Category Archives: Zwelethu Train Station

Padkos: Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis

Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis

Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis requires not only a confrontation with forces and ideologies of the right, but also with those elements in leftist traditions that re-inscribe authoritarian dogmatism, hierarchical power, political exclusion, and contemptuous vanguardism. No ideological orientation guarantees that we're safeguarded against these tendencies – but humanist, autonomist, and anarchist traditions of the left become important resources since they explicitly critique them and, perhaps more importantly, explore practical ways of doing politics against them.

In this edition of Padkos we're sharing a short note on “Christianity and Anarchism” that Mark Butler and Graham Philpott (CLP) recently wrote for our friends at the Anabaptist Network of South Africa (ANISA). We point out that the “anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian” characteristics of Jesus' politics signals “important parallels and resonances” with anarchism.

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Attachments


Butler & Philpott: Christianity & Anarchism

Graeber: The New Anarchists

Twenty Years of Democracy: the call of a world that does not yet exist

The state and corporate  media in South Africa won’t let us forget that 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of representative democracy. But the thinking of people’s organisations, and the conditions against which they rebel and organise, remind us just how utterly disappointing and hollow that project of state democracy actually is. For those who respect and hear the Truth of autonomous grassroots thought and action, it is patently obvious that the state can no longer be seriously imagined as a vehicle for emancipatory politics. Furthermore, making the terrain of state politics the primary concern or target of popular protest and power tends inevitably to distort and finally defeat its original emancipatory impulse.

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Update from Umlazi: Zwelethu Train Station Shut Down & Protest at the Police Station

18 July 2012
Combined UPM & AbM Press Statement

Update from Umlazi: Zwelethu Train Station Shut Down & Protest at the Police Station

At around 4:00 a.m. yesterday morning activists involved in the Umlazi Occupation and the ward 88 struggle closed down the Zwelethu Train Station. This action was in protest at the failure of the police to arrest the ward councillor, Nomzamo Mkhize, after she and her son assaulted an activist.

There was a stand-off between activists and the police at the train station following which the general secretary of the BEC of the local ANC branch, Sandile, tried to arrange an urgent meeting with Nigel Gumede. A meeting with Gumede has always been one of the demands of the Umlazi Occupation.

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