Letter to the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)

The ongoing crisis in the Socialist Workers’ Party – precipitated by the handling of rape allegations against a senior party member – has raised fundamental questions about democracy, power and sexism in the organisations and culture of the left. We believe that the way in which the central committee of the SWP has handled the situation, and its lack of a reasonable response to the legitimate protests voiced by many of its own members, as well as others on the left, point to issues that cannot simply be swept under the rug.

We have all previously participated in events and initiatives promoted by the SWP, including the annual Marxism festival, or written for its publications. We continue to value the commitment and work of many SWP members as trades unionists, activists and comrades. Nonetheless, we can no longer in good conscience participate in SWP publications and platforms until the party recognises and seriously addresses the legitimate criticisms of its handling of this case and the ensuing crisis.

Greg Albo, Abbie Bakan, Jairus Banaji, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Phil Gasper, Peter Hallward, Adam Hanieh, Owen Hatherley, Paul Kellogg, Brian Kelly, Conor Kostick, Robert Knox, Thomas Marois, David McNally, Adam Morton, James Murphy, Kevin Murphy, Ilan Pappé, Charles Post, Nina Power, Gregory Schwartz, Peter Thomas, Alberto Toscano, Thomas Walpole, Jeffery Webber, Rafeef Ziadah

2011 is not 1968: an open letter from Egypt

As Egyptians trickle into Tahrir to commemorate the 2011 revolution, hijacked by the army, it becomes ever more important to listen to the unheard voices. 

Philip Rizik, Roar Magazine

On the morning of January 25, 2014 as people trickle into Tahrir Square, it is once again important to realize where we point our gaze to understand a bit of what is taking place in Egypt. A discourse of terror has scared many into supporting with blind faith a military leader who claims to be able to re-instate the good old days of stability. This discourse of fear also has the opposite effect and across the population there are those who are not falling for the terror trap.

Queer & Trans Art-iculations

A New Direction in the Trajectory of the Workers Movement

Benjamin Fogel, The Con

In January 1973, dockworkers in Durban embarked on a wave of wildcat strikes against low wages. In total, some 61 000 workers took part.

What became known as the “Durban Moment” not only broke the industrial relations framework that had been established after black trade unions had been smashed by the apartheid state in the 50s and 60s, but also led to the rebirth of the black trade union movement, which saw the establishment of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

Caribbean Philosophical Association: Letter from the Present

Happy New Year!

As we enter the eleventh year of the CPA’s existence, there is much to celebrate.

In a period that Doug Ficek described perfectly in Puerto Rico as one of profound practical and theoretical misanthropy or one of an excessively skeptical attitude toward transformative ideas and projects, CPA through the creative and loving labor of a small and now growing community burst onto the scene, forging a refuge, a counter, an alternative.

Revisiting Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Conversation with Partha Chatterjee

I am a homosexual, mum

Binyavanga Wainaina, Africa is a Country

(A lost chapter from One Day I Will Write About This Place)

11 July, 2000.

This is not the right version of events.

Hey mum. I was putting my head on her shoulder, that last afternoon before she died. She was lying on her hospital bed. Kenyatta. Intensive Care. Critical Care. There. Because this time I will not be away in South Africa, fucking things up in that chaotic way of mine. I will arrive on time, and be there when she dies. My heart arrives on time. I am holding my dying mother’s hand. I am lifting her hand. Her hand will be swollen with diabetes. Her organs are failing. Hey mum. Ooooh. My mind sighs. My heart! I am whispering in her ear. She is awake, listening, soft calm loving, with my head right inside in her breathspace. She is so big – my mother, in this world, near the next world, each breath slow, but steady, as it should be. Inhale. She can carry everything. I will whisper, louder, in my minds-breath. To hers. She will listen, even if she doesn’t hear. Can she?

Nahum Dimitri Chandler: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

I just enriched my bookshelf with a text that will no doubt be required reading.

- Lewis Gordon

Agrarian Summer School, Harare, Zimbabwe (2014)

AGRARIAN SUMMER SCHOOL 2014 (HARARE, ZIMBABWE) PROGRAMME by TigersEye99

Will The Centre Hold: Julius Malema and the EFF Take A Sho’t Left

Kwanele Sosibo, The Con

In South Africa’s platinum belt, life and politics are as hard as the earth on which they are contested: natural resources and poverty are plentiful, and support for the ruling ANC is in short supply following the brutal events at Marikana. In this article, first published in the current issue of the Chimurenga Chronic, Kwanele Sosibo revisits the launch of the Economic Freedom Fighters and confronts the opportunistic benevolence, the rhetoric of revival and the promise of renewal in the land of ‘permanently incomplete’.

Racial solidarity not cause of ANC success

by Pallo Jordon, Business Day

SINCE 1994, the political party that has studiedly shunned negative campaigning and ad hominem attacks is the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC’s election campaigns have all been based on its political record and as a party in the government.

Yet one regularly encounters opinions that the ANC’s landslide majorities are not the function of rational voter choice but rather an expression of racial solidarity among Africans. The unpronounced, yet implicit, suggestion is that while white, coloured and Indian voters make rational choices, African voters are motivated by racial considerations that have little or nothing to do with reason.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 'Critical Fanonism'

127918451 Critical Fanonism PDF by Marcelo Sanhueza

C.L.R. James in Conversation with Stuart Hall

Nomboniso Gasa interviewed by Azania Mosaka (audio)

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus by TigersEye99

A Bogus Concept

Jan Breman, New Left Review

Up till the 1970s, the notion that the Rest would follow in the footsteps of the West was intrinsic to the dominant development paradigm. [1] Through industrialization and urbanization, the ‘underdeveloped world’ would replicate the experience of the advanced economies in the nineteenth century: growing employment in manufacturing, rising living standards, mass consumption. If there were not, as yet, many industrial jobs available for the land-poor migrants who began flocking to the cities of Latin America, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, where land reform had been negligible, the consensus was that urban life itself would help them in their search for employment. For the time being they had to make do with whatever low-paid work was accessible to them, as waged hands or self-employed, living in makeshift shelters on the city outskirts or on vacant land. The burgeoning informal sector was at first seen as a zone of transition, a buffer that would disappear as labour was absorbed by the dynamics of industrialization into a growing formal economy. This upward mobility turned out to be a rare occurrence, however, and millions remained stuck in the informal economy that they had helped to build, or drifting back and forth between the slums of the urban periphery and the impoverished rural hinterland, forming a vast stratum of precarious labour.

"There is Marikana everyday in South Africa" - an interview with Abahlali baseMjondolo

Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies & Women's Voices in the 1950s

Nomboniso Gasa: Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women's Voices by TigersEye99

The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu

A window from the house in which Chris Hani lived as a child

Trailer for 'Concerning Violence'

Critical Philosophies of Race: Charles Mills & Sally Kitch at WITS

Adiós Nelson Mandela

Por Lewis Gordon

(Traducción del documento anterior "Farewell" por Alejandro de Oto)

Junto con millones, quizá miles de millones, enciendo una vela el cinco de diciembre de 2013 en memoria de  Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Madiba o Tata, como cariñosamente se lo nombra en la lengua Xhosa de su tierra natal, Azania, conocida ahora a través de su nombre colonial y del postapartheid, Sudáfrica.

La luz de la vela tiene muchos significados en distintas sociedades. En tanto luz, ella significa revelar un sendero para el nuevo viaje. Para los vivos, brilla sobre nosotros una forma de conexión continua, revelándonos algo en lo que reflejarnos. Y para los profundamente religiosos, como algo que debe dejarse a su propio curso, nos recuerda, como en la oración del luto del Judaísmo, el Kaddish, que todo queda en última instancia en manos de Dios.

Eusébio: “Portugal’s best player ever was an African from Mozambique”

by Percy Zvomuya, The Con

On the day that Mozambique-born football legend Eusébio set forth for the other world, it’s likely a sieve-like dingy rowed from north Africa sardine-packed with African immigrants headed for Europe.

The fate of thousands of African migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean is varied but uniformly bleak. Some, never making it to European shores, drown – up to 20 000 have died in the last two decades; others end up in detention centres in Europe to be scrubbed with detergents to cleanse “scum” off their black backs.

Appeal for Support from the Frantz Fanon Centre in Turin

Dear friends and colleagues,

The Frantz Fanon Centre was opened in spring 1996 and carried on its activities in the framework of the Italian National Health Service. From 2002 on we cooperated with the Department of Mental Health, offering free consultation and treatment to immigrants and their families affected by psychological vulnerability, mental illness, or at risk of social drift. We had four rooms in which to receive patients.

One year ago, on January 15 2013 - for a choice due to political interferences - the public health unit where we were lodged decided to put an end to the experience. Although the service – which we created according to an innovative methodology that quickly configured a groundbreaking practice in Italy – has been outsourced to a private society, none of the 250 patients we were attending has received a treatment so far. We needed to keep on attending their – often urgent – psychological needs, but with no place where to do it.

Caribbean Philosophical Association January 2014 newsletter

Nelson Mandela: In Memoriam

Words by Lewis Gordon and Alejandro de Oto.

If the ANC's rivals are all right, what's left?

William Gumede, Mail & Guardian

Twenty years since the founding of South Africa's democracy, the country's existing party political system, the parties and their leaders appear unable to fulfil the needs of the majority of voters.

The increasing disconnection between the voters and parties undermines the accountability of the country's democratic system and diminishes the quality of its democracy.

It is rather obvious that any political party serious about winning an election in South Africa must grab a significant slice of the black vote.

If it was only so simple.

Interview with Premesh Lalu on Nelson Mandela

World Bulletin / Ibrahim Tigli and Jalal Rayi - Cape Town

Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president who steered his nation out of apartheid, passed away on December 6 at the age of 95.

Premesh Lalu, who studies social history and the apartheid regime, has replied to the questions of World Bulletin about Nelson Mandela and South Africa's past and future.

Lalu is the director of the Centre for Humanities Research (University of the Western Cape) and chair of the Handspring Trust.