LPM Members and shack-dwellers attacked in Protea South, Soweto
Solidarity Statement by the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF)
The following is an urgent communication issued on behalf of, and in solidarity with the Landless Peoples Movement (LPM) and other shack-dwellers of Protea South, Soweto. It is based on information obtained by telephonic and face-to-face conversations held with LPM members following violent attacks against them last night. There still seems to be confusion, however, and details are sketchy. Updates on the situation will be made available as and when they are received, as will be any factual corrections.
On the evening of Sunday 23 May a group of men attempted to burn down the shack of Landless Peoples Movement chairperson Maureen Mnisi in the informal settlement of Protea South, Soweto. She was inside at the time, and was fortunate to escape with her life only because her son stumbled on the attackers and chased them away.
Resistance not Ballots: Mass Organisation not Authoritarian Leaders
Even with all eyes on the World Cup, movements of the workers and the poor in South Africa must not forget that another challenge looms: the local government elections of 2011. And with the approach of elections, we are already seeing the return of the wave of authoritarians and opportunists of the left, all singing the same old song: if they are elected, they will somehow be able to do something about the problems of the workers and the poor. And while they may remix the song over and over, the tune remains the same: individual leaders, experts, or vanguards can find the answer; the mass movements of the people cannot liberate themselves.
This is the one big lie of all who seek our votes.
Solidarity with the Greek workers’ struggle!
Statement on the Greek crisis
by Anarchist Communist organizations
Greece is a test case for the social dismantling that awaits us all. This policy is being enacted by all the institutional parties, by every government and by all of globalised capitalism’s institutions. There is only one way to hold back this policy of barbaric capitalism: popular direct action, to widen the strike movement and increase the number of demonstrations all across Europe.
Solidarity with the Greek workers’ struggle!
The Greek working class is angry, and with good reason, with the attempt to load responsibility for the bankruptcy of the Greek State onto their shoulders. We maintain instead that it is the international financial institutions and the European Union who are responsible. The financial institutions have plunged the world, and Greece in particular, into an economic and social crisis of historical proportions, forcing countries into debt, and now these same institutions are complaining that certain States risk not being able to repay their debts. We denounce this hypocrisy and say that even if Greece – and all the other countries – can repay the debt, they should not do so: it is up to those responsible for the crisis – the financial institutions, not the workers – to pay for the damage caused by this crisis. The Greek workers are right to refuse to pay back their country’s debt. We refuse to pay for their crisis!
Terre’Blanche is Dead; Long Live the Workers!
We in the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front will shed no tears for the killing of the racist Eugene Terre’Blanche. Why should revolutionary workers lament the death of a thug who lived in nostalgia for the days when his emulation of Hitler and (empty) threats of war shook the whole country, and who never ceased to exploit and terrorise the black workers on a farm that should rightly be managed by those who work it to meet the needs of all and not be the property of any one single person?
Nor can we join with the capitalist newspapers who link the Terre’Blanche killing to “heightened racial tension in South Africa”, nor with the politicians of the Democratic Alliance and the Congress of the People who attribute the killing to the ANC’s Julius Malema and the “kill the boer” song. Not that we have any wish to defend Malema, any more than any other opportunistic capitalist politician of any party. Whether – like so many others – he is deliberately seeking to shift blame onto “the whites” so black workers won’t challenge his own crookery, or whether he is simply trying to identify himself with “the struggle” in his latest attempt at self-glorification by fake radicalism, Malema’s goal in singing this song is clearly self-advancement, and not any fight against racism or any other form of oppression. After all, even if we leave aside the broader capitalist programme of the ANC government and focus only on the question of white farmers, surely the main goal must be, not to kill them, but to redistribute “their” land to those who work it, or are prepared to work it. And here Malema’s government has been all talk and no action: even the pitiful target of 30 percent land redistribution is nowhere near being met. Just one example of the government’s true loyalties: the interests of the ruling class come first.
Anarchist Statement in Solidarity with Swazi Students at Wits
We condemn the recent unilateral decision by Wits management to no longer accept many Swazi students’ medical aid provider, Swazi Med, for the current academic year. This is an unfair move by the university so close to the registration period. It means an additional burden on students from one of the poorest and most authoritarian states in the world, many of whom come from poor backgrounds and study in South Africa not out of choice but necessity.
International students have to pay their full fees and medical aid for the whole year prior to registration which makes it nearly impossible for poor and working class students to enrol.
Unfortunately, this attack on poor students is not an isolated incident but another move by the university in its programme of neo-liberal restructuring.[1] This started in 2000 when the university’s “non-core” services were privatised. Soon after, upfront payments were introduced and have continued to rise steeply ever since.
KDVS Interview with Lucien van der Walt, co-author of “Black Flame”
Interview with co-author of “Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics
of Anarchism and Syndicalism”
Richard Estes and Ron Glick interviewed Lucien van der Walt, co-author of Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, on their show “Speaking In Tongues,” KDVS, 90.3 FM, University Of California, Davis. The interview took place on September 25, 2009.
The interview covers issues like defining anarchism, anarchism and trade unions today, the issue of centralisation, anarchism and globalisation then and now, the Soviet Union and Communism, the Spanish Civil War, anarchism and immigration today, the relationship between class struggle and other forms of oppression, anarchism after Seattle, and anarchism and postmodernism.
The transcript (edited slightly for clarity) is below. If you’d like an audio recording of the interview, go here or here. For a higher quality recording of the entire show, go here.
Black Flame launch in Mexico
Black Flame co-author Michael Schmidt held a mini-launch of the book at a colloquium with professors of journalism and international affairs at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Guadalajara, Mexico, on October 26. Schmidt was invited to Mexico to train Tec students in covering conflict in transitional societies, especially given the drug war currently ravaging Mexican society. Extracts of his talk, “The Journalist as Activist,” in which he located activist journalism within the Mexican anarchist tradition, follow:
“¡Más vale morir de pie que vivir de rodillas!”
Audio: Social Struggles in South Africa
Thu, 11/12/2009 – AndrewNFlood
Listen to the audio file on Indymedia Ireland
We recently hosted Jonathan of the South African Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) in Dublin. He was doing a speaking tour of Ireland and Britain on the subject of ‘After Apartheid: Social struggle in South Africa’. I’ve just uploaded the audio of his Dublin talk, its linked below. Jonathan is another person I’ve ‘known’ online for quite a long period so it was good to meet him IRL at the London anarchist bookfair which provided the first date for his talk.
The opening section of the talk looks at the very recent repression of the shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo at the Kennedy road informal settlement. Several people were killed and over 1000 displaced when an ANC led gang targetted the settlement and a meeting that was in progess there. The rough notes I provide below will give you some idea of the areas covered in the audio file., they include a quite detailed history of the South African left.
Solidarity with the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha
International Anarchist Statement
Yesterday, Thursday 29th October, the Civil Police of Rio Grande do Sul, under the command of Governor Yeda Crusius, broke into the premises of the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha. Police seized various materials such as posters, minutes of meetings, the hard disk of a computer and also the contents of refuse containers that were at the headquarters. They also tried to intimidate those who came to show their solidarity and names contained in the records of the organization’s website. Two comrades were arrested and charged.
The comrades of the FAG have spent years fighting against exclusion and casualisation, defending justice and decent living conditions. They are well known for their work with the “catadores” (collectors of cardboard and recyclable refuse), with the homeless and with the landless. In short, work they have been carrying on for years with those at the bottom of society.
Still Fanning the Flames: An Interview with Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt
By kate, October 15, 2009
Dearest readers: We’re absolutely thrilled to bring you this wonderful new interview with Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, the authors of AK’s stunning new book Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. In recent months, we’ve posted excerpts from the book, and a roundup of recent reviews, but with today’s post, we’re able to bring you, for the first time, Michael and Lucien’s own thoughts on the book, its genesis, and its usefulness in our current context. Read and enjoy!
AK PRESS: There has been quite a buzz around Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. This is, am I right, volume one of what you call Counter-Power. Can you tell us a bit about what how people have responded to the book?
LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: The response has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re very happy with it. Of course, not everyone agrees with us on everything: that’s only to be expected, and anyway, we make it clear in the opening chapter that we want debate and welcome critique. Some folks, of course, don’t like the book at all—but no book can please everyone! Anyway, we want to stir things up a bit.
Anarchists are Queer and Proud
Anarchism is an ideology that fights against exploitation and all forms of oppression. We fight for a world in which women will be equal to men, a world without racism and class inequality, a world in which LGBTI and queer people are treated with respect. These struggles are part of the anarchist struggle against hierarchy and inequality, for an equal and free world.
Anarchists have been at the forefront in the struggle against LGBTI discrimination
From the beginning of anarchist theory, anarchism has been the first ideology to actively support LGBTI people long before other ideologies. It is believed that one of the key anarchist thinkers and revolutionaries, Mikhail Bakunin, was rumoured to have been homosexual and that this was one among many reasons Karl Marx threw him out of the First International, which caused the split between authoritarian communism and anarchism.
Also, Oscar Wilde, who called himself an anarchist, criticised Marx. His famous trial and conviction of sodomy in 1895 prompted anarchists to engage in an examination of the social, moral, and legal place of same-sex desire. The efforts of the famous anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman (the first advocate for homosexual rights in America) and other anarchists on Wilde’s behalf constitute the first articulation of a politics of homosexuality in the United States. After his trial, Wilde became “a totemic figure” for the anarchists, and at a time when the American productions of Wilde’s plays were closed down and forbidden and his books pulled from library shelves, anarchist journals reprinted his texts and poems.
Kennedy Road Murders Recall Terror of the 1980s
ZACF Statement on the Armed Attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo
in Kennedy Road Informal Settlement
The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) notes with disgust the attacks on the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) affiliated Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) by a heavily armed gang near the AbM office in Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban, KwaZulu Natal. We hereby extend our sympathy and solidarity to all those who have fallen victim to these cowardly attacks, and call for both national and international mobilisation and solidarity in their defence.
The attacks took place at about 11h30 on the night of Saturday 26 September, and carried on with impunity for at least 23 hours. Although police are claiming two people died, it has been confirmed by AbM that at least four people have been killed: three during the attacks and another died later in hospital. It is reported that the houses of around 30 AbM members were burnt or destroyed by the mob, which was shouting things like “The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy. Kennedy is for the AmaZulu” while carrying out the attacks. Hundreds, if not thousands of Kennedy Road residents have fled the community, some seeking refuge at nearby churches.
The political rivalry in KwaZulu Natal has exploited ethnic sentiment and tensions that emerged during the Jacob Zuma election campaign, and we believe that the African National Congress (ANC) in and around Kennedy Road, and probably elsewhere, is using ethnicity to mobilise local residents against popular social movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo. It seems clear to us that the popularly elected committee in the Kennedy Road settlement, and the social work they have been doing is perceived by local political leaders from the ANC to be a threat to political and property interests, and they are thus bent on destroying AbM.
ZACF Statement in Solidarity with Students at Santa Cruz University
Workers and poor all over the world are being asked to pay for the current economic crisis, brought about by capitalist stockbrokers, while the big corporations get bailed out.
We have seen millions of retrenchments worldwide. In South Africa over 300 000 jobs were lost in the first 6 months of this year alone. But all over the world the poor are fighting back. We have seen an increase in service delivery and other protests in South Africa as well as student protests against fee increases in recent weeks.
We are delighted to hear that students at the University of California, Santa Cruz are taking direct action by occupying their university at the same time as our comrades take to the streets in Pittsburgh to protest the G20. We urge occupying students in Santa Cruz, as well as struggling students everywhere to forge links with the workers on their campuses and to support their struggles.
May Day: Defend, Widen and Share the Struggle
Anarchist Communist May Day statement
Today as in the past, May Day means respect for mobilizations throughout the world by workers who suffer, at times even paying with their lives, for the sake of their struggles to improve the condition of men and women who labour under the control of capitalism.
As anarchist communists, we support the struggle for a radical change to a society of freedom, equality and solidarity, but we do not forget that in many countries, workers do not even have the most basic possibility to organise into unions, and many work in subhuman conditions for subhuman pay. Our thoughts today go to these workers, as we seek to strengthen the networks of support for the struggles of all the peoples of the world.
In Western countries, the ‘cradle of freedom’, the fate of working men and women has grown worse over the last two decades: casualisation, flexibility, magic words adopted by the Left as well as the Right, whose effects are now plain for everyone to see in the harsh effects of a crisis which grew out of lower wages and the destruction of jobs.
CPFs: Eyes and Fists of State Oppression
Wednesday March 11, 2009
ZACF statement on another murder in Sebokeng at the hands
of the Community Policing Forum.
The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) is angered by the killing of a second working class activist youth by the Community Policing Forum (CPF) in Sebokeng in less than a year.
In July of last year Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) activist Mathafeni Majobe was killed by members of the CPF after partaking in a service delivery protest in Sebokeng. This time the victim was Teboho “Diventsha” Tsotetsi, who was stabbed to death in front of his parents on Wednesday 4 March by members of the CPF for refusing to withdraw charges he had laid against those same CPF patrollers, who had severely beaten him and stolen his cell phone and wallet the previous Friday.
The atrocious murder of these two activist youth is not the only indictment against the Community Policing Forums, which time and again have been associated with ill behaviour, criminality and outright reaction.
Maximum Support to the Women and Water Campaign
Saturday February 21, 2009
On Thursday 12 February 2009 members of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front participated in a protest-march held in Johannesburg as part of the Coalition Against Water Privatisation’s Women and Water Campaign. The protest went from Library Gardens in central Johannesburg, a historic meeting point for protests in the city, to Mayor Amos Masondo’s office in Braamfontein, near Constitution Hill. The march was to demand that Masondo withdraw his appeal of the pro-poor Johannesburg High Court ruling of Judge Tsoka, which ruled that the forced installation of pre-paid water meters and the prepayment water system is unlawful and unconstitutional, and that City of Johannesburg and Johannesburg Water provide residents of poor townships with 50 litres of free water per person per day.
The Women and Water Campaign is an important campaign seeking to highlight the fact that, although all poor people in Southern Africa suffer from a shortage of water due to lack of basic service delivery and the privatisation of water, which makes it unaffordable to most, this suffering is felt most acutely by poor women. Living as we do in a sexist society it is almost always women that have to do all the cooking, cleaning and laundry. All of which they need water for. It is therefore women who have to walk long distances to collect water from rivers and queue, sometimes for hours, at communal taps. It is women who risk being attacked and raped when they have to go out alone, sometimes in the morning before the sun is up or late into the evening, to get water so they can prepare meals for their boyfriends, husbands and children. As women are very often the only breadwinners in families in South Africa, often employed as domestic workers, it is they who feel the double-edged oppression not only of having to work for a wage, but of having to do all the unpaid housework at home which, in the majority-white suburbs where they work, they are paid – albeit too little – to do. This is made worse by the fact that water privatisation means they can only get a measly 25 litres per person per day, far less than adequate, and have to go to great lengths to get water if they cannot afford to pay for more than that.
Don’t Kill or be Killed for Free Education
Friday February 06, 2009
Statement distributed by ZACF members and progressive students at the Wits University Orientation Week in response to the presence of the South African National Defence Force and attempts by it to recruit students to the military by offering to pay for their education.
Students and the ZACF condemn the presence of members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Orientation Week, and the attempts by these war-mongering representatives of militarism to recruit students to join the armed forces. If the ill-disciplined behaviour of the SANDF troops stationed in Burundi with the African Union, or those that form part of the Monuc forces in the DRC is anything to go by, reports of which accuse SANDF members of raping teenage girls, then the SANDF should be the last one to be allowed into educational institutions to parade itself as role models for the youth and try to recruit them to its corrupt, violent and patriarchal ranks.
What is worse than the mere presence of the Defence Force in institutions of higher learning – despicable and reminiscent of apartheid as it is – is the fact that it is offering to pay for students university fees, in full, if they join the military. We condemn Wits’ invitation for SANDF to be on campus with the weak excuse that students would have the chance to get additional bursaries, instead of offering free education in the first place. It is clear that Wits is only concerned with making a profit out of its students at all costs, even if it means sending them off to possible death in the DRC or Darfur.
The Gaza Slaughter: Europe’s Hand is Bloodied Too
Joint international anarchist communist statement on the situation in Israel/Palestine, signed by the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (Italy), Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa), Common Cause (Ontario, Canada) and Members of Anarchists Against the Wall (Israel).
Hundreds of dead and thousands of injured, sacrificed on the altar of Zionist expansionism and fundamentalism. In Europe, the foreign ministers of every EU country talk about an “exaggerated”, though “legitimate”, reaction on the part of Israel, reversing the true situation with an operation that would make the most cynical illusionist feel proud by making the aggressor, the State of Israel, appear to be the victim.
They continue to pretend that they do not remember that Gaza – one of the most densely-populated regions with around one and a half million inhabitants, about half of whom are children – has been the object of a total embargo for years, an embargo which includes medicines and basic necessities and which is supported by the entire “civilized” western world, imposed by Israel and the West as a result of the Hamas election victory, thanks to the mixed electoral system of majority and proportional representation. Just as they pretend to forget that Hamas was once financed by Israel as a way of countering the PLO.
Autonomous Action (Russia) interviews the ZACF
Answers by Michael Schmidt, International Secretary of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa) to questions put by “Situation”, newspaper of Autonomous Action (Russia), December 2008.
1. The history of worker and anarchist movement in South Africa began more than 100 years ago. Could you tell Russian comrades about the history of your struggles (about organisations from the beginning of the 20th century like International Socialist League etc)?
South Africa would have remained an agrarian backwater colony similar to Kenya if it were not for the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and of gold in 1886. These two events saw a massive influx of capital, infrastructure and of a mostly white industrial working class. The new white working class was overwhelmingly race-protectionist, what was called “White Labourite” and early trade unions were built on those lines. But a small radical tendency with strong anti-racist, anarchist and syndicalist leanings (starting with the Socialist Club of Port Elizabeth in 1900) eventually saw the establishment of a local section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1910. It was operative mostly among tramway workers in the gold-mining town of Johannesburg, the old Boer capital of Pretoria and the British-dominated port of Durban but despite its anti-racism did not manage to break out of the white ghetto. But although the IWW (SA) shut down in 1913, rank-and-file syndicalist ideas spread during the general strikes of 1913-1914, within the anti-war movement during World War I, and by 1917, the Indian Workers industrial Union (IWIU), organized among Indian indentured stevedores, hotel workers and cane-cutters in Durban, was established along IWW lines. The IWIU was backed up by the formation later in 1917 of the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), also based on the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalist, anti-racist class-struggle concept. The IWA is believed to have been the first black trade union in British-colonised Africa and by 1919 was flanked by similar syndicalist unions, the mostly “coloured” (mixed-race) Horse-Drivers Union in the diamond-mining town of Kimberley, and various unions in the port city of Cape Town. These revolutionary syndicalist unions were established by a group of white, black, coloured and Indian syndicalist militants from the Industrial Socialist League, a 1915 revolutionary splinter from the reformist socialist International Socialist League, and the IWA, IWIU and associated unions were so influential that for a period, they shifted the Transvaal section of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later renamed the African National Congress, ANC) in a syndicalist direction. By 1921, these unions formed the core of the new syndicalist-oriented Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU). Although the ICU’s constitution was also IWW-based, it was amore ideologically mixed union, and its radicalism was compromised by elements of black nationalism, Garveyism and communism. The first communist party in Africa, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was established by syndicalist militants in 1920, but like the first communist parties in countries such as Brazil and France was very libertarian and syndicalist. A rival Bolshevik CPSA – Communist International (CPSA-CI, the fore-runner of today’s South African Communist Party, SACP) was established the following year, adhering to Lenin’s 21 points and attracting many original CPSA militants. The revolutionary remainder of the CPSA renamed themselves the Communist League. The ICU peaked in 1927 with about 120,000 members. Importantly, it spread beyond South Africa to establish branches in South-West Africa (Namibia), and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). The Southern Rhodesian branch survived well into the 1950s, but the South African parent organization disintegrated in the late 1920s, bringing an end to South African anarchist-influenced syndicalism. Neighbouring Mozambique (like Angola, the Azores, and Portuguese Guinea) was a place of exile to which many Portuguese anarchists were deported in the 1890s and early 1900s. Some of them established an exile anarchist organization, the Revolutionary League, in the port capital of Lorenco Marques (Maputo) in the early 1900s. By the early 1920s, a significant syndicalist element had arisen among Mozambican workers under the influence of the powerful anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in Portugal (the Portuguese movement was proportionately larger than the Spanish movement). But the Mozambican movement apparently had no contact with the South African movement because of the language barrier, appeared not to have broken out of the white worker ghetto, and was suppressed from 1927 by the Salazar dictatorship. So ended the “glorious period” of anarchist and syndicalist organizing in South Africa. Most dissidents expelled from the Bolshevik CPSA in 1928 for their syndicalist sympathies became Trotskyists instead of returning to the anarchist and syndcalist fold. But rank-and-file syndicalism (usually called “workerism” by the communists) reappeared from time to time as a minority strain. In the 1950s, for example, a South African section of the tiny libertarian Marxist international called the Movement for a Democracy of Content (MDC) was established and played a key role in the Alexandra bus boycott. Some dissidents from the SACP who left over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary moved in an anarchist direction (one of them, Alan Lipman, is close to the ZACF). The rise to power of the National Party in 1948 took what was an already polarized racial situation and divided people further. A whole raft of repressive legislation was introduced that outlawed the Communist Party, geographically carved up the country into ethnic enclaves (the infamous Group Areas Act), racially segregated public amenities such as parks, beaches, buses and toilets, and made mixed marriages and inter-racial relationships a crime. This was an extension of segregationist laws which had been in operation since colonial times. Between 1910 and 1960, in real terms, black wages stayed static and the black working class was mostly resigned to its fate under racial capital – except for the 1949 miner’s strike, the 1950s passive resistance campaigns aimed at the pass laws (which restricted the movement of black men, and later, black women) and other apartheid legislation which culminated in the signing of the 1955 Freedom Charter, and the 1961 turn of the ANC (desperate after its attempts at legal, peaceful reform failed) towards a limited, ineffective armed struggle (an ANC propaganda tool rather than proper armed resistance) led to the arrest of Nelson Mandela and other middle-class ANC/SACP leaders.
Anarchist Communist Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and G20 Meeting
1. The current crisis is typical of the crises that regularly appear in the capitalist economy. “Overproduction”, speculation and subsequent collapse are inherent to the system. (As Alexander Berkman and others have pointed out, what capitalist economists call overproduction is actually underconsumption: capitalism prevents large numbers of people from fulfilling their needs, and so undermines its own markets.)
2. Any solution to the crisis prepared by capitalists and governments will remain a solution within capitalism. It will not be a solution for the popular classes. Indeed, as in every crisis, the workers and the poor are paying – while financial capital is being bailed out with huge sums. This is likely to continue. No change within capitalism can resolve the problems of the popular classes; still less can such a solution be expected from individual politicians, such as Barack Obama. The most such politicians can do is play a part in offering the capitalists a way out, and perhaps in throwing the working class some crumbs.
Passive Voting or Active Boycott: The True Question of Elections
This article argues that active abstention is the only strategic and tactical approach to the 2009 South African elections which is consistent with revolutionary anti-capitalist politics. It was written for a forthcoming issue of Khanya: A Journal for Activists, which will present a range of different approaches that social movements may take in response to the 2009 elections. It has been aptly noted that, on the ground, in townships and poor communities across South Africa, people’s faith has been restored in the ‘new’ ANC, that their hope has been renewed that change can come through bourgeois parliaments and political parties, be it the ANC or Cope – or the DA, IFP, ID, UDM, ACDP or PAC. For some, the response to this is that we, the extra-Alliance left, must consolidate our forces and contest elections against these parties in order to provide an alternative to their rule. But where is the alternative in so doing?
Throughout our lives under capitalism, from the earliest age, we are disempowered; we are taught not to think or act for ourselves, not to empower ourselves. We are taught to rely and be dependent on our political and economic masters; if we have problems with crime in our communities, rather than practicing the tried and tested concept of popular justice, we are encouraged to go to the police; if we have a problem with a co-worker, rather than deal with it between ourselves, we are encouraged to go to our ‘superiors’, that they can resolve affairs on our behalf – perhaps resulting in disciplinary measures being meted out against us or our working class brother or sister; if we have complaints about service delivery we are told to appeal to our political masters. Never, but never are we encouraged to even attempt to resolve things for ourselves. For capitalism to work, for it to keep us exploited, oppressed and in subjugation, it must teach us not to believe in ourselves, neither as individuals nor as a class: the survival of capitalism depends on its breaking down of the collective self-confidence of the popular classes; on its making us dependent and unable or unwilling to think and act for ourselves. Capitalism survives by making the popular classes believe that we need it, that we rely on it for our survival; that without bosses and politicians we would not be able to survive. This is as true in the economic realm as in the political.
Riots and Popular Unrest in Greece: We Didn’t Need another Martyr
As you will no doubt already know the cold-blooded killing of Alexandros-Andreas Grigoropoulos, a 15 years old high school student, by the Greek police in Athens sparked off days of ongoing riots across Greece, leading to occupations of universities and high schools, attacks on police stations and government buildings and strengthened a preexisting call for a general strike today. The Greek embassies in London and Berlin were occupied by anarchists, and there have been numerous pickets and solidarity actions abroad.
Although the country’s 10 000 strong anarchist movement is involved, and has been since the start, it is important to emphasise that this is much deeper and more broad-based than the anarchist movement, or even the Greek left – what is really significant in this struggle is that everyone who is and was thrown in the dustbin of Greek society by the government, the state and any other institutions are all out on the streets together; youth, unemployed, social “minorities”, gypsies, migrants without papers etc.
ZACF Statement of Support for APF and Kliptown Residents
We, the ZACF, support wholeheartedly the APF and Kliptown residents demands (see statement below) and their action to occupy houses which by right should be theirs. It is ironic that Kliptown, being the site where the Freedom Charter (1955) was collectively developed, is the very place where these rights are being denied, despite the fact that the ANC still claims to support and struggle for the principles of the Freedom Charter in its so called National Democratic Revolution. Perhaps we should remind them that the Freedom Charter, available on their website, states:
…There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort!
“Hands off MST (Brazil)!” say SA Social Movements
Landless Peoples Movement (LPM), Shack-Dwellers’ Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)
& Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), South Africa
Joint Statement on Workers Party (PT), Brazil, Campaign to Criminalise the
Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), Brazil
7 August 2008
To the poor of the world, to all people of good will who work for progressive change.
We, the landless and homeless people and associated activists of South Africa, decry the secret campaign by the so-called Workers’ Party (PT) government of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul to criminalise, outlaw and otherwise illegitimately harass our landless comrades of the MST.
