part of no part

There can be little doubt that the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels have engaged, politicians, academics, economists, feminists, working class people and organisations for over 150 years, and has in many instances shaped the worlds political outcomes if not its economic outcomes in various ways. South Africa is no exception. Many have pronounced the death of Marx and his ideas over the 150 years of its unstinting analyses and critique of the Capitalist mode of production. Talcott Parsons(Parsons, 1967), at the same time as Marxism was experiencing a revival of Marxist thought across the globe, dismissed it as a theory whose significance was entirely confined to the nineteenth century. Though, according to Michael Burawoy(Burawoy, 2013) the revival did not last long, suffering setbacks through repression, dictatorship and then by market fundamentalism. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turn to the market in China, that really brought the gravediggers out in t...

In the mining villages of Ga-Pila where Anglo Platinum continues to profit from land grabbed from the traditional communities just west of Mokopane, the appointment of the new Minister of Mineral Resources, Ngoako Ramathlodi , has been met with a sense of betrayal. Ramatlhodi, Premier of Limpopo province from 1994 to 2004, was considered to have had inside knowledge that Angloplat were intending to use Sterkwater-De Hoogedoorns for its mining expansion and community resettlement programme. Ramatlhodi’s part in the 1996 purchase of a farm near an Anglo Platinum mine in Limpopo was partly obscured by the fact that a close corporation acted as the buyer. Ngoako Properties sold the farm two-and-a-half years later to Angloplat for the company’s controversial resettlement of communities affected by the mines operations. The communities of Ga-Pila, Ga-Puka, Ga-Molekane and Ga-Chaba continue to resist the land grabs by AngloPlat and will once again march on the Mogalakwena mine on Tu...