Praxis & the Work of Building Counter-Power

Richard Pithouse

In the ‘70s and ‘80s the idea of praxis was often taken seriously in the process of building the organisations, movements and unions that undertook the work of developing the counter-power of the oppressed. Praxis was often understood as more than just the idea that effective political work required reflection on action, and action guided by reflection. It was also an idea with democratic and ethical dimensions.

Shifting the Ground of Radical Reason

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

For some time now much of the left has either been alienated from actually existing popular mobilisation or unable to make and sustain productive connections with it. But the emergence of new forces to the left of the ANC, forces with money, a national reach, easy access to the media and, in the case of NUMSA, an established and organised membership, is generating fresh optimism.

SACP helped push Numsa’s expulsion from Cosatu

Steven Friedman, Business Day

THERE was a time when the South African Communist Party (SACP) terrified supporters of a market economy. Today, it is more likely to frighten the left.

By expelling the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu’s) central executive committee seems to have slapped the African National Congress (ANC) in the face: it ignored the appeal by its task team, led by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, for unity.

Artistic ‘Freedom’ in the 80s and Now

Jane Duncan, The Con

The 1980s was a heady time in South Africa’s cultural history. Apartheid repression was at its height, but so was mass resistance. The independent label Shifty Records brought together a courageous, outspoken and rebellious group of artists who captured in their music the despair and hope of that turbulent period. It is this legacy that is being celebrated in Shifty September, and rightly so, as the label gave South Africa some of the most important contemporary local music ever made.

Comrades at war: the decline and fall of the Socialist Workers Party

Edward Platt, The New Statesmen

The supporters of the Socialist Workers Party who gathered in Trafalgar Square on a bright sunny day at the end of March could not agree how to define the relationship between their organisation and the rally taking place around them. One seller of the weekly Socialist Worker, who was down from Sheffield for the day, told me that Unite Against Fascism was a “front” for the SWP, but the man working on the stall selling party literature was more cautious: “It’s not an SWP event,” he said. “We’re part of it. But it’s bigger than us.”

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

The Real Threat to BC Today

by Malaika Mahlatsi, GroundUp

On a cold afternoon in July 2010, a group of us met in Newtown to distribute pamphlets around the Johannesburg CBD and hotspots of the 2008 "xenophobic" attacks, such as Diepsloot etc. We were only about twelve, so we had to break into groups of four.

Three people would distribute flyers and one person would engage people to explain the cause we were fighting. Our campaign was called "Singamakwerekwere sonke", meaning "We are all foreigners". Basically, we were protesting against the deporting and the violence against our Afrikan brothers and sisters, whom our system calls "foreigners" and our people call "amakwerekwere". Our group was called SNI. We were young people who wanted change and we wanted it NOW!

The Dignity of the Poor is Vandalized from Many Quarters

by Abahlali baseMjondolo (KwaZulu-Natal), Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal) & the Unemployed People's Movement (Eastern Cape, Free State & KwaZulu-Natal), Harvard International Review

When black people rose up against apartheid, the government usually said that they couldn’t have organized themselves and that there must have been a white person making them resist. Some thought that only whites were capable of thinking, speaking, and acting for themselves. But it was not only the government that looked for conspiracies every time black people organized themselves. This also happened within the movement.

Crowd Renting or Struggling from Below? The Concerned Citizens' Forum in Mpumalanga Township, Durban, 1999-2005

by Buntu Siwisa, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2008

This article considers the problems of water in Mpumalanga Township in Durban, South Africa, and examines the emergence and activities of the Concerned Citizens Forum (CCF), for whom activism around water services was centrally important. It contributes to the debate over the backlog in municipal services delivery and the attendant emergence of new social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. Set against a background of changes in water policy, a profile of the water industry and the drive to cost recovery, the article provides an account of collective action in Durban, by investigating the history and activities of the CCF. The article questions the standing of the movement and argues that the CCF is given to ‘crowd renting’, lacks transparency, and is prone to disorderly decision-making and racial and leadership crises. The article contextualises CCF’s collective action programmes, including its activism over water disconnections, by situating them in Mpumalanga’s neighbourhood politics. By doing so, the reader encounters councillors of the ruling and opposition parties, CCF city-based intellectual-cum-activists, African township youth activists and local council officials and bureaucrats. The collusion and conflicts between these various parties highlight political opportunism, careerism, and the ruthless pursuit of self-enrichment, revealing the complexities of collective action and the contentious politics of new social movements. The article also highlights the looming crisis of the breakdown of social citizenship in relation to cost recovery and the struggles over water services.

Jean-Paul Sartre on the French Communist Party

I was dealing with men who only considered people of their party as comrades, men who were covered with orders and prohibitions, who judged me as a provisional fellow traveler, and who placed themselves in advance in the future moment when I’d disappear from the melee, taken back by the forces of the right. For them I wasn’t a whole man; I was a dead man on reprieve. No kind of reciprocity is possible with men like that; nor any mutual criticism, which would have been something to hope for…. We lived in a poisoned atmosphere of thoughts that didn’t resist examination, but that they avoided examining. It was putrid, and we were never sure that they weren’t in the process of slandering us somewhere.

- Jean-Paul Sartre, A Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party, 1972

Crossmoor - Statement from Lynn Munusamy

Lynn Munsamy was a founder member of the Crossmoor Informal Settlement in Chatsworth and she was elected onto the Crossmoor Committee where she played a leading role. This is the statement that she made after 3 staff members (Heinrich Bohmke, Shannon Walsh & Orlean Naidoo) at the Centre for Civil Society sent around emails accusing her and others of stealing money. 

Crisis of Conscience in the SACP: A Critical Review of Slovo’s “Has Socialism Failed?”

Pallo Jordan. Lusaka, February 1990.

“Has Socialism Failed?” is the intriguing title Comrade Joe Slovo has given to a discussion pamphlet published under the imprint of ‘Umsebenzi’, the quarterly newspaper of the SACP. The reader is advised at the outset that these are Slovo’s individual views, and not those of the SACP. While this is helpful it introduces a note of uncertainty regarding the pamphlet’s authority. The pamphlet itself is divided into six parts, the first five being an examination of the experience of the ‘socialist countries’, and the last, a look at the SACP itself.