It is a remarkable historical coincidence that Neville Alexander was laid to rest on the very same day that some Marikana workers – most of whom were also from the Eastern Cape - were buried. This tragic incident of the miners represents a turning point in the...
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The rabbits of counter-revolution
by Jared Sacks To those of us that know revolution and understand the manner in which the composition of forces are repositioned and counter-hegemony is asserted by the revolutionary left, it is becoming increasingly clear that a new counter-revolutionary threat...
The Marikana Massacre reveals the depths of the fault lines in South Africa | by Sahra Ryklief
On Thursday 16th August, 34 striking mineworkers were shot dead by police at LONMIN's platinum mine in Rustenberg. It is not yet clear why the police were using live ammunition, nor whether a warning was issued. Audio-visual depictions of the event demonstrate a...
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...
Bid to limit strikes in aftermath of Marikana | by Monde Maoto
The government and the mining industry have taken the first steps to limit illegal strike action in the platinum sector and to refine wage negotiating processes, both seen to be key factors behind the violence at Lonmin last week. Meanwhile, the stage is set for...
Haiti’s forgotten Revolution and C.L.R. James
The great Trindadian intellectual C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins is a decidedly partisan text, it has no pretensions of grandiose academic objectivity or liberal 'fairness'. It is a great Marxist text, not great in the sense of providing a new insight into the...
Uniting the Global Movement for Palestine | by Paul Larudee
'The old will die and the young will forget.' - David Ben Gurion, 1948 (1) When I first went to Palestine in 1965, Ben Gurion's prediction seemed plausible. Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement were nearly invisible outside the Middle East. The...
‘I Am an Illegal Alien on My Own Land’ | by David Shulman
In 1949, shortly after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar—the doyen of modern Hebrew prose writers—published a story that became an instant classic. “Khirbet Khizeh” is a fictionalized account of the destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of all...
Crisis and Alternatives | by Achin Vanaik
Crisis for whom? Why after all this is it business more or less as usual? Because those who benefit think they can get away with it. Where there is greater ground level resistance – for example in Greece, significant political forces have put forward specific...





