Video: Lucien van der Walt - Anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in Africa

From Kantine Festival
August 3, 2023

Live from the Kantine Sabot 2023

This talk will provide an overview the two main phases of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in Africa. The focus will be on southern Africa, and North Africa, but there will be some mention of developments in the eastern and western regions. Tracing the African history of the anarchist/ syndicalist current from the 1860s onwards, it will pay close attention to how it was shaped by the larger context as well as by specific national and regional dynamics. The first phase, from the 1860s-1930s, developed against the larger backdrop of Western colonial expansion, and an early epoch of globalisation; the second phase, from the 1990s onwards, started in the wave of struggles against authoritarian African regimes, and the onset of neo-liberal globalisation.

Recent publications and new editions from Zabalaza Books

From Zabalaza

Over the past 18 months Zabalaza Books has published over two dozen new publications or new editions of previous publications, all of which can be read online or downloaded in PDF format from the Zabalaza Books website.

Read the full list of titles and overviews of their contents, with links to the full texts, below.

Modes of politics at a distance from the state: A critical assessment

From Zabalaza dot net by Lucien van der Walt

The crisis of the statist politics that dominated working-class politics — social democracy, Marxism-Leninism, and anti-imperialist nationalism — and the rise of neoliberalism, has aided the rediscovery of society-centred, anti-capitalist forms of bottom-up change “at a distance” from the state.

For the Popular Classes of the World, Pandemic, Crisis, All Times Are Times of Struggle!

From Anarkismo, http://www.anarkismo.net/article/31873

1. The Global Situation
The COVID-19 pandemic has come at a time of weakening globalization, with strong dysfunctions in the mechanisms of finance, management and communication within the capitalist system, a questioning of the general criteria of governmental management, and a crisis of imperialist hegemony, accompanied by deepening tensions between the great geostrategic blocks.

“The soldier has fallen”

From Zabalaza dot net

Mandla Khoza, ZACF anarchist-communist and Swaziland activist, 22 May 1974-26 July 2019

Comrade Mandla Khoza (or “MK,” as his friends and comrades knew him) passed away on Friday 26 July in his home town of Siphofaneni, Swaziland (Eswatini). He had long suffered from sugar diabetes. He leaves behind four children. One of the pioneering members of the Zabalaza Anarchist  Communist Federation (ZACF) founded in South Africa on May Day 2003, MK was committed to a social revolution that would place power and wealth in the hands of the working class, the peasants and the poor. As he would often say: “It doesn’t matter if you change who sits on the throne: you have to get rid of the throne itself.” This obituary commemorates his life as a militant.

A Workers’ Party and Elections or Class Struggle?

From zabalaza.net

The Question of State Power and the Anarchists’ Answer

The question of state government elections and running a Workers or Socialist political party continues to be raised in the working class movement and the Left globally. As we may know, there was excitement about the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party in Britain, left political parties in certain parts of Europe and Latin America and, more recently, certain shifts to more centrist positions in the United States amongst a section of the Democratic Party calling themselves “Democratic Socialists”. In South Africa, many workers and some activists seem cautiously optimistic by NUMSA’s[1] formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party that will seek to participate in the 2019 general elections.

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