Political Consciousness from Soweto to Marikana
Report on a Four-Day Activist Course in 2015
Since the day we first saw images of the police shooting down Marikana mineworkers in August 2012, it seemed to many on the South African left—and I include myself among them—that the Marikana massacre had changed everything in post-apartheid South Africa
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The liberation credentials of the African National Congress and its allied organizations had withstood compromise, disappointment and betrayal over the decades before Marikana. But the idea of the ANC as the essential representative of black working-class aspirations in South Africa had endured, despite challenges. After 1994, the ANC came to represent the idea that the post-apartheid order negotiated in the early 1990s would provide a better, more hopeful future for the black working-class majority.... READ MORE
One Year After the Marikana Massacre
On 16 August 2012 a tactical response unit of the South African police shot and killed 34 striking workers and seriously wounded at least 78 others, who were part of a peaceful gathering on public land near the town of Marikana in North West Province.
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The strike began a week before, when rock drill operators elected representatives to negotiate with management of Lonmin mine, the third-largest platinum mine in the world. Workers no longer trusted their union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), to negotiate on their behalf. They demanded that management should talk to them. Management insisted it would only talk to NUM.
Many of us have seen television images, showing workers apparently charging at the police as the police approach the mountain on which the strikers were gathered... READ MORE
Making Universities into Factories
Performance review: it sounds like a good idea. We can hardly imagine academic life without individual and collective review and assessment—among friends, colleagues and students; within departments, faculties and institutions—of what we are teaching, how we could do our job more effectively, how we balance the demands of teaching and research, how our teaching and research best contributes to the intellectual life of society and indeed the broader society
itself. This has surely been part of academic life since its beginnings in Plato’s Academy in Athens in the fourth century BCE.
Across the centuries, there have been many different ways in which academics have reflected on their tasks. The major questions explicitly or implicitly guiding the process have changed over time and differed from one context to another: Have we grasped the nature of reality? Are we cultivating the virtues needed by our society? Are we serving God’s will?... READ MORE
The Double Lives of South African Marxism
In April 1986, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff (1986a) introduced a special issue of Monthly Review by describing the struggle against apartheid as ‘crucial to the whole history of our time.’ South Africa was unique, they argued, because:
It is so far the only country with a well-developed, modern capitalist structure which is not only objectively ripe for revolution but has actually entered a stage of overt and seemingly irreversible revolutionary struggle.....There is no other country in the world that has anything like the material and symbolic significance of South Africa for both sides of the conflict that rends the world today. A victory for revolution, i.e., a genuine and lasting change in basic power relations in South Africa, could have an impact on the balance of global forces comparable to that of the revolutionary wave that followed World War II. On the other hand, a victory for counter-revolution—the stabilization of capitalist relations in South Africa, even if in somewhat altered form—would be a stunning defeat for the world revolution (Sweezy and Magdoff 1986b: 5–6).... READ MORE
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Ancient Cultures and Modern States
Middle Eastern Struggles in Historical Perspective
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In this talk I will not focus on the current, ongoing struggles of the Kurdish people and the current situation in the Middle East more broadly. Instead I will try to provide a longer historical perspective within which the current situation can be viewed.
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I wish that I was sufficiently well informed to speak with authority on the current situation of the Kurdish people, their challenges and prospects, and the importance of their fate for the rest of us.
I hope that my talk will bring out something of the significance of their struggles for humankind as a whole.
My approach to the topic has been much influenced, I think, by the context of Palestine solidarity work... READ MORE