The coming 2024 national and provincial elections are the most significant since the ’94 ‘freedom elections’. Yet once again there is no credible left-wing or anti-capitalist force contesting.
2024: WAKE UP CALL FOR THE LEFT
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2024: Wake Up Call For The Left!
Inevitably, the feature of this issue focuses on the election – but with a difference. We are more interested in placing the election in the broader context of building the Left and popular organisations than in pondering the details of which party will get how many...
Genocide in Gaza funded by the diamond industry
The international trade in diamonds, worth $87 billion in 2021, conceals the fact that the industry is a significant source of funding for the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, now in its sixth month, has killed at least 32,000 people,...
The #StopFunelaniNganeno Campaign: how the Human Rights Commission is protecting the girl child
On 21 March 1960, in the township of Sharpeville, 69 people died, and 180 were wounded when police fired on a peaceful crowd that had gathered in protest against the pass laws. This iconic date in the history of South Africa is the day we commemorate as Human Rights...
#FeesMustFall in Nigeria
Since the inauguration of President Bola Tinubu, a wave of fee hikes has swept through public universities and secondary schools in Nigeria. Across numerous campuses, students have risen in response to these policies, registering their dissent through campaigns,...
Who is afraid of the masses in Haiti?
A desperate humanitarian crisis is underway in Haiti. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, the country has been gripped by crippling levels of gang violence characterized by regular street battles, kidnappings, sexual assault, and the...
Hamba kahle Eddie Webster: The labour movement will miss you
Eddie Webster has left us. The hole in the world that he left is large indeed. He passed away on Tuesday, 5 March, from a heart attack at the age of 81. More than anyone else, Eddie Webster remade the field of industrial sociology in South Africa, but his impact was...
Gaza’s traumatic stress
The state of mental health in Gaza has to be contextualised in the history of the last 75 years of colonization and occupation; the 17 years during which Gaza has been the world’s largest outdoor prison; and the current constant bombing and invasion of Gaza that has...
The end of labour or the beginning of a new cycle of union growth?
This is an edited version of a talk I gave at the 6th Conference of the International Association of Strikes and Social Conflict (IASSC) in Cape Town on 6th February 2024. Eight years ago, I noticed a growing number of motorbikes on Johannesburg’s pot-holed roads....