Several suicide attempts by young Tunisians, as protest against poverty and unemployment, sparked a number of riots and protests all over the country in the last few weeks. We publish here a short English introduction to an article in Arabic. A translation of the more detailed analysis will be published tomorrow.

The recent dramatic events involving Sahrawi protestors near the city of El Aayiún, with ordinary poor people fighting off the armed security forces, which led to death of around a dozen people, the wounding of several hundreds and the arrest of more than one hundred, highlight the plight of the Sahrawi people. Here we publish and account and an analysis of the events by Moroccan Marxists.

Miners at the Aurora mining company’s Grootvlei mine in Springs, on the East Rand, and the Orkney mine in the North West have taken action demanding the payment of their wages and to get their jobs back. We publish here a letter (with an introductory explanatory note) we have received from South Africa regarding this issue, which expresses the anger of the miners and also advocates the only solution to the problem: nationalization under workers’ control.

The latest edition of The Communist – in Arabic – has come out. We are providing a PDF of the paper and a list of contents in English.

The Nigerian ruling class continues to lose its social base. And rather than this process being reversed, it is accelerating. The main social base upon which this present bourgeois democratic experiment bases itself has been almost completely eroded. The ruling class finds itself more and more isolated from the ever increasing mass of Nigerian masses.

Energy workers in Nigeria recently held protests in Lagos against the privatisation of the sector. Significantly, there were banners calling for the building of the Labour Party as a working class political alternative.