First published by Ravan Press in 1985, Cast in a Racial Mould was a pioneering book. It is now republished by Wits University Press with a new foreword by Michael Burawoy and with support from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.Entering what Marx called the hidden abode of capitalism; the labour process; this book analyzes the nature of work and worker resistance in the metal industry which lies at the core of South Africa manuf...

Analyses the fragmentation and future of labour movements in South Africa and globally in the context of globalisation, the fourth industrial revolution and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting work and workers in the Global South.Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality ...

It is a great privilege to launch our series with A Working Life, Cruel Beyond Belief, by Alfred Temba Qabula, with a new Foreword by the original translator, BE Nzimande. Qabula was a central figure in the cultural movement among working people that emerged in and around Durban in the 1980s. It was an innovative attempt to draw on the oral poetry developed among the Nguni people over many centuries. Alfred Temba Qabula was a forklift driver in the Dunlop tyre factory in Durban at the time...

This is the second volume, after Democratizing Democracy, of the collection *Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestoes.*Here, the author examines alternative models to capitalist developmentthrough case studies of collective land management, cooperatives ofgarbage collectors and women's agricultural cooperatives. He alsoanalyzes the changing capital-labor conflict of the past two decadesand the way labor solidarity is reconstituting itself under new formsfrom Brazil...

This book offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to thinking about inequality, and to understanding how inequality is produced and reproduced in the global South.Without the safety net of the various Northern welfare states, inequality in the global South is not merely a socio-economic problem, but an existential threat to the social contract that underpins the democratic state and society itself. Only a response that is firmly grounded in the context of the global South ...

This volume examines the way in which various strands of left thought have addressed the National Question.The re-emergence of debates on the decolonisation of knowledge has revived interest in the National Question, which began over a century ago and remains unresolved. Tensions that were suppressed and hidden in the past are now being openly debated. Despite this, the goal of one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. T...

These reflections can be described as a personal journey, wrestling with varying experiences in order to gain some existential understanding of life. They were written over a period of ten years during which time they were shared with a wide cross section of persons both in Jamaica and overseas. The contents are varied, incorporating real life experiences, during which the author assumed the role of student, learning from the inexhaustible examples from persons who can be described as livi...

'A kind of epic poem, one that moves in circular fashion from passionate denunciation to intense autobiographical reflection ... should be required reading for every MP, peer, councillor, civil servant and commentator. The fury and sense of powerlessness that so many people feel at government policy beam out of every page.' The Guardian'It is not enough to read Harry's record of the struggles and hopes of a generation – we have to re-assert his pri...

Mukiwa opens with Peter Godwin, six years old, describing the murder of his neighbor by African guerillas, in 1964, pre-war Rhodesia. Godwin's parents are liberal whites, his mother a governement-employed doctor, his father an engineer. Through his innocent, young eyes, the story of the beginning of the end of white rule in Africa unfolds. The memoir follows Godwin's personal journey from the eve of war in Rhodesia to his experience fighting in the civil war that he detests to his...

If 1916 is the founding myth of the Irish state then the famine is the founding tragedy.It was a tragedy on a truly epic scale, the events of the famine came to pass not in one of the worlds poorest nations, but in what was at the time part of metropolitan Britain (following the Act of Union of 1800).Caused by the destruction of the staple food of the ordinary Irishman and women, the potato, by blight. the famine resulted in the massive depopulation of Irel...

**Barack Obama, via Facebook: “A compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.”The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s best-known novel, featuring an introduction by Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah**Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. ...