This week, the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will again be held in Washington, DC, with back-slapping now that the Bretton Woods twins have reached age 75 (they were founded at a New Hampshire hotel in 1944). And with more passion than in recent years, there will be protests, especially climate activists on Friday [18 October] at noon with a strong set of messages, to “end all funding for fossil fuels!”

Autopsy reveals Lonmin—the British-South African company—corpse’s poisoning by microfinance, ‘development finance’ and corporate finance. 

In a few days, the world’s third largest platinimum mining house, Lonmin, will likely be remembered as the exemplar of multinational corporate irresponsibility. As a people’s trial hosted by the Marikana Solidarity Network gets underway outside Carlton House Terrace in London, where Lonmin’s shareholders vote on a friendly takeover deal (albeit with extremely dubious characteristics), many critics are shaking their heads – and fists – at the extraordinary financial and political circumstances.

Upon taking power in a palace coup a year ago, Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) government was supposedly going to sweep out the prolific corruptionassociated with the 2009-18 Jacob Zuma ANC regime. But although excruciatingly-slow progress is being made in evicting the most obvious villains, durable Zumite influences remain, and whistleblowing continues to unveil rapid ANC degeneracy, even stretching into the Ramaphosa family. 

Once again, a formidable burst of state brutality against Zimbabwe’s citizenry has left at least a dozen corpses, scores of serious injuries, mass arrests, Internet suspension and a furious citizenry. The 14-17 January nationwide protests were called by trade unions against an unprecedented fuel price hike, leading to repression reminiscent of former leader Robert Mugabe’s iron fist.

World Bank president Jim Kim is an ex-leftist who claims that in the mid-1990s he wanted to shut down the Bank. At the time, it was an entirely valid, realistic goal of the 50 Years is Enough! Campaign and especially the World Bank Bonds Boycott. Kim’s co-edited Dying for Growth (2000) book-length analysis of the Bank’s attacks on global South public health offered very useful ammunition.

The old guard of South Africa’s ruling party put on new clothes last year, and a new party of the working class finally made its debut.

This week’s hush-hush visit by International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde to Pretoria (between stops in Ghana and Angola) is mysterious. In contrast to last week’s IMF press briefing claim – “Madame Lagarde will hold meetings with the authorities, as well as fairly extensive meetings with the private sector, civil society, academia, women leaders, and of course the media” – there is a complete information void here, with no public events scheduled.

The World Social Forum’s “Thematic Forum on Mining and Extractivism” convenes from 12-15 November 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, just after the Southern Africa People’s Tribunal on Transnational Corporations. In between, at the notorious 2012 massacre site on the platinum belt to the west, there is a launch of a new book – Business as Usual after Marikana– critical not only of the mining house Lonmin but of its international financiers and buyers. 

South Africa has just witnessed two major economic events, which spoke volumes about the prospects for global and local capitalism: an austerity-oriented budgetleaving the economy far more vulnerable to renewed world financial chaos; and a sham investment conferencefeaturing capitalists with just as strong a record of super-exploitation and deceit as those who went to Mohammed bin Salman’sin Riyadh the week before.

Samir Amin was as ruthless a critic of extreme religious movements as he was of neoliberal imperialism. (Ricardo Ramirez)

Samir Amin’s celebrated life was amongst the most trying, but also rewarding, of his generation’s left intelligentsia. Following Amin’s death in Paris on Sunday, his political courage and professional fearlessness are two traits now recognised as exceedingly rare. Alongside extraordinary contributions to applied political-economic theory beginning 60 years ago, Amin’s unabashed Third Worldist advocacy was channelled through unparalleled scholarly entrepreneurship when establishing surprisingly durable research institutions.

This is a brics-from-below reader put together for the 23-24 July 2018 Johannesburg Teach-In ahead of the July 2018 BRICS Summit hosted by South Africa. 

Can the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc rise to the occasion, as Donald Trump jerks Western imperialism out of traditional alignments? With war-talk against Iran blowing through Trump’s tweets, and with Washington’s trade wars raging against both China and traditional allies, there was talk here in Johannesburg about counter-hegemonic prospects during the last week of July. 

Across the world, trade unions are under unprecedented threat, as just witnessed in the United States where the Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision denudes an already weak labour movement of public sector power, for conservatives are aiming at “starving unions of funds and eventually disbanding them altogether.” Where, then, does organisational hope for working people lie?

South African academics and think tanks met on 28-31 May 2018 for deliberations leading to the July 2018 BRICS heads of state summit to be hosted by South Africa. Most of these scholars believe that the BRICS countries offer an alternative to Western imperialism, but the author argues that they are seriously wrong. 

An exceptionally interesting debate about how imperialism is now behaving.

Cyril Ramaphosa’s soft-coup firing of Jacob Zuma from the South African presidency on 14 February 2018, after nearly nine years in power and a bitter struggle to avoid resignation, has contradictory local and geopolitical implications. Amidst general applause at seeing Zuma’s rear end in the society, immediately concerns arise about the new president’s neo-liberal, pro-corporate tendencies, and indeed his legacy of financial corruption and class war against workers given the lack of closure on the 2012 Marikana Massacre.

A recent World Bank report, The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018, offers evidence of how much poorer Africa is becoming thanks to rampant minerals, oil and gas extraction. Yet World Bank policies and practices remain oriented to enforcing foreign loan repayments and transnational corporate profit repatriation, thus maintaining the looting.

Monday night’s internal African National Congress (ANC) presidential election of Cyril Ramaphosa – with a razor-thin 51% majority of nearly 4800 delegates – displaced but did not resolve a fight between two bitterly-opposed factions. On the one hand are powerful elements friendly to so-called “White Monopoly Capital,” and on the other are outgoing ANC president Jacob Zuma’s allies led by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, his ex-wife and former African Union chairperson. The latter faction includes corrupt state “tenderpreneur” syndicates, especially the notorious Gupta brothers, and is hence typically nicknamed “Zupta.” (Zuma is still scheduled to serve as national president until mid-2019.)