Worker Co-operatives, Markets and the South African State: An analysis from an Anarchist Perspective
by Oliver Nathan (ZACF)
Introduction
Worker co-operatives in post apartheid South Africa have all too often been championed by certain sections of the labour movement and some on the left as part of the solution to the ‘structural unemployment’ facing the popular classes in the current dispensation. Moreover, and often framed in purely ideological, often Proudhonist terms (in particular from the SACP and from various ex SACP members); worker co-operatives are understood as an equitable way of organizing production so that workers have control over the labour process, on the one hand, and ownership of the means of production, on the other.
- Sarmcol Workers T-shirt Printing Co-op
Certain ‘enabling’ legislation and policy such as the Co-operatives Act of 2005, the National Co-operatives Policy of 2007 and the national Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) stepping in as the ‘custodian’ of co-operative development South Africa has, at least on paper, meant that co-operatives are part of the national development agenda currently embodied by the New Growth Plan (NGP) policy framework.[1] However, if one does some research into how various co-operative development projects, including trade union, state initiated, and community initiated and worker occupation-type co-operatives have fared in the post-apartheid era, one would see the dismal performance of these co-operatives in relation to their original objectives. These are, in particular, providing sustainable employment for their members while at the same time maintaining member control and popular participation in administration and production.
This article seeks to tease out some of the pitfalls of organizing worker co-operatives trying to compete in the market and often with the ‘assistance’ of the state. The benefits and limitations of co-operatives have long been the topic of discussion amongst anarchists and other libertarian socialists. This paper draws on the ideas of Bakunin (as against Proudhon) around the question of how co-operatives relate to and are affected by the state and the market in capitalist society. It subsequently evaluates the realities faced by co-operatives operating in the market through an analysis of ‘worker control’ and ‘social ownership’ in the former Yugoslavian co-operatives and ‘degeneration of worker control’ in the Mondragon Co-operative Complex in Spain. We then move onto the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality’s state sponsored co-operative development project as the South African case study.
Organisational Dualism, Active Minority and the discussion between ‘Party’ and ‘Mass Movement’
Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro – FARJ (Brazil)
- Mikhail Bakunin
The term “organisational dualism”, as it is used in English, serves to explain the conception of organisation that we promote, or what has classically been called the discussion between “party and mass movement”. In short, our especifista tradition has its roots in (Mikhail) Bakunin, (Errico) Malatesta, Dielo Truda (Workers Cause), Federación Anarquista Uruguaya – FAU (Anarchist Federation of Uruguay) and other militants/organisations that have defended this distinction between levels of organisation. That is, a broad level that we call the “social level”, composed of popular movements, and that which we call the “political level”, composed of anarchist militants that are grouped around a defined political and ideological basis.
This model is based on a few positions: that popular movements cannot be confined to a defined ideological camp – and, in this respect, we distinguish ourselves from the anarcho-syndicalists, for example – because they should organise themselves around needs (land, shelter, jobs, etc.), grouping together large sectors of the people. This is the social level or the mass movement, as it has been called historically. The model also contends that, to work in movements, it is not enough to be dissolved – or inserted – in them, even while recognising ourselves as anarchists. It is necessary that we be organised, constituting a significant social force that will facilitate in the promotion of our programme and also in defence against attacks from adversaries that have other programmes. However, one must bear in mind that we do not promote participation in one or other level; anarchists are also workers and are part of this broad group that we call the exploited classes and, therefore, they organise themselves, as a class, in the social movements. Even so, as this level of organisation has its limitations, the anarchists also organise themselves on the political level, as anarchists, as a way to articulate their work and ideas.
What Anarchism and Syndicalism offer the South African Left
Lucien van der Walt
The 21st century is a time of both despair and hope: despair at the evils of contemporary society, hope that a new world is possible.
The ideas of the broad anarchist tradition can contribute greatly to this new world. They are integrally tied to an inspiring body of practice in working class, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and civil rights struggles, back to the 1860s. And they are relevant to South Africa today.
Aims
Anarchism’s basic aim is the most complete realisation of a revolutionary democratic vision, abolishing hierarchy and exploitation:
- ending social and economic inequality, including by race, nation and gender, to create a society based on free, cooperating individuals;
- revolutionary reconstruction of the family as a site of freedom and cooperation;
- participatory-democratic control of the means of production, coercion and administration, through multi-tendency worker/ community councils, not corporations and states; and,
- self-management at work, global economic participatory planning, and distribution on the basis of need, not markets.
Without bosses: the Process of Recovering Companies by their Workers in Argentina, 2001-2009
by Red Libertaria de Buenos Aires *
Introduction
From late 2001 and the beginning of 2002, sectors of the Argentine working class staged an extraordinary experience of struggle. The occupation of companies and the commencing of production without bosses. In the context of an economic crisis, high levels of unemployment, bankruptcy of companies and massive retrenchments, thousands of workers organised themselves to keep their jobs.
Economic and Political Crisis
Between 1997 and 2001 there was a severe economic crisis in Argentina that impacted heavily on the bloc in power. This crisis was surmounted by a popular rebellion on the 19th and 20th of December that, facing a state of siege, forced the resignation of President Fernando De la Rúa and the opening of a process of leaderlessness in the executive branch of the Republic [1], and an advancement of popular struggle. This rebellion put an end to a series of neoliberal governments in the country, while there was a breakthrough in popular struggle: neighborhood assemblies, movements of unemployed workers and the recovery of factories and businesses by workers.
Picking Up the Slack in Waste Collection and Ecological Protection: the Struggle of Recyclable Waste Pickers in Uruguay and Brazil
by Jonathan Payn (ZACF)
Across South America there is a growing movement – assuming different forms and characteristics, but with similar origins, demands and objectives – that, despite it being located at a strategically important intersection between two critical social issues – class struggle and ecology – seems to me to have received little attention in South African academic and activist circles. And this is true despite the fact that the social and economic conditions that gave rise to this movement prevail in South Africa, as they did – and continue to – in many South American countries. Perhaps this is due to the fact that this movement concerns people largely marginalised by industrial society and so-called ‘brown’ ecological issues – such as the pollution and contamination of rivers and dams surrounding poor communities, most acutely effecting the workers and poor – as opposed to the much more sanitary ‘green’ ecological issues – such as conservation and animal welfare – often associated, in South Africa at least, with liberal white activists from the middle and upper classes [1].
This is the movement of the catadores, as they are known in Brazil, and clasificadores in Uruguay; the recyclable waste pickers and sorters who, similarly to South Africa, constitute a growing informal sector in the industrial production cycle. This includes all people – not formally employed by public or private waste management services – who collect, transport, classify and sell recyclable waste for a living – or ‘work with scrap’ – thus “reducing demand for natural resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions” [2]. A category of work which, according to the World Bank, is performed by 15 million people globally – or one percent of the world population [3] – and has become increasingly common in South Africa in recent years.
Build a Better Workers’ Movement: learning from South Africa’s 2010 mass strike
Lucien van der Walt and Ian Bekker
The biggest single strike since the 1994 parliamentary transition in South Africa showed the unions’ power. It won some wage gains, but it threw away some precious opportunities. We need to celebrate the strike, while learning some lessons:
- the need for more union democracy
- the need to use strikes to link workers and communities
- the need for working class autonomy
- the need to act outside and against the state
- the need to review our positions: against the Tripartite Alliance, for anarcho-syndicalism
Zabalaza 12 Editorial
This issue of Zabalaza (no. 12) comes out in a period characterised by significant political changes and transitions. On the international terrain, the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, which began in late 2010 but have continued into recent months, have been a key topic of discussion – in both the mainstream media and in activist circles. There has been a tendency for these to be portrayed in the media simply as “struggles for democracy”. Likewise, the media often reproduce an incomplete version of events – depicting the uprisings as “coming out of nowhere”. In fact, in many cases the demands of the masses have raised far more profound questions about the basic distribution of both wealth and power in society, and are the culmination of struggles that go back some ten years, by both the masses and organised labour, around high unemployment, rapidly rising food prices, poor living conditions, open corruption by the ruling elites, and a lack of basic political freedoms (produced in part by the introduction of neoliberal reforms). In this issue we focus attention on the Egyptian case, looking specifically at the possibilities the situation holds for the future.
Zabalaza #12 (July 2011)
Contents:
- Editorial – Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front
Southern Africa
- Take Back What’s Yours: the Mine-Line Occupation –Shawn Hattingh (ZACF)
- Andries Tatane: Murdered by the Ruling Classes – Shawn Hattingh (ZACF)
- Build a Better Workers’ Movement: Learning from South Africa’s 2010 Mass Strike – Lucien van der Walt and Ian Bekker
Zabalaza 11 Editorial
Zabalaza 11 has a distinct local flavour to it as compared to our previous issue. This is partly as a result of South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Soccer World Cup, which has dominated the socio-political landscape this last year. The excessive money spent by the state on preparations for the event (before and during) highlighted, once again, a complete disregard for the plight of the working poor and impoverished domestically and the stark reality of its anti-poor, pro-rich policies. Despite the tournament being ‘sold’ to the public as an economic opportunity not only for South Africans, but Africa as a whole, the major beneficiaries have been a small band of domestic and global economic and political elite.
Zabalaza 11 also focuses attention on the repression suffered by social movements based amongst some of the poorest in South Africa. In response to these attacks and subsequent arrests, the ZACF worked closely with the Poor People’s Alliance to create networks and actions of solidarity with those organisations.
Social movements have also gained and suffered at the hands of the South African judicial system recently. We focus attention on constitutional law and offer both a critique of the use of the state’s legal system by social movements as well as a way forward for embattled movements locally.
At the End of the Baton of South African Pretensions
by Warren McGregor (ZACF)
Post-1994 South Africa is usually seen and promoted as a country of moral and political exceptionalism. The spawn of negotiations between the bourgeois nationalist and voluntarily neo-liberal African National Congress (ANC) under the guidance of Nelson Mandela and the hierarchy of the vicious apartheid state, post-apartheid South Africa was to provide a shining example of reconciliation and socio-economic progress. During a few dark days in May 2010, these claims were finally and mercilessly put to rest. So it seems and has been for those who survive in and who are social activists at the layer of society most subject to the oppressive nature of the state and capital: the working class and poor. The Landless People’s Movement, a shack and rural township dwellers organisation based in the Gauteng province, suffered attacks at the hands of their fellow community members. These attacks were designed by local community members to harass and expel prominent local activists and to destabilise the organisation and its constructive community work. Most of the LPM’s activism is directed against the state and its representatives at a local and municipal level, and thus an attack on activists can be seen to benefit a larger state desire of quietening social movements throughout the country. Lack of initial police intervention to prevent further attacks on the night of the attacks, and the subsequent arrest of prominent community activists speak to this desire.
The attacks on social movements and activists should be viewed within a socio-economic context that sees South Africa as one of the most unequal societies on the planet (according to its Gini coefficient – the income inequality indicator, literally the gap between the rich and poor). This inequality persists, bred during the last century and exacerbated by the ANC government’s grasping at neo-liberalism. Added to this cauldron of inequality was the morally criminal and immense spending by the state in hosting the recent 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup which revealed what the staging of the event was designed as and who it ultimately will benefits - a capitalist and corporate state project for the benefits of the very few (domestically and globally).
Electricity Crisis in Protea South
by Lekhetho Mtetwa (ZACF)
It was on Sunday morning, the 28th of April 2010 when people from the bond houses took out illegal connections in Protea South. They were returning from a funeral when they made these disconnections by removing electricity wires.
The person who brought them to my yard, framing me as the one in charge of illegal connections, is a taxi owner named Nkosi. He kept on saying illegal connection meetings are held in my yard, as he often saw people gathered outside my yard connecting. The question is: do I have the powers to stop all people living in the informal settlement from connecting electricity? No! I don’t have any power to stop them. Only Eskom could maybe do that with the help of the state.
I was also threatened that if the main electricity box is burnt, they’ll also burn my shack. On that night people wanted to burn the main box and I contacted the Landless Peoples’ Movement (LPM) comrades to check what was happening outside our shacks. There we found angry community members planning to wake the rest of the people of the informal settlement to go and burn the box. We tried our best to stop them from burning the box and they all listened, although they were not satisfied.
Conned by the Courts: How Working Class Movements are diverted from Struggle
by Sian Byrne, Komnas Poriazis and James Pendlebury
Despite the fact that organisations of workers and the poor are often quick to recognise and point out the massive injustices they face at the hands of the so-called organs of “justice”, some of these very same movements are looking to the courts – those very same organs of “justice” – for a solution to their problems. This has gone on for many years – but in 2009 the courtroom strategy came to a climax, with two key cases decided in the Constitutional Court (Concourt). One of these cases was a complete defeat for the social movements, the other a partial victory. In Mazibuko versus City of Johannesburg, the Concourt ruled that prepaid water meters (as installed in Phiri, Soweto) are entirely legal – meaning in practice that poor people are compelled to cut off their own water, the source of life itself, when they cannot pay for it. In Abahlali baseMjondolo versus KwaZulu-Natal, on the other hand, the court overruled a law that made it easier for the provincial government to evict people from their homes – thus apparently securing the poor against yet another peril. And this victory, whatever it meant in real life, infuriated the state: indeed, it may be one reason why politicians and cops turned to murder as a response to the Abahlali shack-dwellers’ movement.
But even if Abahlali have won something in the courts, they and other social movements would do well to reflect on how far such victories can really go. And the Phiri case should ring alarm bells. The social movements expected to win that case, and they did win earlier on, in the High Court (HC). But the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) partly reversed this apparent victory, after which the Concourt went on to turn it into a complete defeat. This is the very same Constitutional Court that has been hailed as the most progressive branch of the South African legal system! How could the social movements come to have such illusions in the courts and the law? What lessons can we learn for future struggles?
Death and the Mielieboer: The Eugène Terre’Blanche Murder and Poor-White Canon-fodder in South Africa
by Michael Schmidt
The Death of the AWB
Sixteen years ago, as impoverished, browbeaten South Africans of all races were herded towards the slaughterhouse mass betrayal of their liberation dream by the African National Congress (ANC) and their midwives the National Party (NP), in the first multiracial elections aimed at propping up the teetering neo-liberal state, armed groups of the 70,000-strong far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement (Afrikaner Weerstands Beweeging, AWB) played their last desperate hands. These outriders of an ever-receding dream of ruling their own conservative white God-fearing state on the African highveld, the AWB embraced its Götterdämmerung.
COSATU’s Response to the Crisis: an Anarcho-Syndicalist Assessment and Alternative
by Lucien van der Walt
South African unions, centred on the 2 million-strong Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), have consistently articulated a policy vision that breaks with crude neo-liberalism. This is remarkable – but is it enough? Just how viable and desirable is this vision, particularly as the neo-liberal era lurches into a serious slump? And is there an alternative?
This question is posed particularly acutely by the hammer blows of the global recession from 2007. Despite the rather predicable pretence that South Africa is unaffected (notably by Trevor Manuel), the country is far from immune.
2009 saw world economic growth fall to just over 1 percent, trade growth to just over 2 percent, with 50 million job losses worldwide (2 million in SA) and 200 million plunged into the direst poverty. In South Africa, manufacturing shrunk by 22,1 percent in the first quarter of 2009, mining by 32,8 percent, and agriculture by 2,9. The previous year saw a 75 percent increase in business failures. From January to September 2009, a staggering 770,000 jobs were lost.[1] This is, of course, the exactly opposite of the Zuma ANC’s promise to quickly create a half-a-million jobs.
Sharpening the Pangas?: Understanding and Preventing Future Pogroms
by Michael Schmidt
The 2008 Pogroms shattered the illusion among many Leftists – despite numerous early warning signs – that South Africa’s poor was an essentially undifferentiated class of the righteously angry oppressed. The killing spree left 62 people dead, 670 wounded, more than 100,000 displaced and 35,000 languishing in displacee camps. Although most of the dead were foreigners, 21 were South Africans – demonstrating that all of the victims were seen as “outsiders” in one way or another by those wielding the panga’s [1] (machetes). Some of the killers used the unrest as an excuse to settle personal scores; some were driven by ethnic hatred, others by calculated greed. A year ago, in September 2009, I travelled to four townships around Gauteng, three of which had seen pogroms in 2008 (Atteridgeville, Tembisa and Jeppestown) and one of which had not (Soweto), speaking to community activists and to survivors of the 2008 attacks to try and take the temperature at the grassroots regarding “outsiders,” in other words, had the threat of killings receded? After all, for the first week of the 2008 killings, the authorities sat back and cynically watched the damage being done, assessing, perhaps, xenophobia’s usefulness in future as a divide-and-rule strategy. The bad news is the ugly fact that many in our townships believe another pogrom is being planned for sometime after the World Cup, now that the world’s eyes are turned elsewhere. So how did the original Pogroms flourish – and how can they be stopped in future?
Riding to Work on Empty Promises
by Jonathan Payn (ZACF)
Ever since former transport minister Jeff Radebe announced that the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit system prototype would be implemented in time for the 2009 Fifa Confederations Cup hosted in South Africa, we have been hearing a lot about Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Needless to say the deadline was missed, but the hype continued up to the launch in August 2009 and far beyond.
The promise of safe, reliable and affordable public transport comes as welcome news for the majority of working class and poor South Africans and immigrants to the country. The segregated town planning left behind by the system of racialised capitalism known as apartheid has meant that the majority of the population – also those who can least afford it – are often the ones who have the furthest to travel to work, schools, hospitals and so on. The burden of having to walk long distances to one’s destination or to a taxi route is all the more difficult for pregnant women, disabled people and the elderly. The lack of affordable public transport often means that, because there are not enough schools in poor communities, children either have to walk long distances to school, or maybe just don’t go regularly if their parents cannot afford the transport – not to mention the cost of school uniforms, books, stationery and school fees. Unemployed workers cannot afford the transport necessary to go out and look for work, and many workers must spend what little savings they may have – or be forced to borrow from ruthless loan-sharks – in order to pay for the transport needed to go back and forth to the Department of Labour trying in vain to get their Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) paid out. People who suffer from treatable diseases and injuries die because they cannot afford the transport needed to take them to a hospital or clinic to get treatment, and the public ambulance system is insufficient.
Short-Changed: Egyptian Struggle for Democracy founders on Obama’s stinginess
by Michael Schmidt
US President Barack Obama’s military regime (for as commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military machine, his is not merely a mild “administration”), has proven once again that when it comes to American imperialism’s dealing with the darker majority of humanity, having a black man in the Oval Office simply doesn’t matter.
As we argued in the last edition of Zabalaza, the widespread myth that Obama’s skin-colour automatically made him a better man was a deeply racist argument that would be proven to be threadbare as soon as Obama ordered the invasion of his first “country of colour” – and this happened in under a month of his inauguration when he authorised sending 17,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.
But American imperialism is not just about the stick of armed intervention or enforced regime-change: we must not forget the carrot of aid, aid that can be temptingly held out, and then withdrawn if the recipient nation is not suitably compliant.
Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world, and, along with Nigeria and South Africa, one of the most economically and militarily powerful states in Africa, has been the largest recipient of US aid after Israel since it signed a peace accord with Israel in 1979 – sometimes topping US$2 billion/year, US$1.3 billion of that in military aid and between US$100 million to US$250 million in economic aid. Ironically, under President George W Bush, the Americans gave US$45 million to “good governance” and “democratisation” programmes, with a substantial chunk of that bypassing the state and going directly to civil society organisations. But over the past year, Washington has slashed this civil society aid to Egypt by more than half, down to US$20 million.
Massacre as a Tool of the African State
by Michael Schmidt
As Zabalaza goes to press, the West African country of Guinea is preparing to go to the polls in the second round run-off of its first democratic presidential elections ever (the first round was held in June), half a century after its ‘independence’ from France. Its first president, former postal worker Ahmed Sékou Touré, drew heavily from Marxist-Leninism in building a one-party state and ruling with an iron fist until his death 27 years later in 1984, with the blood of an estimated 500,000 people on his hands. He was followed by Lansana Conté who likewise ran an authoritarian military regime until his death in 2008. But is the dawn of bourgeois democracy a guarantee to the Guinean popular classes that they shall be freed from five decades of oppression and exploitation? I argue that when both privateering states such as Guinea that have plundered their citizens and their neighbours, and conventional ‘contractual states,’ have resorted to massacre to ensure the dominance of their parasitic elites, the only solution is a class-line, anti-nationalist social revolution.
It was a black day in the Guinean capital Conakry on Monday 28 September 2009, when troops loyal to junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara opened fire on a rally of pro-democracy activists, killing an estimated 157 people. Camara had seized power in December 2008, just 21 months after I warned in the mainstream South African press that a coup was imminent in Guinea. I’d based my prediction on the observations of different interest groups, including the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent organisation used by the United Nations as a bellwether, which had noted as far back as 2004 that there were isolated uprisings in Guinea, directly related to the collapse of state services. The ICG stated in early 2007 that while the ‘fragile but successful peace processes in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia have greatly diminished the external threats to the stability of Guinea … its internal instability remains a source of immediate concern for the whole region as Guinea is at risk of becoming West Africa’s next failed state.’
Chile and Haiti after the earthquakes: so different yet so similar…
by José Antonio Gutiérrez D.
I.
Chile has again been hit by an earthquake of apocalyptic magnitude, like in the earthquakes of 1938, 1960 and 1985. With the precision of a Swiss watch, the centre and south of the country is hit every 25 years by a seismic movement that puts the country in a state of deep shock. The earthquake we saw on 27 February was one of the strongest recorded in history – 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale, 9 on the Mercalli scale.
The anguish of not knowing anything about our loved ones, of not being able to communicate with them, has followed the destruction, the isolation and death or disappearance of a great many people. Impotence is a shadow hanging over the heart. The death toll is now at about 700 – some are saying that they expect a final figure of about 2,000 when we eventually get the full picture of the devastation. Nothing is known yet about many in the affected provinces in the regions of Maule and Bío Bío. When people were still talking of about 300 killed, we learnt that the Constitución tsunami had swallowed up around 350 inhabitants, doubling the death toll. And we now know there were other places hit by tsunamis, though the extent of the damage is still unknown.
Obama’s Imperial War: An Anarchist Response
by Wayne Price (NEFAC, USA)
The expansion of the United States’ (US) attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan is not due to the personal qualities of Obama, but to the social system he serves: the national state and the capitalist economy. The nature of the situation guarantees that the system will act irrationally. Anarchists should participate in building a broad movement against the war, while raising our political programme.
In discussing President Obama’s expansion of the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is important not to focus on Obama as a personality, but on the social system to which he is committed, specifically to the war-waging capitalist national state. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne declared during World War I. It is what the national state is for, what it does, and why it still exists, despite the real trends toward international unity and worldwide coordination. In an age of nuclear bombs, the human race will not be safe until we abolish these states (especially the big, imperial ones such as those of North America, Western Europe and Japan) and replace them with a federation of self-managing associations of working people.
After 3 months of consultations and deliberation, President Obama announced that he is going to do what he had promised to do during his campaign for the presidency — namely to expand the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan. This may not have been inevitable (since he broke many of his campaign promises already, such as ending overseas prisons, openness in government, ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of silence on homosexuality in the military, a health care plan which covers everyone, an economic plan for working people, etc.). But it was probable.
Anarchism vs. Liberalism: whose powers are “separate”?
by James Pendlebury and Sian Byrne (ZACF)
In liberal political theory – a favoured ideology of many capitalist states – an important principle is that the functions of government are divided into three “spheres” or “branches”:
- The legislature (national and provincial parliaments, local councils) makes the laws;
- the executive (ministers, officials, cops and soldiers, who report to the president or premier) carries out the laws;
- the judiciary (courts) decides what the laws mean when there is some dispute.
In states with written constitutions (including the United States, South Africa and many others) an important task of the courts is to decide whether laws passed by parliament (the legislature), or actions taken by the executive, are allowed by the constitution. (Some liberal states, such as Britain, do not have written constitutions; there the power of the courts is officially more limited.)
A key principle of the ideology of liberalism is “the separation of powers”. Each of the three branches, the liberals tell us, is entitled to autonomous responsibility for certain functions that do not overlap, or cannot be interfered with by the other spheres. The reason for this, it is argued, is that the people who make the laws shouldn’t be the same as those who interpret them or those who enforce them, and so on. No single person or group should have all the power. In this way, liberals hope to limit the powers of the state, which they recognise as a threat to freedom.
The Industrial and Social Foundations of Syndicalism
This is an extract of a speech called “(De)constructing Counter-power” given at five universities in Canada in March 2010 by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Counter-Power, a challenging new two-volume study of anarchist theory, tactics, strategy and history. The first, theoretical volume, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), has received largely constructive reviews from the global activist, academic and labour press (see http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/). Schmidt was kindly hosted by the Wilfrid Laurier University, the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, McMaster University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Toronto. His talks were warmly acclaimed – not without comradely criticism – and his audiences consisted in part of anarchist-communists of ZACF sister organisations Common Cause (Ontario, Canada), the Union Comuniste Libertaire (Quebec, Canada) and the North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists (USA), plus platformists Juventud Libertaria (Mexico), libertarian Marxists such as Gramsci is Dead author Richard Day, members of the hardline Communist Party of Canada and of the (Trotskyist) International Bolshevik Tendency.
Ever since the revolutionary vision that is anarchism gained a foothold in the imagination of the popular classes with the rise of syndicalism within the ranks of the trade unions affiliated to the First International in about 1868, it has provided the most devastating and comprehensive critique of capitalism, landlordism, the state and of unequal social power relations in general, whether gender-based or rooted in racism, colonialism or other forms. In their place it has offered a practical set of tools whereby the oppressed of the world can challenge the dominance of the tiny, heavily armed elites that exploit them. As such, anarchism and syndicalism – together what we have termed in Counter-Power Volume 1, Black Flame, “the broad anarchist tradition” – was not only the most implacable enemy of the rise of the industrialists and landed gentry who were the ruling class antagonists in the state/capitalist modernisation project in most countries, but it unalterably shaped class struggle in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, producing several key effects that we today presume to be fundamental aspects of civilised society.
Zabalaza #10 (April 2009)
- Click above to download the PDF
Contents:
Southern Africa
- Editorial by Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF)
- Unite Against the Minority, Then Unite Against the Majority? (Zambia) by Malele D. Phirii, Zambia
- The Jacob Zuma Cargo Cult and the “Implosion” of Alliance Politics (South Africa) by Michael Schmidt (ZACF)
- A Bitter Taste to the Sugarcane (Swaziland)
by Michael Schmidt (ZACF)
- Four Tools for Community Control – Part I: “Mutual Aid” (Southern Africa) by Steffi (ZACF)
- Zimbabwe’s Party-Political Stitch-Up – How the Zanu-PF/MDC Deal Ignored Civil Society by Jonathan P. (ZACF)
Africa
- The Anarchist Movement in North Africa: 1877 – 1951 by Michael Schmidt (ZACF) & Lucien van der Walt
- Socialists and Gaullists Haunted by the Ghosts of Genocide (Rwanda) by Guillaume Davranche (Alternative Libertaire), France
International
- Jalan Journal: A New Asian Anarchist Voice is Born with introduction by Michael Schmidt (ZACF)
- 30th Congress of the National Confederation of Labour (France) by CNT-F
- Hamas, the Left and Liberation in Palestine by Sevinc (Workers’ Solidarity Movement), Ireland
- Interview with Ilan Shalif from Anarchists Against the Wall – Israel/Palestine
- A Hot Winter in Greece by Steffi (ZACF)
- Something Smells Different in Cuba by Movimiento Libertario Cubano, with introduction by Michael Schmidt (ZACF)
- Imperialism, China and Russia by Pier Francesco Zarcone (Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici), Italy
- Against Political Terror in Russia, We Mobilise! by the Internatioal Secretary, Alternative Libertaire, France/ Belgium
- Change We Need: An Anarchist Perspective on the 2008 US Election by North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC), USA, with introduction by Michael Schmidt (ZACF)
Theory
- Tangled Threads of Revolution: Reflections on Anarchist Communists: A Question of Class by James Pendlebury (ZACF)
Zabalaza #11 (October 2010)
- Click above to download the PDF
Contents:
- Editorial – by the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front
South Africa:
- At the End of the Baton of South African Pretentions – Warren McGregor (ZACF)
- Electricity Crisis in Protea South – Lekhetho Mtetwa (ZACF)
- Conned by the Courts – Sian Byrne, James Pendlebury (ZACF), Komnas Poziaris
- Death and the Mielieboer – Michael Schmidt
- COSATU’s Response to the Crisis: an Anarcho-Syndicalist Assessment and Alternative – Lucien van der Walt
- Sharpening the Pangas?: Understanding and Preventing future Pogroms – Michael Schmidt
- Riding to Work on Empty Promises – Jonathan P. (ZACF)
