22 March 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
As South Africa coasts uncomfortably toward national and provincial elections on May 8, accompanied by rolling blackouts and with commissions delving ever deeper into sewers of corruption, it is time to take stock of where the country is and where it may be going. This should apply in particular to trade unions that have, in recent years, touted models of “socialist alternatives”, in Brazil and Venezuela.
10 February 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
A version of this item appeared in the City Press on February 10
The people shall govern. So says the Freedom Charter. And so they do, says the ANC along with all the parties represented in parliament.
But this is a lie. And awareness of this fact is what has caused such widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics and political parties. In our party list electoral system this is particularly pertinent: every five years we go to the polls to vote for a party where a president and perhaps the party elite, usual decide on the representatives over whom we have no control. Yet a universal franchise — one person, one vote — is a concession won after many bloody and bitter battles in recent centuries by working people deprived of even the slightest influence over those who governed them.
9 February 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
South Africa is again in the midst of that five-yearly cycle when politicians make extravagant promises that, on even cursory examination, ignore reality. And that does not even mean looking ahead to the consequences of the fourth industrial revolution that the world has already embarked on.
23 February 2018 — Pambazuka News
After Jacob Zuma’s firing, South Africa risks budget austerity and even renewed BRICS “poisoning”.
Cyril Ramaphosa’s soft-coup firing of Jacob Zuma from the South African presidency on 14 February 2018, after nearly nine years in power and a bitter struggle to avoid resignation, has contradictory local and geopolitical implications. Amidst general applause at seeing Zuma’s rear end in the society, immediately concerns arise about the new president’s neo-liberal, pro-corporate tendencies, and indeed his legacy of financial corruption and class war against workers given the lack of closure on the 2012 Marikana Massacre.
22 January 2018 — TRNN
In Cape Town, one of the most unequal cities in the world, poor people are taking the buckets they use for chemical toilets and turning them into weapons, as the water shortage intensifies class conflicts Continue reading
24 December 2017 — TRNN
Cyril Ramaphosa, who was recently elected to head South Africa’s ANC, is closely associated with major economic interests in South Africa, such as the Lonmin Mining Company, and is thus unlikely to bring about real change says Patrick Bond (inc. transcript)
20 December 2017
Monday night’s internal African National Congress (ANC) presidential election of Cyril Ramaphosa – with a razor-thin 51% majority of nearly 4800 delegates – displaced but did not resolve a fight between two bitterly-opposed factions. On the one hand are powerful elements friendly to so-called “White Monopoly Capital,” and on the other are outgoing ANC president Jacob Zuma’s allies led by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his ex-wife and former African Union chairperson. The latter faction includes corrupt state “tenderpreneur” syndicates, especially the notorious Gupta brothers, and is hence typically nicknamed “Zupta.” (Zuma is still scheduled to serve as national president until mid-2019.)
19 December 2017 — TRNN
After a tight race that exposed stark divisions within the party, the African National Congress elected Cyril Ramaphosa, an anti-apartheid crusader, business tycoon, and key suspect in the 2012 Marikana Massacre is positioned to be the country’s next president. But will he root out corruption, or is he part of the problem? (inc. transcript) Continue reading
5 October 2017 — Pambazuka News
Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and super-consultant Iraj Abedian, two solid bourgeouis representatives, have made an unusually passionate case against what is sometimes termed White Monopoly Capital. Th[i]s surprising breakthrough indicates that corporate-state degeneracy is now so extreme, that the truth will out.
Last week a conceptual barrier carefully constructed by elites since 2015 was suddenly cracked at the University of the Witwatersrand Great Hall by two of South Africa’s leading economic personalities: Pravin Gordhan, who served as a pro-business Finance Minister for seven years until being fired in March, and super-consultant Iraj Abedian, who in 1996 had co-authored the country’s post-apartheid homegrown structural adjustment programme. Two more solid bourgeois representatives would be hard to find.
10 October 2016 — Youtube
The Giant is Falling takes us through the big political events of recent years that signify the dying days of the ANC in South Africa. Locating the moment when things fell apart as the Marikana Massacre, the film charts the various ways people have collectively responded to the ANC’s failure to deliver on its promises. From the end of the ANC’s special relationship with the trade unions, to the #FeesMustFall student movement, to the more recent crushing electoral losses at the polls for the party of liberation, the film picks at the festering sore of inequality that is making the current status quo untenable.
6 May 2014 — WSWS
Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu has added his voice to a campaign championed by senior members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to get the electorate to vote against the party in the May 7 general election.
27 April 2014 — Daily Maverick
All these years later, I still sometimes go back to the intoxicating days of 1985. The workers of South Africa had a dream. They dreamt that one day we would walk out of the cold night of apartheid’s tyranny. They dreamt that the sun would shine down on the new democracy. We dreamt of a time when workers would never again be seen as commodities, but as valuable citizens of our rainbow nation. And yet, today we are our own worst enemies, our own worst nightmare.
Continue reading
23 March 2013 — Leftstreamed
The dramatic upsurge of popular grass-roots protest in South Africa’s townships and rural areas in recent years has been well-termed as marking a virtual “rebellion of the poor” in that country. The working-class itself has also been assertive there, prompting the ANC-led state’s orchestration of an horrific massacre of dissident mine-workers at Marikana in 2012. Until recently, however, leading trade unions have themselves been cribbed and confined within the tri-partite governing coalition of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and COSATU, the country’s largest trade union central body. Now NUMSA – the country’s National Union of Metalworkers with over 340,000 members – has begun to break that mould, under the leadership of its General Secretary, Irvin Jim, a longstanding socialist militant in the union. At its Special National Congress in December it heralded a new socialist political direction for South Africa.
Toronto — 6 March 2014.
3 March 2014 — Daily Maverick
So it has finally happened. The militant metalworkers union Numsa is now actively campaigning against the ANC government and has issued a call to South Africans to join its “United Front” – a mass movement for socialism and radical economic change. Numsa will soon be hosting provincial consultative conferences to bring together left-leaning organisations and social movements, and this will culminate in a national summit. Numsa will also ratchet up the pressure on the ANC government through a national strike on 19 March. If you read through Numsa’s demands and objectives and somehow hear the echo of Julius Malema’s voice, you are not alone. By RANJENI MUNUSAMY. Continue reading
15 February 2014
Mainstream praise is unanimous. It ignores reality. It got short shrift. It reinvents Mandela’s disturbing legacy. It turned a Thatcherite into a saint. A previous article discussed it. Editorials, commentaries, and feature articles read like bad fiction. Tributes are overwhelming. They reflect coverup and denial.
The true measure of Mandela is hidden from sight. It’s willfully ignored. Illusion replaced it.
14 February 2014
I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year – the parliament we called the NUMSA Special National Congress. In that parliament there was vigorous debate. Every delegate knew that they would have to account to their constituency. We are justifiably proud of our democratic heritage. We know that what we decide has the backing of our members. We don’t have to change decisions after the Congress has spoken, as some do, even though there are those who would urge us to “come to our senses” and take NUMSA in another direction from the decisions of that Congress.
28 January 2014 — SACSIS
The decision of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) to cut ties with the African National Congress (ANC) has received poor analysis. Comment has tended to focus on the possibility of a new political party in 2019 or whether all this means that Zwelenzima Vavi will get his job back. As such, the greater significance of the biggest trade union in the country throwing in its lot with a growing movement in opposition to the neo-liberal order, and thus to the left of the ANC, rather than the line up to the right (which includes the newly merged Agang and Democratic Alliance who want more of the same), is being missed.
27 January 2014 — The Daily Maverick
Elections 2014 will come and go, the ANC will be top of the pops, and a new bag of Liquorice Allsorts will fill the parliamentary benches. The great shake-up in South African politics looks set to happen after the elections – and metalworkers’ union Numsa is likely to play a big role in the new alignment. Numsa and a group of other Cosatu unions will put their federation on notice this week on a number of issues. Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim is also taking on the government’s enforcer, Minister of Police Nathi Mthethwa, for police killings during protest marches. And even before the split in Cosatu happens, workers from other sectors are seeking to join the Numsa movement. By RANJENI MUNUSAMY. Continue reading
7 January 2014 — Black Agenda Report
Black “rule” in South Africa is illusory. “White supremacy without the obvious hand of white people is the form of social and political control, which replaces legal apartheid.” The revolution was derailed. “The road from the Freedom Charter, to the Morogoro Consultative Conference, to the 1994 elections, to the murder of 34 miners at Mirikana in 2012, is the ANC’s road to counter-revolution.” Continue reading
23 December 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Democratic Left Front salutes the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa special national congress
By the Democratic Left Front, South Africa
The New Dark Age 