Workers' Liberty

In a magnificent display of working-class solidarity, dockworkers in Durban, South Africa, refused to unload 77 tonnes of Chinese weapons bound for Zimbabwe.

A strike wave began in Durban in 1973 involving nearly 100,000 workers. It shook the racist apartheid regime (where only the white minority could vote) that had ruled for 25 years. Students played an important role too, calculating cost of living indexes and doing research for workers.

7.30pm, Thursday 26 July
The Lucas Arms, Grays Inn Road (five minutes from Kings Cross tube and rail)
For a downloadable leaflet for this meeting see here.

BY Mike Rowley

On 1 June, public sector unions in South Africa called a general strike of over a million public sector workers in response to a derisory pay offer from the government (originally 5.3%, creeping up to 6%, then 6.5%) that would be completely cancelled out by inflation. Public sector workers in South Africa are very poorly paid and have not had a pay rise in real terms for ten years.

By Amina Saddiq

Two days before Solidarity went to press, on 6 June, police in the South African city of Durban attacked nurses picketing their hospital as part of a national public sector strike over pay with plastic bullets and stun grenades. Several strikers were injured and twenty arrested.

South Africa

Hundreds of thousands of workers in South Africa supported a one-day general strike in protest against job losses on 18 May.

We have received a copy of a paper by veteran South African Marxist Neville Alexander on "Affirmative Action and the Perpetuation of Racial Identities", from Rajni Lallah of Lalit, Mauritius. Rajni writes: "I thought I'd you'd appreciate getting a paper of Neville Alexander on affirmative action and the perpetuation of racial identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Lalit comrades find it excellent and very useful in debate".<--break-->

South Africa is undergoing a strike wave, the second in a matter of months, with miners, municipal workers and civil servants about to take strike action. This follows stoppages in recent weeks by urban workers, grocery clerks and airline workers.

Two million South African workers showed how to fight poverty at the end of June with the biggest strike since the days of apartheid.

South African trade unionists picketed the Zimbabwe border last week to demand democratic and labour reforms ahead of Zimbabwe’s 31 March parliamentary elections.

During the last week of October, a delegation from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) arrived in Zimbabwe for a brief “fact-finding mission”.

Paul Hampton reviews Frank Glass: the Restless Revolutionary by Baruch Hirson (Porcupine Press)

Frank Glass was a pioneer Trotskyist of the 1920s and 30s. But his life and work has been largely forgotten, written out of history by the Stalinists and ignored even by genuine Marxists.

The South African telecommunications firm Telkom plans to shed another 4,181 workers in three years, despite making record profits this year.

More than 700,000 public sector workers, including 320,000 teachers, struck on 16 September in probably the biggest strike in South Africa’s history.

Nazi thugs gain

Any thoughts that the BNP might be in retreat should be completely dismissed. In a Dagenham council by-election on 15 July the BNP got 31% of the vote.

This gave them more than the Tories, Lib-Dems and Greens put together.

• Ciao

• Floods of East Europeans... leave Britain
• Plus ça change...
• Comrade racist?
• Yes, we have bananas

Ciao

For three weeks they drifted in the Mediterranean because no European country was willing to take them in. Then the 37 men - reportedly Sundanese refugees - made it… to the safety of an Italian concrete shed surrounded by barbed wire.

By Pablo Velasco

• Colombian oil workers halt privatisation: solidarity works!

• "Massive summer strikes" planned in Korea
• ANC against anti-privatisation activists
• Argentine workers fight for a six-hour day

• Rogue bodyguards

• Blair's bodyguard
• Multi-cultural? No, anti-semitic
• BNP idiot of the week
• By their celebrities shall you know them
• Not our brothers

Rogue bodyguards

Over the last weeks we have become more aware of the extent to which the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority "outsources" its security services. According to the Pacific News Service 1,500 of the security personnel are South Africans and many have used their backgrounds as mercenaries during the years of apartheid to bolster their credentials.

By Pablo Velasco

• South Africa Charges against Anti-Privatisation Forum dropped

• Solidarity with Cambodian hotel workers!
• Support Argentinian food workers
• Criminal trials of Chinese workers begin

Hope flickers in South Africa

The African National Congress (ANC) won South Africa's general election on 14 April, with 70% of the vote. The queues to vote have shortened slightly after 10 years of democratic South Africa, but the voters are still overwhelmingly backing the ANC.

The BBC website recorded the thoughts of some of the voters. Alvina Masinga, aged 59, ing KwaZulu-Natal said: "I feel like I did when I voted for the first time in 1994 - fantastic." Vicki Morris looks at why black voters are sticking with the ANC and whether their loyalty is being rewarded.

On 27 April 2004, Freedom Day, South Africans will celebrate the anniversary of the elections of 26-29 April 1994, and 10 years of "majority rule". On 14 April 2004 they will go to the polls to elect their third government since apartheid ended. In this article Vicki Morris looks at the history of apartheid and how it was defeated. In the next issue of Solidarity she will consider apartheid's baleful legacy.

On 14 April 2004 South African electors go to the polls to elect their government. It will be, more or less, the 10 years anniversary of the end of apartheid and of the beginning of 'majority rule' - one person, one vote - in South Africa.
In coming issues of our newspaper Solidarity, available to view on this website, we will examine the history of apartheid, its demise, and its legacy, and the prospects for socialist struggle in South Africa today.
Central to this history, of course, is the history of those who fought against apartheid, the nationalists and the socialists. As background to this discussion we publish below the Freedom Charter of the ANC adopted in 1955 and the Workers' Charter adopted by the National Union of Metalworkers in 1987.

An interview with Neville Alexander, Cape Town.

In this interview, Alexander says that in South Africa "there isn't any general system of state welfare benefits...it is almost exactly the same as during apartheid", and comments on the somewhat strained relations between the neoliberal ANC and their coalition partners the SACP and COSATU, and the possiblilties of a new workers' party.

Many opponents of apartheid are still unwilling to look too closely into what has become known as the “Winnie Mandela affair”. That is a mistake. The episode tells us much about the ANC, its methods, and the prospects for democracy in the new South Africa. To refuse to examine the evidence against Mrs Mandela and her followers amounts to nothing less than a refusal to come to terms with the recent history of the liberation movement. It is the politics of faith rather than facts.