The Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in ...particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers. Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous – challenge hegemonic neoliberal feminism through their resistance to ordinary capitalist practices and ecological extractivism. Contributors cover women’s responses in a wide range of contexts: from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, to approaches to anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, to championing climate justice in mining affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. Their practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered in this collection is a subaltern women’s grassroots resistance focused on advancing and enabling solidarity-based political projects, deepening democracy, building capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.
This article situates the Marikana massacre, in which 34 mine workers were gunned down by police in South Africa, in the context of what the South African state has become, and questions the ...characterisation of the post-Apartheid state as a “developmental state”. This contribution first highlights what is at stake when the post-Apartheid state is portrayed as a “developmental state” and how this misrecognition of the state is ideologically constituted. Second, it argues for an approach to understanding the post-Apartheid state by locating it within the context of the rise of transnational neoliberalism and the process of indigenising neoliberalism on the African continent. Third, it examines the actual economic practices of the state that constitute it as an Afro-neoliberal state. Such economic practices are historicised to show the convergence between the post-Apartheid state and the ideal type neoliberal state coming to the fore in the context of global neoliberal restructuring and crisis management. The article concludes by recognising that South Africa’s deep globalisation and globalised state affirm a form of state practice beyond utilising market mechanisms that includes perpetrating violence to secure its existence. Marikana makes this point.
South Africa is the twelfth highest emitter of carbon emissions in the world. It has an energy intensity and per capita usage of fossil fuel energy that surpasses other countries in the BRICS, it is ...currently building one the largest coal-fired power stations in the world, and is championing a green neo-liberal approach to the climate change crisis. This article investigates how the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) developed an approach to climate justice and is intervening to shape policy around the just transition in South Africa. The article explores the factors that contributed to NUMSA’s embrace of a politics of climate justice, the internal education and policy capacity developed in the union and the campaigns championed to advance climate justice. The article provides insights into how NUMSA has campaigned around energy efficiency and electricity price increases, influenced and monitored the roll out of solar water geysers and has advanced a position on socially owned renewable energy.
The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. We bring a critical social science perspective to this framework through the ...notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds. We start by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. We then focus on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process ‒ based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles ‒ it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation. Collective autonomy and the politics of self-limitation are key elements of societal boundaries and are linked to important proposals and pluriverse experiences to integrate well-being and boundaries. The role of the state and propositions for radical alternative approaches to well-being have particular importance. We conclude with reflections on social freedom, defined as the right not to live at others' expense. Toward the aim of defining boundaries through transdisciplinary and democratic processes, we seek to open a dialogue on these issues.
"Racism after Apartheid, volume four of the Democratic Marxism series, brings together leading scholars and activists from around the world studying and challenging racism. In eleven thematically ...rich and conceptually informed chapters, the contributors interrogate the complex nexus of questions surrounding race and relations of oppression as they are played out in the global South and global North. Their work challenges Marxism and anti-racism to take these lived realities seriously and consistently struggle to build human solidarities."
"BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism ...challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance. The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg’s pioneering work inspires most of the volume’s contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance. While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers."
Destroying Democracy, volume six of the Democratic Marxism series, focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, rising ...authoritarianism is expressing itself in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified and corporations have become more powerful than states and their citizens. This is how neoliberal capitalism functions at a systemic level and if left unchecked is the greatest threat to democracy and a sustainable planet. The authors home in on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America to interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy. The book is an invaluable resource for all who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global south and the global north.
Fees Must Fall Godsell, Gillian; Chikane, Rekgotsofetse; Mpofu-Walsh, Sizwe ...
04/2018
eBook
#FeesMustFall, the student revolt that began in October 2015, was an uprising against lack of access to, and financial exclusion from, higher education in South Africa. More broadly, it radically ...questioned the socio-political dispensation resulting from the 1994 social pact between big business, the ruling elite and the liberation movement. The 2015 revolt links to national and international youth struggles of the recent past and is informed by black consciousness politics and social movements of the international left. Yet, its objectives are more complex than those of earlier struggles. The student movement has challenged the hierarchical, top-down leadership system of university management and it’s ‘double speak’ of professing to act in workers’ and students’ interests yet entrenching a regressive system for control and governance. University managements, while on one level amenable to change, have also co-opted students into their ranks to create co-responsibility for the highly bureaucratised university financial aid that stands in the way of their social revolution. This book maps the contours of student discontent a year after the start of the #FeesMustFall revolt. Student voices dissect colonialism, improper compromises by the founders of democratic South Africa, feminism, worker rights and meaningful education. In-depth assessments by prominent scholars reflect on the complexities of student activism, its impact on national and university governance, and offer provocative analyses of the power of the revolt.
This article situates the Marikana massacre, in which 34 mine workers were gunned down by police in South Africa, in the context of what the South African state has become, and questions the ...characterisation of the post-Apartheid state as a "developmental state". This contribution first highlights what is at stake when the post-Apartheid state is portrayed as a "developmental state" and how this misrecognition of the state is ideologically constituted. Second, it argues for an approach to understanding the post-Apartheid state by locating it within the context of the rise of transnational neoliberalism and the process of indigenising neoliberalism on the African continent. Third, it examines the actual economic practices of the state that constitute it as an Afro-neoliberal state. Such economic practices are historicised to show the convergence between the post-Apartheid state and the ideal type neoliberal state coming to the fore in the context of global neoliberal restructuring and crisis management. The article concludes by recognising that South Africa's deep globalisation and globalised state affirm a form of state practice beyond utilising market mechanisms that includes perpetrating violence to secure its existence. Marikana makes this point.
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