"The industrial union is the embryo of the socialist commonwealth": The International Socialist League and revolutionary syndicalism in South Africa, 1915-1919

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 12 October 1998The outbreak of the First World War in Europe in August 1914 was a turning point in the history of the international socialist and radical labour movement. The war precipitated the collapse of the International Socialist Bureau (the "Second International") of socialist and labour parties, with almost all sections supporting the war efforts of their national governments. The only Second International groupings which proved exceptions to this general pattern -a violation of every basic tent of the international socialism, as well as the formal anti-war commitments of the Second International - were the Russian Bolsheviks, the Serbian socialists, and anti-war minorities in a few of the belligerent parties

Anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa, 1904-1921: Rethinking the history of labour and the left

Abstract: This is a study of the influence of anarchism and syndicalism (a variant of anarchism) on the left and labour movements in South Africa between the 1890s and the 1920s, but with a focus on the first two decades of the twentieth century. Internationally, this was a period of widespread working class unrest and radicalism, and the apogee, the “glorious period”, of anarchist and syndicalist influence from the 1890s to the 1920s. The rising influence of anarchism and syndicalism was reflected in South Africa, where it widely influenced the left, as well as significant sections of the local labour movement, as well as layers of the nationalist movements. This influence also spilled into neighbouring countries, fostering a movement that was multi-racial in composition, as well as internationalist and interracial in outlook. These developments are today almost entirely forgotten, and have been largely excised from the literature: this thesis is, above all, a work of recovering the history of a significant tradition, a history that has significant implications for understanding the history of left and labour movements in South Africa and southern Africa

From dispossession to disappointment: neo- liberalism and South African land reform policy

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Forging the links between historical research and the policy process, 18-19 September 1999.Land ownership in South Africa is inequitable and characterised by exploitative social relations. The land policy process represents the triumph of the dominant powerful groups, mainly the landowning classes. The concerns of ordinary rural people have been marginalised. The paper examines the processes that lead to the ANC's land reform policy

Reclaiming syndicalism: from Spain to South Africa to Global Labour Today

Union politics remain central to the new century. It remains central because of the ongoing importance of unions as mass movements, internationally, and because unions, like other popular movements, are confronted with the very real challenge of articulating an alternative, transformative vision. There is much to be learned from the historic and current tradition of anarcho-and revolutionary syndicalism

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

The limits of transnational solidarity: the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the Swaziland and Zimbabwean crises

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the main union federation in South Africa, was instrumental in ending apartheid. This paper evaluates COSATU's post-apartheid role in working for democracy elsewhere in Southern Africa through deepening transnational solidarity, focusing on its role in Zimbabwe and Swaziland. Although the federation successfully mobilised trade union members to oppose the contravention of human and labor rights, its ability to affect lasting change was limited by contradictory messages and actions by the South African government, the dualistic nature of institutional formation in these countries, strategic miscalculations and structural limitations on union power

State of the climate in 2018

In 2018, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—continued their increase. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth’s surface was 407.4 ± 0.1 ppm, the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800 000 years. Combined, greenhouse gases and several halogenated gases contribute just over 3 W m−2 to radiative forcing and represent a nearly 43% increase since 1990. Carbon dioxide is responsible for about 65% of this radiative forcing. With a weak La Niña in early 2018 transitioning to a weak El Niño by the year’s end, the global surface (land and ocean) temperature was the fourth highest on record, with only 2015 through 2017 being warmer. Several European countries reported record high annual temperatures. There were also more high, and fewer low, temperature extremes than in nearly all of the 68-year extremes record. Madagascar recorded a record daily temperature of 40.5°C in Morondava in March, while South Korea set its record high of 41.0°C in August in Hongcheon. Nawabshah, Pakistan, recorded its highest temperature of 50.2°C, which may be a new daily world record for April. Globally, the annual lower troposphere temperature was third to seventh highest, depending on the dataset analyzed. The lower stratospheric temperature was approximately fifth lowest. The 2018 Arctic land surface temperature was 1.2°C above the 1981–2010 average, tying for third highest in the 118-year record, following 2016 and 2017. June’s Arctic snow cover extent was almost half of what it was 35 years ago. Across Greenland, however, regional summer temperatures were generally below or near average. Additionally, a satellite survey of 47 glaciers in Greenland indicated a net increase in area for the first time since records began in 1999. Increasing permafrost temperatures were reported at most observation sites in the Arctic, with the overall increase of 0.1°–0.2°C between 2017 and 2018 being comparable to the highest rate of warming ever observed in the region. On 17 March, Arctic sea ice extent marked the second smallest annual maximum in the 38-year record, larger than only 2017. The minimum extent in 2018 was reached on 19 September and again on 23 September, tying 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest extent on record. The 23 September date tied 1997 as the latest sea ice minimum date on record. First-year ice now dominates the ice cover, comprising 77% of the March 2018 ice pack compared to 55% during the 1980s. Because thinner, younger ice is more vulnerable to melting out in summer, this shift in sea ice age has contributed to the decreasing trend in minimum ice extent. Regionally, Bering Sea ice extent was at record lows for almost the entire 2017/18 ice season. For the Antarctic continent as a whole, 2018 was warmer than average. On the highest points of the Antarctic Plateau, the automatic weather station Relay (74°S) broke or tied six monthly temperature records throughout the year, with August breaking its record by nearly 8°C. However, cool conditions in the western Bellingshausen Sea and Amundsen Sea sector contributed to a low melt season overall for 2017/18. High SSTs contributed to low summer sea ice extent in the Ross and Weddell Seas in 2018, underpinning the second lowest Antarctic summer minimum sea ice extent on record. Despite conducive conditions for its formation, the ozone hole at its maximum extent in September was near the 2000–18 mean, likely due to an ongoing slow decline in stratospheric chlorine monoxide concentration. Across the oceans, globally averaged SST decreased slightly since the record El Niño year of 2016 but was still far above the climatological mean. On average, SST is increasing at a rate of 0.10° ± 0.01°C decade−1 since 1950. The warming appeared largest in the tropical Indian Ocean and smallest in the North Pacific. The deeper ocean continues to warm year after year. For the seventh consecutive year, global annual mean sea level became the highest in the 26-year record, rising to 81 mm above the 1993 average. As anticipated in a warming climate, the hydrological cycle over the ocean is accelerating: dry regions are becoming drier and wet regions rainier. Closer to the equator, 95 named tropical storms were observed during 2018, well above the 1981–2010 average of 82. Eleven tropical cyclones reached Saffir–Simpson scale Category 5 intensity. North Atlantic Major Hurricane Michael’s landfall intensity of 140 kt was the fourth strongest for any continental U.S. hurricane landfall in the 168-year record. Michael caused more than 30 fatalities and $25 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages. In the western North Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut led to 160 fatalities and$6 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was responsible for 170 fatalities in Vietnam and Laos. Nearly all the islands of Micronesia experienced at least moderate impacts from various tropical cyclones. Across land, many areas around the globe received copious precipitation, notable at different time scales. Rodrigues and Réunion Island near southern Africa each reported their third wettest year on record. In Hawaii, 1262 mm precipitation at Waipā Gardens (Kauai) on 14–15 April set a new U.S. record for 24-h precipitation. In Brazil, the city of Belo Horizonte received nearly 75 mm of rain in just 20 minutes, nearly half its monthly average. Globally, fire activity during 2018 was the lowest since the start of the record in 1997, with a combined burned area of about 500 million hectares. This reinforced the long-term downward trend in fire emissions driven by changes in land use in frequently burning savannas. However, wildfires burned 3.5 million hectares across the United States, well above the 2000–10 average of 2.7 million hectares. Combined, U.S. wildfire damages for the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons exceeded $40 billion (U.S. dollars)

Back to the future: revival, relevance and route of an anarchist/syndicalist approach for twenty-first-century left, labour and national liberation movements

The failings of classical Marxism, social democracy and anti-imperialist nationalism point to the need for a radical left politics at a distance from the state. This paper examines the impact, revival and promise of the anarchist/syndicalist tradition, a rich, continuous praxis in labour, left, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and egalitarian movements, worldwide, since the 1860s. Outlining its core ideas – anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism, anti-statism, opposition to social and economic inequality, internationalist class-based mobilisation – and critique of mainstream Marxism and nationalism, it highlights the arguments there is a basic incompatibility between state rule, and bottom-up, egalitarian, democratic, socialist relationships. The anarchist/syndicalist project cannot be reduced to an organising style, protest politics or spontaneism: for it, transition to a just, self-managed society requires organised popular capacity for a revolutionary rupture, developed through prefigurative, class-based, democratic organs of counter-power, including syndicalist unions aiming at collectivised property, and revolutionary counter-culture. Success needs formal organisation, unified strategy and anarchist / syndicalist political organisations

Negro e Vermelho: anarquismo, sindicalismo revolucionário e pessoas de cor na África Meridional nas décadas de 1880-1920

<p>http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-9222.2010v2n4p174</p><p>Este artigo examina a história inicial do anarquismo e do sindicalismo revolucionário na África do Sul, uma sociedade colonial que se industrializou no final do século XIX, e nos arredores da região sul-africana. A África do Sul era caracterizada, nessa época, por um movimento sindical militante, mas que era dividido nacional e racialmente, e pela opressão nacional das pessoas de cor, que constituíam a maioria da população. Em oposição à opressão nacional e à segregação, mas também assumindo uma posição crítica ao nacionalismo africano e de cor, os anarquistas e os sindicalistas revolucionários desenvolveram uma análise da opressão nacional cada vez mais sofisticada, recrutaram e treinaram um quadro multirracial, formaram sindicatos gerais pioneiros e revolucionários contra as pessoas de cor e continuaram a influenciar o trabalho regional, branco e negro, e a esquerda, em geral, após a formação do Partido Comunista da África do Sul (South African Communist Party – CPSA) em 1921.</p&gt

Negro e Vermelho: anarquismo, sindicalismo revolucionário e pessoas de cor na África Meridional nas décadas de 1880-1920

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-9222.2010v2n4p174Este artigo examina a história inicial do anarquismo e do sindicalismo revolucionário na África do Sul, uma sociedade colonial que se industrializou no final do século XIX, e nos arredores da região sul-africana. A África do Sul era caracterizada, nessa época, por um movimento sindical militante, mas que era dividido nacional e racialmente, e pela opressão nacional das pessoas de cor, que constituíam a maioria da população. Em oposição à opressão nacional e à segregação, mas também assumindo uma posição crítica ao nacionalismo africano e de cor, os anarquistas e os sindicalistas revolucionários desenvolveram uma análise da opressão nacional cada vez mais sofisticada, recrutaram e treinaram um quadro multirracial, formaram sindicatos gerais pioneiros e revolucionários contra as pessoas de cor e continuaram a influenciar o trabalho regional, branco e negro, e a esquerda, em geral, após a formação do Partido Comunista da África do Sul (South African Communist Party – CPSA) em 1921