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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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