Geography Archives: South Africa

From Brazil and Mexico to South Africa and Malaysia, international labor solidarity is aiding the UAW’s fight to reverse the global race to the bottom.

AS SIGNIFICANT as the fact of BRICS expansion are which countries are now set to join: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Argentina.

The mining super-majors are keen to walk away from their legacy responsibilities, which in the case of South Africa date back to colonial times under British rule, continuing under apartheid, and in the last generation since 1994.

South Africa’s media agencies report that the country’s authorities have rejected a French request to send an invitation to President Emmanuel Macron to attend the upcoming summit of the BRICS economic group.

The UK Labour Party’s latest corporate mega-donor is a pro-Israel businessperson whose firm profiteered from South African apartheid.

The new chief of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the U.S. dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal murder of the South African Communist Party (SACP) General Secretary, Comrade Thembisile Martin “Chris” Hani.

The U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, threatened to arrest judges, and passed a “Hague Invasion Act”. Previously, the ICC only prosecuted Africans. But now that it wants to arrest Russian President Putin, Washington praises the court (while still refusing to join it).

What constitutes a crisis worthy of global attention? When a regional bank in the United States falls victim to the inversion of the yield curve (i.e., when short-term bond interest rates become higher than long-term rates), the Earth nearly stops spinning.

The twentieth century was marked by national liberation struggles that emerged in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin America, where neocolonial structures had subordinated the formally independent countries. The achievements of the Russian Revolution in 1917 inspired the peasantry and the working class across the Global South. The fight for equality and liberation […]

The 1973 Durban strikes were part of a wider political ferment in the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a generative site of political experimentation and innovation.

South Africa is sitting on a tinderbox, says Irvin Jim, General Secretary of the country’s largest trade union NUMSA. The solution is to foster a spirit of solidarity which will have to come from people’s struggles and movements.

On November 17, a photo exhibition titled ‘Socialism or Death: Abahlali baseMjondolo on the Frontlines of Struggle’ opened at The Forge in Johannesburg. The work displayed chronicles the years-long struggle of South Africa’s shack dwellers movement to secure land and housing for the urban poor.

South Africa is set to implement an $8.5bn plan funded by western countries to transition from coal-based energy to renewables. The country’s biggest union NUMSA has warned this plan will only intensify privatization while burdening South Africans with debt and poverty.

Mlungisi Makhanya, president of one of the largest pro-democracy political parties, PUDEMO, whose house was attacked “remains unshaken, defiant”.

As tensions between the United States and China rise, Washington is intent on contesting Beijing’s influence around the world, particularly in the Global South. The U.S. government has ramped up its efforts to influence international media and public opinion. In this new Cold War, South Africa is once again in the crosshairs.

The police attempted to arrest CPS member Bongi Nkambule, who was abducted and tortured by the police in March. When they failed to capture him, they took his wife into custody and beat her up in the police station. There has been an upsurge of resistance in Swaziland recently.

1 year ago, in June and July, a massive uprising led by Communists in Swaziland threatened to overthrow the last absolute monarchy in Africa. With the help of its imperialist allies, the Swazi monarchy brutally repressed this uprising, but they have only temporarily delayed the inevitable. One year later, we can reflect on the conditions that caused the revolution, its successes and missed opportunities, the role of imperialism in tipping the scales to a comprador bourgeoisie, and what has changed in the year since in Swaziland as revolutionary agitation continues.

In March 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a ‘hurricane of hunger’ due to the war in Ukraine. Forty-five developing countries, most of them on the African continent, he said, ‘import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, with 18 of those import[ing] at least 50 percent’.

The labour relations on South African farms continue to maintain race, gender, and class inequalities as a central character of work and life.