by Benjamin Fogel The Lonmin Worker's Council was birthed by last year's wildcat strike at the London Mining (Formerly London Rhodesian mining) mines in Marikana. The strike itself emanated from a long-running dispute between workers and management stemming both from...
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COSATU at the crossroads
This feature of Amandla! lays bare the conflict unfolding in COSATU. Tensions in SA's biggest labour movement play themselves out over the failure of the Polokwane project. The ANC's 2007 Polokwane Conference, which adopted a host of progressive policies, was supposed...
The strike committees: Organising against all odds | by Amandla! correspondants
Whether the aftermath of Marikana will spell the downright end of the National Union of Mineworkers, the resentment against the traditional structures of bargaining and the union leadership is palpable in the platinum belt, sometimes bordering on murderous anger. The...
Tribute to Neville Alexander | by Na-iem Dollie, Hamied Mahate, James Marsh, Enver Motala, Jean Pease, John Samuels, Marcus Solomon, Salim Vally and Crain Soudien
(born 22 October 1936; died 27 August 2012) Neville Edward Alexander meant many specific things to many different people. For the most part of his adult life, he grappled with life's contradictions, its dilemmas, its twists and its beauty as a socialist intellectual...
Echoes of the Past:Marikana, Cheap Labour and the 1946 Miners Strike
Chris Webb On August 4, 1946 over one thousand miners assembled in Market Square in Johannesburg, South Africa. No hall in the town was big enough to hold them, and no one would have rented one to them anyway. The miners were members of the African Mine Worker's...
Lonmin toll tells us all about SA’s lived reality | by Aubrey Matshiqi
AS IS always the case under these circumstances, there is no shortage of explanations — "scientific", "academic" or otherwise — for the conflict that led to the deaths of 44 people at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, in North West. Given the plethora of pet...
Malema: Miners were killed to protect Cyril Ramaphosa shares
President Jacob Zuma and Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa must resign following the death of mineworkers at Lonmin's Marikana operations, in the North West, expelled ANC Youth League President Julius Malema said on Saturday. "President Zuma decided over the massacre of...
Health activism in Cape Town: A case study of the Health Workers Society | by W Pick, J W B Claassen, C A le Grange, G D Hussey
The Health Workers Society (HWS), founded in 1980, was one of several progressive health organisations that fought for a democratic health system in South Africa. We document the sociopolitical context within which it operated and some of its achievements. HWS, many...
The late Christopher Hitchens | by Richard Seymour
A review of Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic, 2010), £9.99 Given Hitchens’s political inconsistencies, Hitch-22 is better than it ought to be, a fact which is a consequence of his undeniable talent A petty bourgeois individualist, in his last years...






