South Africa
South Africa: Mine workers union rejects pay offer
The National Union of Mine-workers has rejected a 6% offer and is instead demanding that miners receive a 15% increase.
The NUM is acting after a series of high-profile wildcat actions in the Platinum mining industry in South Africa. Prices are high and a small decline in production over the last year has helped create conditions where workers can apply a lot of pressure on management. The South African government is complaining of a skills shortage and warning of the inflationary pressures caused by wage rises.
Gasping from out the Shallows: Reflections on revolution in the early twenty-first century
A text by Wayne Spencer giving an overview of struggles in the UK, Poland, South Africa and Italy alongside his reflections on the possibilities for revolution and revolutionary theory in the 21st century.
Gasping from out the Shallows
Reflections on revolution in the early twenty-first century
By Wayne Spencer
After ten years of GEAR: COSATU, the Zuma trial and the dead end of alliance politics
An analysis from the ZACF journal Zabalaza #7 of the African National Congress (ANC)'s neo-liberal Growth Employment And Redistribution (GEAR) policy and its relation to the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).
Lost in Transit
Cape Town: Community condemns police arrests of shack dweller youths
The shack dwellers of Civic Road near Parkwood, Cape Town, are angered that youth from the shacks are being subjected to repeated police harassment and arrests by the Grassy Park SAPS.
The Civic Road residents have joined the Zille Rain Heights residents in opposing the city council’s bid to forcibly remove them to Happy Valley, 40 kms away.
On the poverty of Berkeley life and the marginal stratum of American society in general - Chris Shutes, 1983
A situationist-influenced text from 1983, containing critiques of Berkeley radicalism, the marginal worker, 'natural' commodities (e.g. crafts, food, medicine), the car, jogging, bureaucratic reform, Reaganism, the Black Panthers, criminality, culture/aesthetics, feminism, therapy, Robert Crumb, global class struggle in the 1970s and 80s and South Africa in particular - plus more.
9. Trafalgar Square, London
An account of opposing fascist attacks on the regular anti-apartheid picket outside South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, London, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Reflections on the black consciousness movement and the South African revolution
A situationist-influenced text decribing how a protest by Soweto school students in 1976 spread and became a country-wide revolt - involving mass workers' strikes and violent confrontations that shook the foundations of white South Africa. Written as a collaboration between an American and two South Africans, the text also deals with the rise and fall of the Black Consciousness Movement.
[i]Originally published in August 1979
Interview with southern African anarchists, 2006
A detailed and interesting interview between Black Flag magazine and members of the South African Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation covering their organisation, and the situation for workers in South Africa at present.
First, perhaps you could say something about yourself and the organisation you are part of?
South African platinum industry halted by two major strikes, 2004
Very short article on two South African metal workers strikes.
South African public service strike - September 2004
Very short account of a strike over pay of 800,000 South African public-sector workers.
