housing

Cape Town: two anti-eviction campaigners jailed for a year

On Wednesday, July 2nd at the Bellville Magistrates Court courtroom E, two members of the Delft Anti-Eviction Campaign, Jerome Daniels and Ridwaan Isaacs, were each sentenced twelve months in prison - simply for being community leaders at Delft-Symphony Way settlement.

The movement, and other militant movements in South Africa considers Daniels and Isaacs to be political prisoners and is mobilising support on this basis.

We are not all like that: the monster bares its fangs

Black consciousness militant and activist in the Landless Peoples' Movement Andile Mngxitama responds to the May 2008 pogroms in South Africa.

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic blood letting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks.

On the pogroms in South Africa

An essay on the May 2008 pogroms in South Africa by Richard Pithouse.

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear.

Greenlake "Motel" attempted eviction - Seattle

Residents and SeaSol members outside apartments

Residents of Seattle motel left suddenly homeless

On Friday May 16, tenants at twelve apartments behind the Green Lake Motel on Aurora Ave got a surprise visit from their landlords - who also own the motel and a few others - saying they had two days to move out, or they'd be arrested. The motel's license was being suspended due to unsafe conditions, and the apartments had been operating (possibly wrongly) under the same license.

South Africa: Gangster landlord continues campaign of intimidation with police support

The poor of Motala Heights, affiliated to Abahlali baseMjondolo since 2006, are fighting a bitter battle against eviction against a local gangster business man and the local state. There have recently been death threats and threats of arson and the local cops are acting as the gangsters' enforcers.

[i]London anarchist, Antonios Vradis lived in the community for a while in late 2006 from and it was here that the anarchist magazine Voices of Resistance from Occupied London was conceived.

Abahlali baseMjondolo to host National UnFreedom Day

Freedom Day, 27 April, is the major national holiday in the civic religion of post-apartheid South Africa. The poor are usually herded into stadiums to be lectured on their good fortune by their leaders while the rich head for the malls. This year, for the 3rd time, Abahlali baseMjondolo will be hosting an UnFreedom Day. Heresy is alive & well....

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
Monday 21 April 2008

Abahlali baseMjondolo to Mourn UnFreedom Day Once Again

Time: 9:00 a.m., Sunday 27 April 2008
Venue: Community Hall, Kennedy Road Shack Settlement, Clare Estate, Durban

The Politics of Fire

A shack burnt in the aftermath of the electricity disconnections in the Kennedy Road settlement

Abahlali baseMjondolo has long sought to politicise fire & shit: to show that people suffer fires because electricity is refused, to show that people suffer diarrhoea because clean water is refused. This press release responds to the active and of course armed withdrawal of electricity from the Kennedy Road settlement in February 2008.

Friday, 15 February 2008
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release

City Escalates Its War on the Poor
Mass Disconnections from Electricity at Gun Point in the Kennedy Road Settlement

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release for the March on Mlaba, 28 September 2007

Abahlali baseMjondolo March on (Mayor) Mlaba 28 September 2008

Press release of Abahlali baseMjondolo in the run up to a march on the mayor of Durban to protest his refusal to supply electricity to the shack dwellers' settlements.

[b]On 28 September 2007 around 3 000 Abahlali baseMjondolo members marched on the mayor of Durban, Obed Mlaba. In previous Abahlali baseMjondolo marches mock coffins were carried and local councillors symbolically buried as a rejection of their top down party authority over bottom up people's power.

Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today

A major and widely influential new theoretical statement on the rising tide of anti-state politics by a major radical African intellectual.

by Michael Neocosmos

Abstract

Taking Poverty Seriously: What the poor are saying and why it matters

Article based on interviews with South African shack dwellers about their views of what constitutes 'democracy', stressing the need for those in struggle to set their own agenda rather than have it set by professional activists.

A commitment to justice and democratic governance requires that we listen carefully as much as we speak loudly and act decisively.

news

London bus workers to strike
2,500 bus drivers in east, west and central London will be going on strike tomorrow (August 29th) to oppose a below-inflation pay offer.

articles

Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Rise of Stalinism: Theory and Practice - John Eric Marot
Through a critical examination of the limits of SWP guru Tony Cliff's analysis, Marot demolishes the popular myth that Trotsky and his Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party in Russia were, during the 1920s, a heroic attempt to defend working class interests against a Stalinist 'socialist construction' and repression that they disagreed with. An effective factual antidote to leftist and ICC-type left-communist apologetics for Trotsky and Trotskyism's anti-working class character in Soviet Russia.

1968

Review: Whatever happened to the Situationists?
A steady trickle of publications about the situationists testifies to the market value of their ideas, but it also reminds us of the continued requirement for revolutionaries to engage with them. In this review we look at two recent books. Ken Knabb's Public Secrets illustrates the self-obsessed nature of the situationist milieu after the heady days of 1968. What is Situationism? A Reader includes Barrot's important critique of the Situationist International for their one-sided emphasis on circulation rather then production.

Tea Break

Tea Break July 2008
First issue of an irregular workers' bulletin put together by users of the website, libcom.org. This issue focuses on the 2008 pay dispute over sub-inflation pay offers.

housing

1968

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