RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY ACTIVIST and journalist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, faces up to 25 years in jail. He is charged with high treason and spreading false information about the Russian army. His “crime” is that he has spoken out repeatedly against the Putin regime and against...
I HAVE JUST RETURNED TO SOUTH AFRICA after spending months in occupied Palestine. When I was thinking about what to write about my time there, the first thing that popped into my mind was the mental violence at Israeli checkpoints. And that is still what is with me...
AS THE AUSTERITY trajectory of the Treasury continues downward, tricks and deception have become the order of the day. All to deceive public sector workers about the real amount of their pay “increase”. Nehawu, Popcru, Denosa, Sapu and others went on strike for one...
IT CAN NO LONGER BE DOUBTED THAT we are living in an age of unceasing crisis. And South Africa can no longer be considered as an exception in the socio-economic problems it faces. At home and abroad, we face unyielding economic instability, explosive political...
IN THE SPACE OF A YEAR AND A HALF, South Africa has agreed to borrow billions of rand in foreign currency. This is for a programme of economic restructuring on the basis of a Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET-IP). Unions and civil society have been...
We are publishing this article in the feature on the dysfunctional state as an illustration of one response to that dysfunctionality – set up your own, local, socially-owned project. In this case to produce electricity. The story shows how, even in this kind of...
STATES AND THE SOCIETIES THEY are responsible for have historically treated women like a natural resource. They have assumed that women have a “natural” capacity to do social reproduction work of cleaning, cooking, soothing, healing, childraising, birthing,...
Amandla! interview INTERVIEW WITH THULANI BUKANI, Secretary Independent Komani Residents’ Association (Ikora) Note: sometimes Komani is referred to by its former name of Queenstown. Amandla!: What are the conditions of public services in Komani? Thulani Bukani: The...
WATER IN SOUTH AFRICA IS A story of failing infrastructure and dry taps. Only one-third of South Africa’s water infrastructure is operational. The government’s inability to maintain existing infrastructure, as a result of austerity policies and political malfeasance,...
TWO THOUSAND BLACK WORKERS at Coronation Brick and Tile in Durban went on strike in January 1973. They could not know that their action to demand a modest wage increase would ultimately transform workers’ struggle in South Africa. They launched a process of concerted...
NOT SO LONG AGO, LOCAL government was blamed for the failures of the “new” democratic order in South Africa. Once known as the hands and feet of government, it was the target of protest by working-class communities frustrated by poor service delivery and the...
Interview with Camden NUM leadership Amandla!: So we're sitting here with load-shedding. It persists. In general, it gets worse. Why in your view is this the case? What is happening that is causing us to have this level of load-shedding or even load-shedding at all?...
THABO BESTER NOT ONLY escaped from a privately owned, G4S prison; they neglected to tell us about it for nearly a year. In fact, they only “remembered” when GroundUp unearthed the story. In the UK, in 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party privatised the supply...
Issue 87 of Amandla! focuses on the collapse of the state. We look both at municipalities and state-owned entities. Trevor Ngwane writes on local government finance and we have an interview with Ikora, a civic from Komani in E.Cape, as well as an article from Tony...
Membership take leadership to court for multiple violations of the constitution. Read more here.
A recent article on Basic Income Grant pathway scenarios criticises the IEJ-ADRS research on the matter, but intentionally exaggerates the cost and funding strategy. Read here.
Green energy requires the use of scarce resources, just as fossil fuel energy does. We must rapidly come to terms with this. This article gives us an example. By 2050 we may not only have reached peak silver; we may have consumed most of the world’s reserves. Silver...
This article has been jointly published with Daily Maverick. Let us not forget that the public sector strikers are workers who have come off a year of zero increase. They have effectively taken a wage cut two years in a row, a loss of nearly 10% of their buying power....
Bruce Baigrie interviewed the author, Matt Huber Amandla!: Your recent book is titled Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Can you explain what you mean by that? Why is class so important here? MATT HUBER: The title is very explicitly...
Amandla! spoke with Anele Selekwa Amandla!: Could you give us a little bit of the history of Soundz of the South (SOS), like when you started, why you started, where you are from as a collective? Anele Selekwa: We started in 2008 as a loose collective of activists,...
LULA HAS RETURNED TO THE presidency of Brazil and - with his victory - to the spotlight of the global media. This is news longed for by Brazilians with a saudade (thirst) for democracy. For those who live in other Latin American countries it represents the opening of...
SOUTH AFRICA’S ENERGY CRISIS IS set to proceed as usual, with Eskom’s recent announcement of another round of high-intensity stage four load shedding due to the exhaustion of its diesel budget. At the same time, the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference...
ALL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT WATER scarcity in South Africa begin by telling us that the county is water scarce. It’s the 39th driest country in the world and, due to el niños and el niñas, droughts and floods have become distinctive features of the climate. They have become...
WE NEED TO DEVELOP a perspective and strategy for financing a public pathway to an energy transition; it must be capable of addressing energy poverty and climate protection. The current neoliberal approach to climate finance is based on loans, whether at...