The workers and poor of South Africa voted massively for an ANC that had
been purged of its right wing. Now that the ANC is once more in office,
the bourgeois – having failed to stop this – are putting enormous
pressure on its leaders to steer away from any radical pro-worker
policies. What is required is a struggle within the South African
labour movement to anchor its organisations to genuine socialist
policies. David van Wyk  in South Africa looks at the election results and what they mean for the working class.

One of the issues confronting the G20, and one the official communiqué is likely to duck, is the threat of climate change making parts of the globe uninhabitable. Nowhere is the peril more present and manifest than Bangladesh, home to more than 130 million people. The G20 leaders may smile for the cameras as their conflab closes, but the working people of Bangladesh are at the sharp end of capitalism’s failure to deal with threat of climate change

The G20 is in process as we go to print. Yet we can already make predictions as to the outcome of the talks. The poor will gain nothing from the summit. The Global Monitoring Report from Unesco estimates that as a result of the slump the 390 million poorest Africans will see their income drop by around 20% – far more than in the developed world.