Zabalaza #6 - A journal of South African Revolutionary Anarchism

April 2005 issue online

The latest issue of this South African anarchist journal is now online as a PDF file and we will be adding the articles to Anarkismo.net for discussion over the next week. This article includes the cover story about the anti-municipal riots in the townships last year.

Front cover

Other Articles in this issue.

• BEE-lionnaires In Mbeki-Stan: BEE Debate Shows Nature of Post-Apartheid SA, and Limits Of "Left" Critique
• The President from the Skies vs. The Auntie Who Says "No!" New - Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa
• Doing the Liberation Lang-Arm: Africa and South Africa after "African Socialism"
• Swaziland: a Bitter Taste to the Sugarcane
• ABC-SA Protests the Murder of CIPO-RFM Activists
• Zimbabwe: Time for an End to the Electoral Road
• Revolutionary Anarchism and Political Parties
  The SACP's youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL), backed by a groundswell of support from what SACP secretary-general Blade Nzimande admitted was a “significant minority” in at least six of the nine provincial branches of the party, is arguing that the SACP should stand on its own right in the local government elections scheduled for March 2006 at the latest. The SACP leadership has come out against this rank-and-file proposal, worried that if it is accepted at the party's special congress this May (2005), it may pit the party against the ANC and drive the government rightwards. The go-it-alone tendency has arisen because of frustration at the SACP's declining influence within the Alliance and also with the sell-out actions of much of its leadership. But standing as a “workers' party” for elections to bourgeois state-capitalist forums is a deeply compromising strategy which has seen revolutionary Marxism decay into reformist social democracy across the world. All of which raises questions of what role self-described communist organisations including our own, the ZACF, should play and on what field: among the working class, or among the bourgeoisie? So here is an excellent article by our comrades in the ACL of Mexico, which gives their answer to that question. We encourage the rank-and-file of the SACP and the YCL to honestly examine this alternative method of grassroots communist organising and ask of themselves: “Does this not ring true to us?”
• Anarchism, Alternative Unionism and Workers' Struggles In Iraq
• Support Zandile Mbarane, Class-War Prisoner!

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Cover Story

Protests in September 2004 in the Free State town of Harrismith over the lack of service delivery by corrupt officials (taking their cue, perhaps from the corrupt fatcat Members of Parliament implicated in the R17-million travel scandal?) saw the cops open fire on the demonstrators, killing Teboho Mkhonza, a 17-year-old youth. This murder sparked a series of anti-municipal riots in townships right across the Free State, the latest being in Phomolong in early April. It is important to note that in none of these uprisings have the radical social movements been present as instigators, which suggests that a new layer of the pissed-off poor is emerging. But the social movements need to engage with this layer to ensure coherence and continuity. We need to assist this layer, so that it does not burn itself out like its burning barricades, but so that we can spread our struggles for liberation like a bush-fire across the region. We need to build a new confidence in horizontally-organised selfmanaged working class resistance.

Online in PDF now
http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/sapams/zab6.pdf

Southern African anarchism online:
http://www.zabalaza.net/