Africa's working class is not waiting for the left to get organised. It is already paying the price of the left's disorganisation. Inflation is gutting household incomes across the continent. Living costs are rising faster than wages. Economic growth across southern Africa has averaged below one percent over the past decade. Imperialism is not pausing while progressive forces debate the terms of their unity. It is restructuring African economies, deepening dependency, and exploiting every fracture within the working class to prevent the kind of coordinated resistance that would threaten its dominance. It was precisely this reality that gave the Conference of the Left, held from 29 to 31 May 2026 at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg, South Africa, its urgency. As SACP General Secretary Solly Mapaila stated from the plenary stage, this was "a very decisive moment, not only for the left, but for the working class as a whole." The conference was not convened in comfortable times. It was convened because the cost of continued fragmentation has become too high to bear.
The Pan- African Progressive Front (PPF) was a participant of this conference, and our presence was deliberate. The gathering brought together at least ten leftist political parties, thirteen trade unions and trade union federations, nineteen social movements and community organisations, and nine international solidarity organisations under the unifying theme "Building a Left Movement for Working Class and Popular Power." On the plenary stage stood the MK Party, AZAPO, the PAC, Afrika Mayibuye Movement, United African Transformation, the Socialist Party of Azania, the EFF, and the SACP — a breadth of South African left formations that has not shared a platform of this kind in recent memory. But a gathering of South African formations, however broad, cannot on its own answer a continental question. PPF's participation placed a pan-Africanist, continental perspective inside a space that required it. The struggle against imperialism does not end at the Limpopo. The working class whose power this conference sought to build does not exist only within South African borders. Our presence was a reminder of that fact and a commitment to acting on it.
The political clarity emerging from the conference must now be carried into action. Mapaila was direct: "We are different political organisations, we are not going to dissolve our independent political organisations, we are creating a platform of common coordination of the working-class agenda." That is the correct framework; unity of action without the erasure of political identity. But frameworks only matter if they are implemented. Julius Malema's framing on Afrophobia deserves particular attention from every continental formation present: redirecting working-class anger toward migrant communities does not serve the working class, it serves imperial interests. Dividing African workers by nationality is a strategy of domination, not a symptom of organic grievance. Progressive forces must name it as such and organise against it. PPF, after participation, returns with a clear commitment: to deepen our engagement with the Council of the Left as it takes shape, to carry the argument for continental left unity into our own programme and structures, and to ensure that the pan-Africanist voice is not an occasional guest at these gatherings but a permanent and organised presence within them. As Mapaila demanded, this conference must mark "the beginning of a new seriousness within the left." PPF intends to be part of that seriousness.