Struggle in a Time of Crisis

Mbuso Nkosi

Nicolas Pons-Vignon

The crisis which started in the United States in 2007 has turned into a global depression whose consequences are wreaking havoc across the world, although affecting in a disproportionate manner the 99 per cent, people who depend on their labour or state transfers to live. While banks and large companies have been bailed out (a remarkable sign that state intervention is alive and well in the neoliberal era) it is the majority who are now paying the bill in the form of spending cuts. Such cuts have direct social and economic effects: on the one hand, they make life more difficult for the poor; on the other hand, they undermine investment and economic recovery, delaying desperately needed job creation. As shown by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu (2013) in their work on austerity policies’ impact on health, austerity kills, not just growth, but people. 

The crisis has shown the limits of the neoliberal model of accumulation and of its theoretical or ideological foundation, the neoclassical belief in the self-regulating ability of ‘free’ markets. This is nothing new though, as many economists outside of the hegemonic tradition had been arguing since the 1980s that neoliberal capitalism does not only increase inequality, but generates disequilibria which threaten the possibility of sustained growth. There is however, in Europe and North America, a rampant sense of powerlessness in the face of the crisis. This is because, in spite of the rise of numerous movements of contestation of neoliberal policies, from Occupy to the Indignados, the only cure which politicians are implementing to respond to the ills of neoliberalism entail more of the same.

Freedom of Association and the Right to Strike

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

It is a fact that technological innovations and changes in the organization of work have caused alterations in the labour market, making certain international labour standards obsolete and, at the same time, giving rise to demands for new rights. However, this does not justify the pressure that the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been put under to reduce its character as an International Organization (IO) to that of an agency of the United Nations system, nor indeed the questioning about whether the right to strike is part of Convention 87, on freedom of association, although the ILO has been fostering this concept for more than sixty years now. 

The ILO is one of the oldest and most important organizations in the UN system. It is also the only one to be run on a tripartite basis – governments, employers and workers. It has standard-setting and supervisory powers, as well as mechanisms for annulling obsolete standards, for updating incomplete standards and for enabling member countries to denounce Conventions that they consider unsuitable. So the instruments for perfecting the standards system do exist.

Farm Worker Uprising on the Western Cape: From “Flexible Work” to “Moment of Madness”

Jesse Wilderman

“We outnumber the farmers eleven to one and they still hoard the economic power and still talk to us with disrespect. We could kill all the farmers in a weekend if we wanted to and this land will be fucked up - it could happen in one day. But until this strike we were never able to get all the farm workers and all of us to come out and fight back”

Local Councilman and supporter of the farm worker protests 

In late 2012 into early 2013, tens of thousands of farm workers and their allies across more than twenty-five towns around the Western Cape of South Africa, engaged in a historic series of explosive and unexpected work stoppages and protests. There had not in living memory been a protest that reached this scale and intensity, even though grievances around low wages, inadequate housing, and unfair treatment have plagued farm workers for years; the perceived power of the farm owners coupled with a lack of large, formal organisation or trade unions among farm workers seemed to have stacked the deck against collective resistance.

Not only was the scale of this uprising historic, it displayed a form of resistance outside the “paternalistic” discourse that characterised relationships between farm workers and farm owners; as Ewert and Du Toit explain about traditional farm worker resistance, “. . . they rely on the ‘weapons of the weak’, operating within the framework of the paternalistic moral universe itself, relying on individual appeals, consensual negotiations, and the avoidance of the appearance of open conflict” (2005). Yet this uprising was defined by open conflict, including burning of vineyards, protest marches, and pitched battles with the police; farm workers and their allies adopted an overt, confrontational, and adversarial approach in an apparent break from the traditional discourse.

The Swedish Model in 2015: A ‘Safe Haven’ or a ‘Nordic Noir’?

Alexis Stenfors

Fiction versus a startling reality
I am positively surprised by the increasing number of people coming up to me asking for travel advice on Scandinavia. As is often the case, they admit to ultimately having been swayed by the dark landscapes and fictional characters in Nordic noir novels or television box sets. Simultaneously, foreign observers find the new political landscape in Sweden puzzling and worrying - and rightly so. Having slowly witnessed the deconstruction of the old ‘Swedish model’, a new element appears to have cemented the belief that Sweden truly has changed: the rise of the Sweden Democrats. How could an anti-immigrant party on the Far Right become the 3rd largest party in the country?

Initially, it would be easy to dismiss the Sweden Democrats as yet another European anti-immigration party on the Far Right, occasionally flirting with Fascism but portraying themselves as ‘neither Left nor Right’. As is then the case, the focal point gravitates towards immigration and multiculturalism for supporters and opponents alike. This might be a convenient and logical approach, but it also leads to the wrong precision.

The Swedish model offers an insight to why.

Chinese investments, Marange diamonds and ‘militarised capitalism’ in Zimbabwe

Nunurayi Mutyanda

Crispen Chinguno

Taurai Mereki

For the past two decades, China has undergone a massive global economic expansion and a continued search for resources to keep up its high growth targets. This converged with Zimbabwe’s adoption of a look East economic policy in 2003, following a fall out with the West. As a result there have been massive Chinese investments in various Zimbabwean sectors including mining, telecommunications, infrastructure development, agriculture and retail. This paper examines the experience of workers in Chinese investments, drawing from Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe. 

The mining potential of the Marange fields was discovered in 2006 following the unorthodox withdrawal of mining rights from the British-owned African Consolidated Resources (ACR) due to a strained relationship between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom (Sokwanele, 2011). 

‘Militarised’ capitalism

Zimbabwe discovered its biggest diamond deposit when it was under sanctions from the European Union and the United States. Underlying politics and the mineral rights legal wrangle presented an impediment for the attraction of investors. The regime was thus forced to adopt a militarised model of capitalism, a mining exploitation regime controlled by the military and its associates. Its industrial relations model is not receptive to independent trade unions. To start up the diamond mining operations at Marange, the government established a subsidiary closely linked to the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) through a parastatal, the Mineral Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) (ibid). This was the onset of the militarisation of the Marange diamond mining operations and has a bearing on the labour relations that evolved.