in English as “Socialism or Death.” In discussing nuclear disarmament, Castro argued that nuclear abolition alone would not bring security to the Third World because imperialism also relied on fleets, military bases and increasingly sophisticated conventional weapons. The address uses this argument as a Fidelus framework rather than presenting an extended verbatim quotation.
Jiang Zemin on party discipline. Jiang Zemin, “Build a Well-off Society in an All-Round Way and Create a New Situation in Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” Report to the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, 8 November 2002. Section on improving the Party’s style of work and enforcing discipline. Party organizations and members, particularly leading cadres, must strictly observe Party discipline and must not “go their own ways in disregard of orders and prohibitions.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on proletarian internationalism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, first published in London in February 1848. Final line of Chapter IV, “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” commonly rendered in modern English as “Workers of all countries, unite!” or “Workers of the world, unite!”
Mao Zedong on investigation. Mao Zedong, “Oppose Book Worship,” May 1930, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 6 in later English collections; the section is headed “No Investigation, No Right to Speak.” The formulation also appears in Mao’s “Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys” (March–April 1941), Selected Works, vol. 3.
Mao Zedong on unity, criticism, unity. Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” speech delivered February 27, 1957, revised for publication June 19, 1957; Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 5. Mao describes the democratic method of resolving contradictions among the people as “unity—criticism—unity,” begin from the desire for unity, resolve contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arrive at a new unity on a new basis.
Nelson Mandela on poverty and justice. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, address at the Make Poverty History campaign rally, Trafalgar Square, London, February 3, 2005: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.” Mandela repeated the formulation in later public statements, including his acceptance of Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award on November 1, 2006.
V. I. Lenin on imperialism. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline, written January–June 1916 and first published in 1917; English edition in Lenin, Selected Works, Progress Publishers (Moscow, 1963), Vol. 1, pp. 667–766. Especially Chapter VII, “Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism,” on monopoly, finance capital, export of capital, international monopolist associations and the division of the world among the major powers.
V. I. Lenin on organizational fragmentation. V. I. Lenin, “Our Immediate Task,” written in 1899 and first published in Rabochaya Gazeta 1, January 1899. English text in Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers). The passage refers to the “isolated functioning of separate local organizations” and the need to place unification on a sound footing.