South Africa: Exploding with Rage, Imploding with Self-Doubt—but Exuding Socialist Potential by Patrick Bond

29 October 2015 — Monthly Review

South Africa: Exploding with Rage, Imploding with Self-Doubt—but Exuding Socialist Potential by

Patrick Bond is director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society and is an advisory board member of Numsa’s Research and Policy Institute. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

The fast-reviving South African left is urgently coming to grips with the most acute national crises of structure and agency the country has experienced since the historic freeing of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the shift of the entire body politic in favor of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). At that time, the ANC soon took control of the country’s progressive forces, winning mass social hegemony, vanquishing other liberation tendencies (Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness), and dissolving the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front (UDF) that civil society activists founded a decade earlier. It then negotiated the first democratic election, which it won handily in April 1994 under Nelson Mandela’s leadership. Afrikaner state managers and corporate titans, as well as multilateral agencies and other forces of imperialism, demanded from the ANC an elite transition that opened both the macro- and microeconomies. Property rights were granted maximum protection, even though whites had acquired the bulk of those through what is widely termed a crime against humanity: apartheid. Read the rest of the article HERE.

South African student protesters win first big victory By Patrick Bond

29 October 2015 — Pambazuka News

South African student protesters win first big victory By Patrick Bond

Decolonization, race and class politics fused in epic battle

What started with rejection of the statue of a Dutch colonialist in Cape Town fast expanded to nationwide student protests against a racist, colonialist and classist education system that denies many South Africans the right to study. President Zuma finally respondend and turned an intended increase in tution into a 6 per cent cut for 2016, but this can only be a beginning.

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