11 May, 2021 — Terry Bell Writes
May Day 2021 has come and gone, without much of a whimper, let alone a bang. And it is the novel coronavirus that is only marginally responsible. Because there would not have been much of a bang even without the pandemic.
22 May 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
(Inside Labour column – first published in City Press, May 19)
One interesting result of South Africa’s May 8 national and provincial poll was the effective demolition of an enduring myth, beloved of many bosses and union-bashing free marketeers: that union bosses call the shots and members blindly follow. This is a claim trotted out at the time of almost every major strike.
15 May 2019 — Rebel News
Ronnie Kasrils joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1960 after Sharpeville and later played a leading role in Umkhonte we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing. He served for a number of years as a minister in Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid government as Deputy Minister of Defence and as Minister for Security. He has since become a major left critic of the ANC and its embrace of neo-liberalism. He is also known as an outspoken opponent of Apartheid Israel. Rebel is pleased to publish his assessment of the recent South African election here.
The best aspect of South Africa’s sixth national election since democracy in 1994 was that it was extremely peaceful, virtually incident free, fair, and credible. The top marks go to the 16 million who cast their votes, many in difficult rural terrain and some in cold, rainy conditions. The downside was that this was the lowest turnout of registered voters since that first seminal democratic election.
8 May 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
While there has been much media debate about what “black middle-class” voters will do today, there has been nothing about where the votes of unionised workers may go as South Africa completes its sixth non-racial election. This is perhaps because it is widely assumed that, in terms of labour voting patterns, nothing much has changed in the 25 years since the transition from apartheid.
5 April 2019 — Terry Bell Writes
[South Africa may be thousands of miles away but the debates on the left taking place there, are directly connected to the kinds of debates taking place here within and about the struggle for socialism. WB]
What will workers decide when faced with the confusion of 48 political parties listed for the national and provincial poll on May 8? Many clearly did not register to vote, some have said they will abstain, others remain uncertain about who to support.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
13 December 2013 — MRZine
Has the time come when it might be possible to move past the well-deserved praise-song phase of the marking of Nelson Mandela’s death in order to strike a more careful balance sheet on the meaning for present-day South Africa of his storied career?
13 December 2013 — Democracy Now!
Speaking from Johannesburg, leading anti-apartheid activist and former South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils discusses the evolution of the African National Congress’ economic views from its time as a liberation movement to leading South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Kasrils says the ANC was forced to make a “Faustian pact” with neoliberalism in order to bring apartheid to an end and avoid civil war. He also discusses recent reports that Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party. Kasrils was on the National Executive Committee of the ANC for 20 years, serving as minister for intelligence services from 2004 to 2008. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 