Police and power in South Africa
South African policing is a tool of social control and repression. Are democratic and humanistic alternatives possible? This week on the AIAC podcast, we discuss.
Marikana
We need to talk about wage theft
South African companies can afford to pay their workers a living wage—if not for their commitment to profit shifting, as the case of Lonmin and Marikana showed.
The afterlives of Marikana
Why do representative bodies like the union, the party, and the so-called Left seem to fail its constituents during struggles like Marikana?
Confronting police power
Accountability—insofar as it ever existed within the South African Police Service—has been reduced to a merely theoretical concept. It is time this changed.
Where do trade unions go from here?
In South Africa, the seismic shifts in unionism triggered by the Marikana Massacre have sadly not resulted in a union movement better equipped to tackle the issues that workers face.
Dreaming of the green blanket
The impact of the Marikana massacre on South Africa’s student movement for free education, and an end to outsourcing, has been overlooked.
Killing the collective
We know an enormous amount about what precipitated the 2012 Marikana massacre, but relatively little about what is behind the violence there since.
What does it have to do with Marikana?
The Marikana Massacre changed democratic South Africa forever. It can also catalyze resistance to the current order.
The promise of platinum
Platinum holds promise for a net-zero future. But the promise of platinum cannot be founded on the broken promises endured by those who live in its spaces of extraction.
Countering the narrative
If committed filmmakers want to reach and influence more people, and counter fake news, impact producing may help get us there.
A dedicated teacher of the working class
Oupa Lehulere, revolutionary teacher and mentor, died on November 29. His approach to theoretical study and struggle was the same: there are no shortcuts.
Policing the colony
We have to become more open to the possibility that what our society needs is not better policing, but less. And ultimately no policing at all.
Post-apartheid symptoms of morbidity
Ordinary working-class people have been forced to the belief that there can never actually be real solutions; stripped of the confidence that fundamental change can happen.
Why South Africa needs Democratic Socialism
South African politics urgently needs an injection of electoral energy from the left, that speaks in a language that resonates with voters, rejects chauvinism and embraces democracy.
Marikana and the end of South African exceptionalism
South Africa's problems are no longer specific to the apartheid legacy, but about more global issues of poverty and inequality.
The Spirit of Marikana
Marikana's workers were active agents in controlling their own destinies in the midst of plutocratic mine-owners and “pocket trade unions.”
The lesson of Marikana
The relationship between the massacre of workers at Marikana and the rational destiny of market fundamentalism.
No country for widows
The astonishing lengths to which the South African state went to demean and diminish Marikana miners, dead and living, and their loved ones.
Stirring the Spirits of the Dead Miners of Marikana
When the widows of Marikana tried to wake up their husbands from their graves by yelling at them.
The winners and losers of the platinum strike in South Africa
Will the trade union that organized the strike will unify and rally workers outside of the ruling alliance.