South Africa
BHP-Billiton: a corporation founded on apartheid plunder
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 a
South Africa: A victory for workers' solidarity with the Zimbabwean people
By 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 Bond
Two talks by Patrick Bond, delivered at the Climate Change Social Change Conference, Sydney, April 12, 2008.
Climate change solutions: what role for the market?
John Pilger on South Africa: Honouring the 'unbreakable promise'
March 28, 2008 -- Fourteen years after South Africa's first democratic elections and the fall of racial apartheid, John Pilger describes, in an address at Rhodes University, the dream and reality of the new South Africa and the responsibility of its new elite. (See video clips of John Pilger's visit here.)
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By John Pilger
On my wall in London is a photograph I have never grown tired of looking at. Indeed, I always find it thrilling to behold. You might even say it helps keep me going. It is a picture of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the notorious ‘hippos’, as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised. Her fists are clenched. Her thin body is both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. It was May Day 1985 and the uprising against apartheid had begun.
15 years since the murder of Chris Hani
On April 10, 1993, South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Chris Hani was asassinated by right-wing extremists hoping to derail South Africa's transtion to democratic rule. On the 15th anniversary of his death, Links reproduces a speech by socialist and African National Congress (ANC) veteran Pallo Jordan delivered to mark the 10th anniversary of the assassination.
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By Dr Pallo Jordan
Allow me first to thank the leadership of the SACP and the central executive committee of Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) for inviting me to deliver this inaugural Chris Hani Memorial Lecture. I consider it a great honour to have been chosen for this task because Comrade Chris was a close and very dear friend of mine.
South Africa: Amandla Colloquium, Cape Town April 4-6, 2008
Amandla Colloquium: Continuity and Discontinuity of Capitalism
in the Post-apartheid South Africa
4-6 April, 2008, Cape Town, Ritz Hotel (Sea Point)
Friday afternoon – Sunday afternoon
Colloquium Objectives:
Develop an analysis of the changing nature and structure of capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa;
Examining how capitalist restructuring has reshaped the working class both at the point of production and reproduction;
Develop perspectives for anti-capitalist strategies;
Develop research agenda related to changing nature of South African capitalism;
Popularise Amandla Publishers as a progressive media initiative that serves to promote anti-capitalist analysis and perspectives;
Video: Patrick Bond on the global fight for climate justice
On March 4, Patrick Bond addressed a meeting organised by Climate and Capitalism blog in Toronto, Canada, and supported by Socialist Project in Canada and Socialist Voice, among others. Bond will also be a featured speaker at the Climate Change l Social Change conference in Sydney, Australia, April 11-13. Watch Patrick Bond's presentation below.
Capitalism is no solution to problems facing humanity: Tribute to Cde Fidel Castro
By Blade Nzimande
February 20, 2008 -- Tributes are not meant only for the departed, but are also befitting to living revolutionary legends who have served the cause of humanity with distinction, like Cde Fidel Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba! Cde Fidel, as he is affectionately known in Cuba and throughout the progressive and socialist world, was until earlier this week, the President of the Socialist Republic of Cuba and Commander of the Armed Forces of the Cuban Revolution.
South Africa: Two economies - or one system of superexploitation
By Patrick Bond
[The following is the introduction to ``Transcending two economies – renewed debates in South African political economy'', a special issue of Africanus, Journal of Development Studies (Vol. 37 No. 2 2007, ISSN 0304-615x). It is republished with permission.The full issue is available for free download at http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/africanus_1.pdf ]
Zuma, the centre-left and the left-left
By Patrick Bond
December 21, 2007 – Congratulations are due Jacob Zuma – apparently far more Machiavellian
than even his arch-opponent since 2005, Thabo Mbeki – and the tireless
band of warriors from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), SA Communist
Party (SACP) and African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) who kept his political
life support on when everyone else declared him dead.
The SACP and COSATU have been fiddling with the same strategic and political choice for over 15 years now.
The left and UN military intervention in East Timor
By Terry Townsend