1st Edition
Mzala Nxumalo, Leftist Thought and Contemporary South Africa
Written as a tribute to the revolutionary intellectual and leader Mzala Nxumalo, this book discusses the significance of his work in the context of contemporary South African left politics. It explores the history and struggle of the apartheid era that preceded the advent of democracy to analyze a crucial aspect of the national question – that is, the quest for the establishment of a united South Africa to overcome racist and sexist policies that create and nurture divisions among black people.
The subjects in this book deal with a wide range of topics, including the new social, economic and political challenges facing democratic South Africa; the need to reexamine the critique of capitalism in the 21st century; the relationship between race, class and community struggles; and the ecological challenges under capitalism.
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Acronyms and abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: Mzala Nxumalo’s ideas in post-apartheid South Africa
Mandla J. Radebe and John Pampallis
PART 1: MZALA AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION
1. Radical Left Thought Revival: Mzala’s Views and Their Applicability in Contemporary South Africa
Percy Ngonyama
2. The National Question and Exile: Remembering Mzala in London
Elaine Unterhalter
3. Socialism is the Future: Comrade Mzala’s Thoughts on the National Question
Mandla J. Radebe
4. The First and Second Transitions and the National Question in South Africa
Gregory Houston and Yul Derek Davids
5. The EFF’s Perspective on ‘What is the Future of the Left in South Africa in a Global Context?’
Sam Matiase
6. The Dilemma of the Post-1994 Democratic Breakthrough: A Broad Survey of Community Struggles in South Africa
Noel L.Z. Solani
PART 2: COMMUNITY, STATE AND GLOBE: ISSUES, STRUGGLES AND THE POLITICS OF WORK
7. The Challenges of Economic and Social Development in South Africa: Left Perspectives
Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo
8. Global Economic Imperialism and the Politics of (Under) Development: Street Traders, Domestic Workers and Sex Workers
Pat Horn
9. Social and Economic Challenges from a Left Perspective
Gunnett Kaaf
10. After Revisionist Marxism: Reanimating the Critique of Capitalism in South Africa
Bernard Dubbeld
11. Emerging Powers and the Polycentric World
Vladimir Shubin
12. Ecocide or Socialism: Ecological Challenges and Neoliberal Capitalist Constrains on Radical Transformation
Rasigan Maharajh and Sigfried Tivana
Conclusion: The Future of Leftist Thought in a New Century
Robert J. Balfour
About the Contributors
Index
Biography
Robert J. Balfour is Deputy Vice Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) at North-West University, South Africa. He is a National Research Foundation-rated academic and has published frequently on language learning and literacy, rural education and postcolonial literature.
‘In a dispiriting present, these wide-ranging essays reinvigorate left analysis, with many drawing on the work of the communist intellectual and militant Mzala Nxumalo. This reaching back to engage the present means that this volume is an important contribution to sustaining a national left intellectual tradition, aproject in dialogue with the best ideas from around the world. Mzala, as he was and remains known, was committed to a nonsectarian approach to building a left project and these essays will be useful to people across the South African left, and elsewhere.’
— Scholar, journalist, editor, teacher and activist; author of Writing the Decline: on the Struggle for South Africa’s Democracy (2016) and editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2006), Richard Pithouse
