The death of Neville Alexander on August 27, coming as it does in the wake of the massacre of mineworkers at Marikana, is a double blow. He had the breadth of intellect and depth of knowledge to help the world to understand the significance of these events. Throughout...
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Bona fide progressive leaves a lasting legacy | by Jonathan Jansen
I knew only one genuine revolutionary in my life, and he died this week. The news floored me, and for an hour I roamed around the office in a daze. " He was the standard for a revolutionary" "It is not true," I kept telling myself, for this great man, simply by being...
The massacre of our illusions …and the seeds of something new | by Lenny Gentle
The story of Marikana has so far been painted shallowly as an inter-union spat. In the first few days after the fateful Thursday and the shock and horror of watching people being massacred on TV there have correctly been howls of anger and grief. Of course no one...
Syrian regime: Friend of the Palestinians? | by Miriyam Aouragh
Syria lies at a very sensitive nexus in the Middle East. It borders Israel, a state that poses a very real threat to it. The country lacks it own natural resources, and is dependent on other states economically. US president George Bush described Syria as a "state...
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...
Rio+20: Vengeance Too Long Delayed | by Gwynne Dyer
There was no law against genocide in the early 1940s; it only became an internationally recognized crime after the worst genocide of modern history had actually happened. Similarly, there is no law against “ecocide” now. That will only come to pass when the damage to...
Green energy won’t save the earth without social change | by Ian Angus
The most popular techno-fix for global warming is green energy. If energy companies would only deploy wind, hydro, solar, geothermal or nuclear, then emission-intensive fossil fuels will eventually disappear. But will that actually work? A new study by Richard York of...
Death of a mensch and anti-racist scientist : Phillip Tobias
Phillip Tobias, who died on 7th June 2012 aged 86, was probably South Africa’s most honoured and decorated scientist. He was world renowned for his path-finding work in palaeoanthropology that combined studies of paleontology and physical anthropology. At a time when...
Let’s not surrender democracy for anger | by Max du Preez
I SINCERELY hope all white South Africans have taken proper notice of the depth of continuing black anger and hurt at the memory of apartheid and its bitter legacy. Perhaps that was the one positive spinoff of the Zuma Spear debacle. A few weeks ago, in response to...


