South Africa is a morass of wretched inequality, racial tensions and class conflicts, its transition limited and frustrating. Much blame lies with ongoing "white monopoly capital," but its essential to pay attention to ongoing "denationalisation" by foreign capital. There are also major blind-spots in analyses that omit the central role of the state as owner of means of production (as well as means of coercion & administration). Private and state elites are structurally & programmatically allied, elections cannot emancipate the black working class -- only autonomous mobilisation and action.

Richard Estes and Ron Glick interviewed Lucien van der Walt, co-author of "Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism," on their show “Speaking In Tongues,” KDVS, 90.3 FM, University Of California, Davis. The interview took place on September 25, 2009.
The interview covers issues like defining anarchism, anarchism and trade unions today, the issue of centralisation, anarchism and globalisation then and now, the Soviet Union and Communism, the Spanish Civil War, anarchism and immigration today, the relationship between class struggle and other forms of oppression, anarchism after Seattle, and anarchism and postmodernism.

**Based on a talk given in Kenya, this his article argues that, while official minimum wages and other improvements are welcome gains, they are inadequate in an exploiting system based on the rule of the few. It is necessary to pose the more ambitious demand for a ‘living wage,’ set by the working class, and to enforce this by building powerful, autonomous, self-managed, conscientised class-struggle movements. Rejecting ‘privilege’ theories, it argues that all sectors of the working class benefit from demands and campaigns that secure equal rights, equal treatment and equal wages, against divide-and-rule systems, and in which strikers build alliances with communities and users. A ‘living wage’ movement of this type should be located in a larger project of building a popular counter-power that can resist, and then topple, ruling class power.

When we commemorate May Day we rarely reflect on why it is a public holiday in Africa or elsewhere. Sian Byrne, Paliani Chinguwo, Warren McGregor, and Lucien van der Walt tell of the powerful struggles that lie behind its existence, internationally and in Botswana...

RADIO: "Poverty And The Living Wage Campaign, " 26 August 2015. Lucien van der Walt arguing for autonomous, self-managed unified working class movement to win living wages and build a breakthrough to new, better society ....

Lucien van der Walt, TV interview, 2007, on "Interface" (SABC 3), on job losses in South Africa

Opinion: "Troubled SA must take May Day seriously" (30 Apr 2015, Sian Byrne, Warren McGregor, Lucien van der Walt)
"May Day – a call to build an international movement of working class and poor people across lines of race, nation and religion for workers’ control and democracy from below, social justice and freedom from political and economic oppression – remains critical. In a country racked by anti-immigrant violence, racial and ethnic tensions, the fragmentation of the labour federation Cosatu, corporate scandals and political corruption, it is time to remember May Day’s roots and aspirations."

Overview of labour movement and union history in South Africa, from 1880s to present.Nicole Ulrich & Lucien van der Walt, 2009, “South Africa, labor movement”, International Encyclopaedia of Revolution and Protest, Blackwell, New York, pp. 3090-3099