The SA Communist Party will focus on ensuring that its alliance partner, the African National Congress, secures an overwhelming majority in the upcoming general elections.

A way to accomplish this would be to ensure that vulnerable sectors of society, such as rural workers and women, had more access to land, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande told reporters in Johannesburg yesterday.

"In the campaign, the SACP will be taking further its Red October campaign, focusing in particular on the most vulnerable sectors of the working class - rural workers, casualised workers, those in the 'informal' sector.

"Vulnerability in these sectors often particularly affects women. We are broadening this campaign to focus on acceleration of land and agrarian transformation, with a particular focus on access to productive land for household-based subsistence farming," he said.

He said the ANC had committed itself to giving 30% of land to people but "that would not happen if left to government alone".

Nzimande was speaking after a three-day meeting by the SACP's central committee.

The party would also be paying particular attention to KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

"In these provinces in particular, there are sections of the working class that, for various reasons, have tended to vote for opposition parties," Nzimande said.

The SACP would actively engage with those sections of the working class and ask them to consider the consistent anti-worker, anti-trade union and anti-poor stance of the Democratic Alliance and the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Nzimande said that in the run-up to the elections the SACP believed it was important to celebrate the achievements of the country's 10 years of democracy, and assess the challenges and difficulties of the decade.

"In particular the CC (central committee) underlined two key aspects of our government's own assessment of the past 10 years.

In its important 10-year overview... government noted that the advances made in the first decade by far supersede the weaknesses.

"Yet, if all indicators were to continue along the same trajectory, especially in respect of the dynamic of economic inclusion and exclusion, we could soon reach a point where the negatives start to overwhelm the positives".

He said that while the SACP was campaigning for a victory, his party would point out how capitalists had systematically sought to undermine major gains.

"The very significant legislative and regulatory gains made by workers in terms of labour rights, safety regulations, minimum wage determinations for farm and domestic workers, or security of tenure rights on farms are often systematically undermined.

"Private capital has retrenched, casualised and outsourced depriving workers of the hard fought - for gains they had made in terms of pensions, medical aid and other rights.

Private capital has made solemn commitments to create jobs at the jobs summit and the growth and development summit, but everywhere it is importing machinery and firing workers, or disinvesting".

Nzimande said that during the campaign the SACP had every intention of placing the principal blame for many of the social and economic challenges that confronted South Africans, squarely where it belonged. – Sapa.