More than a million South African public sector workers started an all-out national strike for better wages and conditions on Wednesday, August 18. The present wave of strikes shows that the South African workers are not prepared to accept promises anymore and it's time for the Zuma government to deliver the change it was voted in for.

The June 2010 edition of the Moroccan Marxist journal, The Communist, is now available online.

After months of build up, the World Cup is finally underway. As it approaches the end of the first week, in what is a month-long bloated competition, something has become rather clear. Hype is everything.

This year’s Mayday event was quite historic for the Communist League of Action, the Morrocan section of the IMT. It was the first time we sold our paper, The Communist in public. This is quite an audacious move under a repressive regime also considering that our paper was the only illegal revolutionary paper to be sold on the Mayday demonstrations.

Over 70% of the Nigerian population lives below the poverty line; life expectancy stands at 43 years; and 50,000 Nigerian women die from childbirth every year. Instead of finding a solution to these burning problems, the corrupt Nigerian elite is now playing with the idea of “electoral reform” and the labour leaders are falling for this. What is required is an independent party of the working class capable of leading the workers in a struggle to change society.

This year there was a massive display of working class militancy at the May Day rallies in Nigeria. What was evident, however, was the glaring contradiction between the main speeches calling for “dialogue” and the desire to take the road of militant strike action by the rank and file. The Marxists of the Workers’ Alternative intervened successfully with a huge sale of their paper and with many workers showing a keen interest in their ideas.

We make available the latest edition of the Moroccan Marxist journal, The Communist, in Arabic, which has articles on The origins of May Day, the Mass struggles in Jebha and Chefchaouen, the Western Sahara Question, and the IMT Statement on the Fifth International. [Download pdf]

David van Wyk in South Africa sent us this comment on how Mugabe, from a leader of the war of liberation, became a pliant tool in the hands of imperialism, impoverishing the Zimbabwean masses in the process, and only later turning to “land reform” and so-called “economic indigenisation” as a means of diverting attention away from the very problems his policies had provoked in the first place.

Inmates at a Kaduna Prison in Nigeria last Tuesday attempted a jailbreak, and no fewer than 15 of them are feared dead as security forces were called in to regain control of the situation. At the root of this situation are the appalling conditions in which the prisoners are kept, and beyond the prison itself the appalling living conditions of millions of Nigerian poor.

The recent death of Eugene Terre Blanche, leader of the AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), at the hands of two farm workers, has highlighted the situation that exists today in South Africa, on the one hand the many unresolved problems of the huge majority of black workers and poor, and on the other a minority within the white population who cannot reconcile themselves to the end of Apartheid, upon which their privileges depended.

The Nigerian workers’ genuine mass organised expression is the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), a powerful trade union body. But they lacked a political expression, a genuine workers’ party. In recent times a Nigerian Labour Party has been formed, which has attracted some attention from activist within the movement. The problem is that the NLC has not put its full backing behind it, leaving it in a kind of half-way house, limbo state. What is required is to transform it into a genuine mass party with the full backing of the NLC.

Over the weekend of March 6-7, hundreds of people, including many women and children, were butchered like animals in ethnic conflicts near the city of Jos in Nigeria. This is not the first time such ethnic strife has erupted. It is a symptom of the decay of Nigerian society under the rule of a parasitic local bourgeoisie at the service of imperialism.

Niger’s military overthrew former President Mamadou Tandja in February. In a sense it can be seen as a military coup against a constitutional coup that Tandja had carried out last year. But why was Tandja removed? Ola Kazeem and Fred Weston look at the background to the coup and the economic interests that it serves.

As part of the debate on the nationalisation of the mines in South Africa we re-publish here an article by Mojalefa Musi and Zico Tamela, both of whom are SACP, ANC and labour movement activists. While we do not necessarily agree with all their positions, we think it is an interesting contribution to the debate.

After several weeks of solid protest, the state authorities released the three youth activists of Jebha from prison last week. This is a huge victory for the struggle against the lack of water supplies, power cuts and other problems affecting the village. We want to thank all our readers who sent solidarity messages.