Scholars argue that the rise of neoliberal mining and outsourcing has created a more fragmented working class and precarious working environment for mineworkers in the global South. Less examined is how climate change and the decarbonisation process have further restructured the labour dynamics. In the late 2000s, with the surge in global commodity prices, Tete province in Mozambique emerged as a coal frontier. However, long-established multinational mining companies gradually divested from their coal ventures, partly responding to international calls for decarbonisation. Since then, Indian companies have entered the frontier. The shifts in ownership have restructured the projects and their labour dynamics in Tete. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article argues that Indian investors have further fragmented the existing class relations and worsened already precarious labour conditions in Tete. As the coal economy persists, the authors expect to see more variations in the nexus between shifting investors and changing labour dynamics across coal-producing countries.
SUMMARY Since 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has expanded to 150 countries, with a cumulative value of approximately US$1.4 trillion, and has evolved into a key component of China’s international monetary strategy. This briefing examines how BRI investments enhance trade invoicing in renminbi (RMB) and create liquidity dependence through the People’s Bank of China’s swap network. Using 2025 data, it notes a shift from energy investments towards mining and advanced technology, with Africa seeing BRI engagement of US$61.2 billion – a 283% increase from 2024 – making it the leading region for BRI activity. The report highlights the growing role of the private sector in BRI investments, emphasising resource-backed financing and digital infrastructure such as e-CNY/mBridge as factors that enhance regional RMB usage, despite capital controls and a dollar-centred system hindering de-dollarisation. Overall, China’s engagement with Africa is gradually fostering a multipolar international monetary system.
This article argues that, in order to study the role of oil as a primary contradiction determining the mode of social reproduction of a global South country, it is fundamental to understand the role that oil has played in consolidating the US-led global order after the Second World War. Moving beyond methodological nationalism and regime type theories - especially rentier state theory - the article focuses on the case of modern Libya (1951 to the 1980s) and assesses how oil provided both opportunities and limitations for the development of the country's national sovereignty. It promoted both globalisation and nationalism, colonial and decolonisation strategies, and adherence and resistance to imperialist policies. Ultimately, the article shows that, while oil resources can serve different national developmental programmes, the real curse for developing countries is the US-led imperialist structure. The latter is an inherently undemocratic system for socio-political formations in the global South, especially in the Arab region, whose developmental ambitions prioritised popular needs and regional integration over elite enrichment and Western dependency.
This article examines the resistance strategies employed by fintech users in Jimeta, Nigeria against the violent techniques used by fintech companies to enforce loan repayments. While efforts to extend access to financial services are framed as financial inclusion, they are often entangled with exploitative practices-what the article terms financialised inclusion-marked by opaque loan terms, data extraction and violent practices. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research, the article investigates the heterogeneous strategies that fintech users employ to disentangle themselves from such violence, including 'keeping a distance', 'moving' and 'seeking support'. These practices reveal that fintech users are not passive recipients of fintech's disciplinary power, but rather active agents in resisting it. The findings contribute to debates on financialisation, debt and resistance by addressing the limited understanding of how African fintech users contest the ethos of commodity calculation and by enriching scholarship on resistance to everyday technologies.
Given China’s expanding presence in Africa’s extractive industry, this article considers why China is benefiting more than Zimbabwe from the significant increase in Chinese investment in the latter’s lithium megaprojects. The article explores energy colonialism and new patterns of accumulation in the extraction, beneficiation and export of Africa’s critical minerals, drawing on Contreras et al.’s six-dimensional energy colonialism framework to enhance our understanding of the debilitating effects of these phenomena. This framework illuminates the novel extractivist logic of green extractivism that fosters economic dependency and power asymmetries to sustain and reproduce transnational capitalism. The article considers four case studies where Chinese ownership, investment and operations are substantial. The findings show that energy colonialism underlies China’s significant increase in investments in Zimbabwe’s lithium megaprojects. The Chinese extractivist and colonial model of mining promotes the accumulation of wealth on one side and the accumulation of tragedies on the other.
The socio-ecological crisis of capitalism has given rise to right-wing populism in various parts of the world, including South Africa. Invoking Rick Turner’s ‘necessity of Utopian thinking’, this article assesses the limits of statist twentieth-century Marxist-Leninism and considers the democratic-humanist alternative that inspired the re-emerging South African trade union movement in the 1970s. It then looks at the rise of various social-ecological perspectives and the transformation of Marxist-Leninist parties in Rojava, north-east Syria, as well as Kerala, India. It argues that South Africa, like most parts of the world, desperately needs to build a democratic-humanist, ecological and feminist political centre that can harness the various social-ecological struggles being waged in order to provide a viable counter-hegemonic alternative to the moribund politics of the country. If it does not, the forces of reactionary populism, of various kinds, will gather strength.
The South African Communist Party's potential to play a progressive role within post-apartheid state leadership was frequently tested-and found wanting-following liberation in 1994. The failure was in not advancing the National Democratic Revolution's 'second-stage' objectives, that is, ending not just racial injustice in civil and political terms (the first stage), but socioeconomic injustice. Several Communist cabinet members shaped transitional and post-apartheid policies. Their sector-by-sector travails merit attention in part because they openly documented and defended their own work, and also because in housing, water and industrial development, three ministers made crucial, long-lasting neoliberal policy decisions. In the spirit of a structure-agency dialectic, such leaders (Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Rob Davies) reflected Marx's conclusion in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that people 'make their own history ... but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past', not of their own choosing-and thus not fighting effectively for socialism, either.
The article examines the distinctive contributions of Ruth First and Matthew Goniwe to liberation struggles in Mozambique and South Africa in the period between 1980 and 1985. The focus is on their intellectual influences, as well as their strategies and organisational roles. Their role in, and critical relationship to, the South African Communist Party (SACP), is examined. The influence of First and Goniwe is linked to that of two socialist intellectuals, Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci. It is argued that there were important influences on socialist thought in South Africa that are distinct from, as well as in addition and/or in parallel to, what is understood as the mainstream discourse of the SACP-the Marxist-Leninist theory of national democratic revolution and state power. There were other streams of thought and revolutionary practice related to popular power and critical pedagogy that played an important role in the struggle for socialism in southern Africa.
Nobody in the 1980s would have expected South Africa to become a beacon of any kind of freedom. The best-known feature of this former British colony was apartheid, a government-enforced system of racial segregation which had for decades forced millions of black people from their homes and denied all black people the vote. Yet apartheid came to an end in 1991, democratic elections took place in 1994, and in 1996 a new Constitution became the first in any country to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. This remarkable change took place in the context of broad and deep-rooted social struggles, with those of organised workers acting as a catalyst.
The relative success of the South African negotiated transition to a non-racial democracy in the early 1990s owed much to popular protagonism at both national and local levels. In this respect, the South African negotiations bucked the dominant transitions to democracy literature of the time. This literature argued that success required behind-closed-doors ‘elite-pacting’ between contesting ‘moderates’, sidelining ‘radicals’ and their mobilised constituencies. The South African Communist Party played a central role in propagating an alternative, people-driven negotiation process. The key power bases for popular pro-democracy mobilisation were the black townships on the periphery of apartheid-era towns and cities. There was an antagonistic but reciprocal dependence between the capitalist class and these proletarianised locations with their armies of daily migrant workers. The township political stay-away and boycotts of ‘white’ businesses were key weapons of negotiation that underpinned the mid 1990s transition to a non-racial democracy.
This article explores the vexing question that has challenged South Africa in the post-apartheid era: what development policies ought to be pursued to bring about a more economically equal society? The emphasis of this piece is the role that the South African Communist Party has played in pushing the South African government in a more progressive direction when its alliance partner, the African National Congress, leaned into a neoliberal strategy.
This debate examines the changing dynamics of the Nigerian economy and politics. It discusses the consequences of the downward trend of petroleum revenues and new energy technologies in the transport sector and the impact on Nigeria's political and institutional structures in the 'post-oil economy'. It argues that although the reductions in oil revenues due to internal and global factors have led to radical debates on political restructuring, the post-oil transitions are more likely to be chaotic than orderly. There seems to be only a small hope that the reactionary ruling class will willingly withdraw from influencing the national economy while the oil economy continues, even in a reduced capacity.
