Despite its title, this book does not look exclusively at the massacre that occurred at Marikana on 16 August 2012, when South African police officers shot and killed 34 striking mineworkers and wounded 78 others. Rather, it places that event in the context of a longer, larger struggle for dignity and economic freedom by the working class in South Africa. The authors did not do this to trivialise this significant event but to implore the reader to recognise that it was one moment, one particular incident in a long history of struggle and conflict, one that is not necessarily more important than another. As such, it pursues what George Lipsitz has called the ‘long fetch’, looking into the past and identifying the forces that slowly shaped what may otherwise appear to have been sudden and inexplicable.1 The book does this by attempting to describe the tensions between the various ‘ordinary’ individuals – the striking employees of Lonmin’s platinum mine at Marikana – and their relationships to the labour collectives they started, helped lead, or held to account. It attempts to show how understanding these tensions is crucial to understanding the events that occurred at Marikana, and understanding South Africa as an economic project.

中文翻译：

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书评：《大麻的精神：南非叛乱工会组织的兴起》，卢克·辛威尔（Luke Sinwell）和西菲威·姆巴塔（Siphiwe Mbatha）

尽管书名冠名，但它并不仅仅着眼于2012年8月16日在马里卡纳发生的大屠杀，当时南非警察开枪打死了34名打击矿工，炸伤78人。相反，它将这一事件置于南非工人阶级为争取尊严和经济自由而进行的更长，更大的斗争的背景下。作者这样做并不是要琐碎这一重大事件，而是要恳请读者认识到这是一个时刻，这是悠久的斗争和冲突历史中的一个特定事件，不一定比另一个重要。因此，它遵循了乔治·利普茨（George Lipsitz）所说的“长期获取”，回顾了过去并确定了缓慢塑造那些原本似乎是突然的和无法解释的力量。1这本书是通过描述各种“普通”个体（隆敏公司在Marikana的铂金矿的醒目的雇员）之间的紧张关系，以及他们与他们开始，帮助领导或追究的劳工集体的关系来做到这一点的。它试图表明理解这些紧张关系对于理解在马里卡纳（Marikana）发生的事件以及将南非视为一个经济项目至关重要。