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`Our passion to destroy capitalism ... remains unwavering': Declaration of the African Conference on Participatory Democracy
Johannesburg Declaration of the African Conference on Participatory Democracy
August 16, 2008
SACP leader Blade Nzimande addresses the conference.
As comrades and compatriots, gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 14-16, 2008, from all parts of the world, at the African Conference on Participatory Democracy, hosted by the South African Communist Party and the Swedish Left Party under the auspices of the International Left Forum declare the following:.
Zimbabwe: A `power-sharing' deal for whom?
By Shawn Hattingh
Negotiations between the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) over the political future of Zimbabwe have reached a zenith in the past few weeks. It now seems almost inevitable that some sort of deal will be attained by the political masters of the MDC and ZANU-PF and that power sharing will become a reality. The mediator in the negotiation process, the South African government, has claimed that the outcome of the negotiations between these parties will lead to a new dawn in Zimbabwe. As part of this, we are assured that the corner has been turned and that democracy and freedom will be a reality in the beleaguered country in the near future.
South Africa's activist social justice research centre under attack
By Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond
August 6, 2008 -- Durban's University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba is expected to deliver an edict that the Centre for Civil Society will close on December 31. The reason given by dean Donal McCracken to a sceptical School of Development Studies (where the centre is housed) is that staff do not have "permanent" funding. But neither do most of the university's research units, and there is money in centre reserves for at least a couple of years, plus ongoing donor support for many of our projects.
Hence this "execution" will be doggedly resisted because UKZN still has many staff and students who remember the struggle for non-racial democracy and don't mind speaking out to challenge misguided decisions.
As the two most senior academics in the centre, holding an honorary professorship and tenured research chair, respectively, we will resist, despite what a UKZN internal report recorded -- an environment of "intimidation and bullying", in which management "deploys power rather than intellect", as Rhodes professor Jimi Adesina put it.
Photo exhibition: Durban, South Africa, UKZN Centre for Civil Society from August 1-September 3, 2008
| Photographs by Oliver Meth, from the exhibition 'Breathing Spaces |  |
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Breathing Spaces exhibition can be viewed at UKZN Centre for Civil Society from 1 August - 3 September 2008.
Southern African People's Solidarity Network's SADC Peoples' Summit 2008, Joburg, August 14-17, 2008Announcing…. The SADC Peoples' Summit 2008As the SADC Heads of State will be meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2008, the ordinary peoples of Southern Africa will also The Peoples' Summit serves as a social movement planting and The following issues will be the main focus areas for the 2008 Summit: South Africa: Treatment Action Campaign 10th Anniversary Conference, Cape Town, December 8-9, 2008Treatment Action Campaign 10th Anniversary Conference and Edited Volume Cape Town, 8-9 December 2008 [provisional dates]
Overview The xenophobia outbreak in South Africa: Strategic questions facing the new social movements
By Oupa Lehulere
June 2008 -- The township of Alexandra outside Johannesburg, South Africa, has a long history of resistance to oppression and exploitation. In the late 1950s Alex (as it is popularly referred to) was the centre of bus boycotts against increases in fares and of struggles against apartheid, in the 1980s Alex was the centre of building street committees that represented what were then called ``organs of people’s power’’ – forms of alternative government to the apartheid state, and in 2002 the event that announced the presence of the new social movements on the South African post-apartheid political landscape – the 20,000-strong march led by the Social Movements United – took place in Alex. The fact that it was Alex that would go down in history as the township that expressed most publicly the reactionary attitudes held by working-class people against fellow working-class people from other parts of Africa throws into sharp relief the process of political and organisational decline that has been underway within the South Africa’s working class since 1994. African Participatory Democracy Conference, Soweto, South Africa, August 14-16, 2008AFRICAN PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY CONFERENCE How international big business colluded with South Africa's apartheid regime; Audio added July 13, 2008Dennis Brutus, veteran anti-apartheid campaigner, describes how US, British and other major multinational corporations colluded with the racist regime of apartheid South Africa. Brutus is attempting to win reparations for superprofits made through the exploitation and repression of black South African workers. For further background to this, go to ``Can reparations for apartheid profits be won in US courts?''.
* * * Friday, July 11th, 2008 SOUTH AFRICAN POET DENNIS BRUTUS ON STEAL THIS RADIO! Can reparations for apartheid profits be won in US courts?By Patrick Bond
Dennis Brutus Durban, July 6, 2008 -- A telling remark about US imperialism's double standards was uttered by Clinton-era deputy treasury secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who a decade ago was the driver of reparations claims against pro-Nazi corporations, assisting plaintiffs to gain $8 billion from European banks and corporations which ripped off Holocaust victims' funds or which were 1930s beneficiaries of slave labour (both Jewish and non-Jewish). But how about reparations for corporate profits made under South Africa's racist apartheid system? As a November 2002 keynote speaker for the “USA Engage” lobby of 650 multinational corporations organised to fight the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), Eizenstat warned that South African reparations activists “can galvanise public opinion and generate political support,” and “may achieve some success despite legal infirmities''. Political activism, class struggle -- not markets -- will save the planetJuly 5, 2008 -- A political economist and activist who directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, Patrick Bond was a featured guest speaker at the Green Left Weekly Social Change — Climate Change conference held in Sydney, Australia, in April. Author of a range of books, including Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, and Walk Left, Talk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, Bond is a long-time advocate for radical solutions to the climate and social catastrophe wraught by global capitalism. Lauren Carroll Harris spoke to Bond at the conference about responses to climate change. * * * What has been the response of the market to the crisis of climate change and what role does carbon trading play? Baruch Hirson: The South African left and the Russian connection (1991)Click HERE to view a CVET video production of a seminar at the Baruch Hirson: The South African left and the Russian connection (1991)
Marxism in South Africa - Past, Present, & Future
September 6-8, 1991 Cuito Cuanavale: How Cuba fought for Africa’s freedomBy Barry Healy June 14, 2008 -- This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, a heroic struggle in which, between October 1987 and June 1988, in some of the fiercest fighting in Africa since the Second World War, the South African Defence Force (SADF) were humiliatingly defeated by liberation forces in Angola. Cuban assistance to Angolan resistance to the SADF invasion was vital. Defeat at Cuito Cuanavale spelled the doom of apartheid and the victory of the South African liberation movement. Former Cuban president Fidel Castro famously observed that “the history of Africa will be written as before and after Cuito Cuanavale”. In South Africa’s Freedom Park, outside Pretoria, 2070 names of Cubans who fell in Angola are inscribed alongside those of South Africans who died during the anti-apartheid struggle. South Africa: Water struggles from Johannesburg and beyond
By Dale T. McKinley
It’s been five years since residents of the poor community of Phiri (Soweto) were first confronted with the practical consequences of the City of Johannesburg’s corporatisation and commodification (read: privatisation) of water delivery. That was when Phiri was chosen as the first community in the Johannesburg Metro to ``benefit'' from the implementation of its Operation Gcin’amanzi. What subsequently happened has now been well documented many times over: the surreptitious and forcible installation of pre-paid water meters under the pretext of fixing ageing infrastructure; the victimisation and cutting-off of supply to those who refused; and, sustained resistance pitting community residents – organised through the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) and the newly formed Coalition Against Water Privatisation (CAWP) -- against an ``unholy alliance'' of Johannesburg Water, the City of Johannesburg, state prosecutors, the South African Police Services and private security firms. Musical interlude: Abdullah Ibrahim's Mannenberg (Is Where It's Happening)MannenbergAbdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) is seen here visiting Mandela's cell on Robben Island, and wandering in and around Cape Town -- including the famed District Six and Mannenberg -- to the soundtrack of his now classic South African jazz tune Mannenberg (Is Where It's Happening). Photo essay: Migrant workers in South Africa; Photography and social justice strugglesBorn in Durban and the author of a forthcoming book on Wentworth in Durban, Peter Mckenzie was a co-founder of the photo collective Afrapix agency under the auspices of the South African Council of Churches and the chief photographer for Drum magazine until the late 1980s before going freelance. He was also the co-ordinator and facilitator of the photojournalism department at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism from 1996 to 1999. Mckenzie has published and exhibited both in South Africa and internationally, and is recognised as one of South Africa's greatest photographers. Below are photos from Peter Mckenzie's brilliant photo exhibition of migrant workers in South Africa -- sponsored by the Southern African Migration Project. For South African readers the exhibition is at the [Durban] Centre for Civil Society hallway through June, in the Memorial Tower Building's first floor F section (in the back of the courtyard). Below the photos, McKenzie provides a commentary on aesthetics and representation strategies for popular movements committed to social justice.
Xenophobia tears apart South Africa's working classBy Thandokuhle Manzi and Patrick Bond May 26, 2008 -- The low-income black township here in Durban which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a test performed on a Mozambican last Wednesday morning (May 21). At 6:45am, in the warmth of a rising subtropical winter sun, two unemployed men strolling on Belair Road approached the middle-aged immigrant. They accosted him and demanded, in the local indigenous language isiZulu, that he say the word meaning ``elbow'' (this they referred to with their hand). The man answered ``idolo'', which unfortunately means ``knee''. The correct answer is ``indololwane''. His punishment: being beaten up severely, and then told to ``go home''.
March against xenophobia, Johannesburg, May 24, 2008. `Our struggle knows no borders!' -- South African left, unions respond to xenophobic attacks* * * See also ``Xenophobia tears apart South Africa's working class'' by Thandokuhle Manzi and Patrick Bond. Watch South Africa: The New Apartheid, on the South African government's treatment of migrant workers and refugees and the involvement of racist white farmers. * * * May 21, 2008 -- According to the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, as of May 19, 2008, the death toll in a wave of attacks targeting foreigners around South Africa's main city of Johannesburg has risen to at least 32, with an estimated 6000 people seeking shelter in police stations, churches and community halls. The violence has spread to Zandspruit, northwest of Johannesburg, and Tembisa, Primrose, Reiger Park and Thokoza, on the eastern perimeter of the city, as well as other working-class communities.
ISRAEL: Washington backs Middle East's `nuclear outlaw'
Norm Dixon
March 24, 2004 -- “Every civilised nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction... We’re determined to confront those threats at the source”, US President George Bush declared in a February 11 speech. “We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We’ll block them from being transferred. We’ll prevent them from ever being used. One source of these weapons is dangerous and secretive regimes that build weapons of mass destruction to intimidate their neighbours and force their influence upon the world.” Arguing for combative new “arms control” measures that would further entrench the West’s control over nuclear weapons, Bush casually repeated the now thoroughly exposed lie that the US-led war against Iraq was launched because Baghdad “refused to disarm or account for ... illegal weapons and programs”. The transformation of South Africa's communists
12 February 1997
Raising the Red Flag: The International Socialist League and the Communist Party of South Africa 1914-1932 Review by Norm Dixon Mayibuye Books specialise in publishing works relating to South Africa's liberation struggle, most by participants in the movement. Under apartheid many valuable works were suppressed. Now free to publish anything, it may seem strange that Mayibuye would decide to publish a book that began as an unpublished thesis by an obscure US academic 30 years ago. Strange or not, it is a decision to be welcomed. BHP-Billiton: a corporation founded on apartheid plunder
25 April 2001
 BY NORM DIXON In late March, newspaper headlines hailed the announcement that giant Australian-owned mining, oil and steel corporation BHP and the huge Anglo-South African mining and base metals conglomerate Billiton had agreed to merge, forming the world's largest mining and second-largest resources corporation. The new monolith is worth A$57 billion at current stock market prices. None of the capitalist “market analysts” who have churned out thousands of words on the merger thought it necessary to point out that Billiton's accumulated capital is the product of decades of collaboration with the racist apartheid system in South Africa. Billiton's parent company Gencor formally came into being with the amalgamation of two companies formed in the late 19th century, the General Mining and Finance Corporation (later known as Genmin) and the Union Corporation. South Africa: A victory for workers' solidarity with the Zimbabwean peopleBy Patrick Craven, COSATU April 22, 2008 -- The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the statement by a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman that the China Ocean Shipping Company which owns the An Yue Jiang, has decided to recall the ship because Zimbabwe cannot take delivery of the 77 tonnes of weapons and ammunition onboard. If true, this is an historic victory for the international trade union movement and civil society, and in particular for the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), whose members refused to unload or transport its deadly cargo.
Protest banner being removed from China's Pretoria embassy.
Climate change solutions: what role for the market? & Equity in energy consumption -- Patrick BondTwo talks by Patrick Bond, delivered at the Climate Change Social Change Conference, Sydney, April 12, 2008.
Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal; editor of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society
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