How to explain the violent xenophobic attacks in South Africa in recent years? Two militant South African activists, Leonard Gentle and Noor Nieftagodien, interviewed here, analyse the race/class bases for the anti-foreigner violence in terms of the echoes/reverberations of apartheid and the rise of neoliberalism. They argue that remnants of apartheid have endured through the reproduction of racial and tribal categories, which has contributed to the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalist politics and the fragmentation of black unity. South Africa’s specific history of capitalist development, the African National Congress’s embraces of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and rainbowism, on the other, have produced the underlying conditions of precarity and desperation that resulted in the normalisation of xenophobia. The unions, too, have failed to recognise the new shape of the ‘working class’. Gentle and Nieftagodien outline the need to contend with the broader social conditions, the global economic crisis, neoliberalism and the deep inequalities it engenders in order to counteract the rising tide of xenophobia and build working-class unity.

如何解释近年来南非发生的暴力仇外袭击事件？在此接受采访的两位南非激进分子 Leonard Gentle 和 Noor Nieftagodien 从种族隔离的回声/回响和新自由主义的兴起来分析排外暴力的种族/阶级基础。他们认为，种族隔离的残余已经通过种族和部落类别的再生产而持续存在，这导致了排他性民族主义政治的根深蒂固和黑人团结的分裂。南非特定的资本主义发展历史，一方面是非洲人国民大会对新自由主义的拥护，另一方面是彩虹主义，产生了不稳定和绝望的潜在条件，导致仇外心理正常化。工会也一样 未能认识到“工人阶级”的新形态。Gentle 和 Nieftagodien 概述了应对更广泛的社会状况、全球经济危机、新自由主义及其造成的严重不平等的必要性，以抵消日益上升的仇外情绪并建立工人阶级的团结。