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Despite the resurgence internationally of strikes in recent years, studies on the temporality of strike waves within a long-wave perspective has been marked by silence in the literature. This paper revisits the debate on the veracity of long-wave theory to explain the temporality of upsurges in strike activity and the disputes on the measurement of strike waves from an international perspective. The paper applies long-wave theory to South Africa, which is a new contribution and proposes a new quantitative approach to examine the long-term patterning of strikes. This study finds that the predictive power of long-wave theory—that an escalation of the class struggle unfolds around the peaks and troughs of economic long waves—holds throughout the period 1886–2022. This paper makes a new finding that long waves of strikes display a countercyclical patterning to long waves of capitalist development, providing proof of the relative autonomy of the class struggle from long waves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Farlam Commission of Inquiry's official discourse on violence within the context of the Marikana mine massacre. The commission was established in 2012 to investigate the killing of 34 mine workers during a wage strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in South Africa. The commission was tasked with scrutinising the actions of the police, mine management and labour unions involved in the incident. By employing the concept of legalism, this paper analyses the commission's report and argues that it adopted a legalist perspective on violence, which served to legitimise the prevailing legal framework for collective bargaining while delegitimising the strike action itself. The study highlights Phase Two of the commission's investigation, which was aimed at examining the underlying sociological causes of the conflict within the mining sector. This phase provided an opportunity to delve into the structural factors that fuelled the dispute. However, despite the potential for a more nuanced exploration of structural violence, the final report of the Farlam Commission ultimately embraced a narrative form and simulacrum of legality that reflected implicit moral and political biases concerning specific forms of violence and social action. The commission struggled to assimilate critiques of the collective bargaining framework into its report, instead maintaining a fidelity to legalism, with practical implications for the type of "truth" and "justice" the commission could promote. The paper contributes to a broader understanding of the complex dynamics between legal frameworks, violence and social justice in contexts of labour disputes and collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, the South African government started to discuss the possibility of utilising shale gas in the energy mix to produce cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable electricity. Shale gas was to be used as a 'bridge fuel' in the envisaged transition to renewables. Since 2010, anti-fracking groups and other environmentalists have been at loggerheads with the state and fracking companies. This paper focuses on the effectiveness and role of anti-fracking groups and the wider environmentalism apparatus to stall fracking plans. Data for this paper is based on qualitative research in the Central Karoo between 2019 and 2022. Fieldwork involved in-depth interviews with various stakeholders, observation, documentary study, critical engagement with literature, case law and media analysis. Although the previous literature demonstrated limited power of anti-fracking groups, these groups have set boundaries and gained strides in frustrating fracking processes and conscientising communities about the dangers of fracking. Using the case of fracking, I argue that environmentalists in South Africa have been emboldened by the legal precedents they have created at courts, the secretive and elusive culture of the state, and the global dynamics against fossil fuels, especially in 2021 onwards. If it were not for their activism, fracking would have started earlier. Environmentalists have also been emboldened by global awareness of carbon emissions, especially in 2021. The victories by anti-fracking groups lend support for the argument that civil society movements are central in lobbying governments to embrace good governance, quality democracy and human rights and environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa faces several massive, interconnected challenges that reverberate through its political economy, society and education system. This paper offers lessons for the current conjuncture by exploring radical democracy and educational experiments in two other contexts: Brazil, as a point of close comparison, and Rojava (northern Syria), as a point for dissimilar comparison but which offers a "real utopia". The Brazilian student movement (2015–16) involved several waves of mass school occupations in the "student spring" (primavera secundarista), with students demanding free, quality public education and, within the occupations, experimenting with democratic, dialogical, caring educational spaces. The Revolution in Rojava, emerging in 2012 and continuing to date, offers an alternative model of social organisation guided by women's liberation, ecological harmony, and "Democratic Confederalism", a form of anti-capitalist radical democracy. It has provided fertile ground for a profoundly different education system from the statist, authoritarian models previously imposed in the region. This paper draws out several prominent themes from each context, drawing these into conversation with the contemporary South African context. First, the movements demonstrate the pedagogical importance of language and culture, history and social dynamics, the decommodification of education, feminism and ecology. Second, they highlight the political importance of education for self-organisation in relation to broader processes of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-governmental socioeconomic intervention exists within a framework and history of racialised proximity to power and privilege. The arrangements of race and power in and beyond the sector along with the inequitable distribution of material and nonmaterial resources have therefore been used to affirm the sector's affinity to colonial relations of exploitation and racism. This paper recounts the genealogy of this affinity and outlines the ways in which current arrangements of poverty, power and non-state mediation interpolate with the historical arrangements of race and power through non-state interventions. Data collected with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in Makhanda in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province inform the proposition that race and power remain central features of socioeconomic intervention in part, through organisational structures, traditions of engagement with communities, dominant explications of poverty and depictions of "the poor". The paper concludes that the world and work of NGOs—despite dominant assertions of its independence and neutrality—is inextricably bound to its historical and sociopolitical context and is thus a site wherein race and power are not only present but at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational support is a common cultural expectation and obligation in most African families. It is a form of reciprocal solidarity wherein a generation uses its privileges to assist a generation in need. This is typical of care and support relationships between parents and their children. As parents care and provide for their children, the unspoken expectation is that they are investing as their children will be obliged to take care of them in the future. In Zimbabwe, the obligations of this social contract have led many to migrate to other countries in search of economic opportunities. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant economic hardships, these reciprocal relationships have been negatively impacted. This paper assesses the impact of COVID-19 and the economic difficulties faced by migrants in South Africa, drawing from the life histories of dyads of five parents and five adult children. It explores how the governance systems implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and the precarity of transnational migrants in South Africa affected intergenerational material support within transnational families. Findings reveal that the pandemic significantly affected intergenerational support within transnational families. The restrictive measures crafted to curb the spread of the pandemic led to notable adaptations in the provision of parental support by migrant children in South Africa. Parental support went beyond reciprocity and altruism, exhibiting a profound moral value embedded in the moral economy perspective, where children remain committed to providing support to their parents despite the economic struggles presented by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iscor Vanderbijlpark, now ArcelorMittal South Africa (AMSA), is a former state-owned enterprise that was used by the Afrikaner nationalists to advance the political, economic and social interests of poor white Afrikaners. However, since 1994, there has been wide debate about why black empowerment has not happened under post-apartheid South Africa. This article compares the role of various types of social capital in the empowerment of poor whites during apartheid and black people under post-apartheid. The perceived relationship was measured by various networks, trust and the relationship between family members, neighbours and colleagues, as well as with governmental, private sector and civil society organisations (CSOs). The sample of 26 participants, comprising former and current employees of Iscor/AMSA, trade union representatives and members of the community, were assembled using purposive random sampling for the study. My doctoral study found that there was a strong connection and positive relationship between the state, business and CSOs under Afrikaner Economic Empowerment (AEE), and that social capital played a role of bonding and linking communities while under Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) the connection between the state and CSOs was weak and social capital did not contribute to empowerment. This paper attempts to address the current gap in the post-apartheid BEE literature—that is, the role of networks and CSOs in BEE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-important tool for quantitative analysis of protests, the potential power of Protest Event Analysis (PEA) has only increased with the rise of Machine Learning technologies and the ubiquity of big data. PEA coders also present an advantage over contemporary Natural Language Programming innovations by being customisable to incorporate locally appropriate terms and vernaculars, expressed as personalised ontologies. As such, there is a need to develop a standard process for deploying machine learning tools that can draw on the local. This paper introduces such a tool, innovating the numeration of abstract indicators. "Machine Learning Protest Event Analysis Keyword Enumerated Recoding" is a protocol that enables PEA coders to read and classify large "event databases", incorporating local terms and abstract indicators into the analysis. Applying this protocol to 150,000 records in a police-recorded database of crowd events in South Africa, protest events could be individually rated by levels of "tumult"—a feat hitherto inhibited by conventional PEA methods. Innovations in estimating crowd sizes, as well as an updated view of post-apartheid protest, showing that protests tend to be more common but less prone to violence than previous theories concluded, speaks to the potential for this protocol to unearth novel insights on even bigger data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]