Behind The Veil

Swaziland Solidarity Network is a group you can join and read and contribute to, and help lay down a body of understanding, critique and revolutionary determination for Swaziland. The first linked item below is from that group. It is short and to the point. Imprisonment and torture of political agitators is not a thing of the past in this region, it is happening now, and will be happening this weekend.

The Swazis are using the Internet and e-mail groups. Meanwhile, in the City Press Goodenough Mashego writes that blog awards should not be an all-white affair. Blacks are blogging, too. Goodenough gives the names of some of these blogs. The Communist University has found them and linked them within Goodenough’s article. Follow the second link below and find out how good they really are.

The third link, from the Guardian, does not mention South Africa but is of great interest to South Africa. It shows how the BAE Company is being protected from investigation by thuggish dirty tricks. This is the same company that benefited from South Africa’s “arms deal”.

From Moneyweb there is an account of certain money flows in the 1990s into South Africa, allegedly to the ANC, from certain other countries. Was this bona fide or was it the precursor of the “1996 class project”? Click the link and judge for yourself.

The CU meets again on Tuesday, May 8th (next Tuesday is May Day), at the SACP boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein, at 17h00.

Karl Marx wrote three great works on revolutionary France in the period 1848 to 1872. The first was called “The Class Struggles in France” and was written in 1850. It is the prototype of a genre of concrete political economy, and a type of class analysis that continues to be indispensable to this day. This is the main work we will discuss next time. See the link below.

The other one is Antonio Gramsci’s short essay on “Caesarism”. This will help us to appreciate the next following work which will be the "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte". This particular Bonaparte (also known as Napoleon III) is the one after whom the word “Bonapartism” was coined. It refers to a person who rises to the top by playing each side off against the others.

The image above is of Antonio Gramsci.

Click on these links:

Silent brutality in Southern Africa, Sedition Trialists Update, SSN (374 words)

Blog awards get it all wrong, Goodenough Mashego, City Press (382 words)

UK sabotage on BAE bribes inquiry, Leigh and Evans, Guardian (653 words)

Behind ‘quiet diplomacy’, James Myburgh, Moneyweb (1023 words)

Class Struggles in France, Part 1, The Defeat of June, 1848 (9373 words)

Gramsci, A., The Modern Prince, Caesarism (2265 words)