Ruth First - New General Megathread for the 17th of August 2023
Heloise Ruth First (4 May 1925 – 17 August 1982) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar. She was assassinated in Mozambique, where she was working in exile, by a parcel bomb built by South African police.
Journalist, academic and political activist, Ruth Heloise First was born on 4 May 1925. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants Julius and Matilda (neé Levetan) First. Julius, a furniture manufacturer, was born in Latvia and came to South Africa in 1906 at the age of 10. Matilda came to South Africa from Lithuania when she was four years old. They were founder members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, later South African Communist Party [SACP]) in 1921. Ruth and her brother Ronald grew up in a household, in which intense political debate between people of all races and classes often took place.
After matriculating from Jeppe High School for Girls, First studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1942 to 1946. She graduated with a BA (Social Studies), receiving firsts in sociology, anthropology, economic history and native administration. Her fellow students included Nelson Mandela, Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambican freedom fighter and the first leader of FRELIMO), Joe Slovo, JN Singh (executive member of both the Natal and South African Indian Congress), and Ismail Meer (a former secretary-general of the South African Indian Congress). First helped found the Federation of Progressive Students and served as secretary to the Young Communist League, and was active in the Progressive Youth Council and, for a short while, the Johannesburg branch of the CPSA.
In 1947 First worked, briefly, for the Johannesburg City Council, but left because she disagreed with the actions of the council. She then became the Johannesburg editor of a left-wing weekly newspaper. As a journalist she specialised in investigative reporting and her incisive articles about slave-like conditions on Bethal potato farms, the women's anti-pass campaign, migrant labour, bus boycotts and slum conditions remain among the finest pieces of social and labour journalism of the 1950s.
Having grown up in a politically conscious home, First's political involvement never abated. Apart from the activities already mentioned, she did support work for the 1946 mineworkers' strike, the Indian Passive Resistance campaign and protests surrounding the outlawing of communism in 1950. First was a Marxist with a wide internationalist perspective. She travelled to China, the Union Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and countries in Africa, experiences that she documented and analysed. She was central to debates within the Johannesburg Discussion Club, which led to the formation of the underground SACP (of which First was a member) and to closer links between the SACP and the African National Congress (ANC).
In 1949, First married Joe Slovo, a lawyer and labour organiser and, like her, a communist. Throughout the 1950s their home in Roosevelt Park was an important centre for multiracial political gatherings.
Despite her public profile and wide contacts, First remained a private person. She had a brilliant intellect and did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp criticism and her impatience with bluster earned her enemies and she was often feared in political debate.
In 1953, First helped found the South African Congress of Democrats (COD), the White wing of the Congress Alliance, and she took over as editor of Fighting Talk, a journal supporting the alliance. In 1956, both First and Slovo were arrested and charged in the Treason Trial. The trial lasted four years, after which, all 156 accused were acquitted on 29 March 1961.
First considered herself to be primarily a labour reporter, and during the 1950s she was producing up to 15 stories a week. Despite this high work rate, her writing remained vivid, accurate and often controversial. Her investigative journalism was the basis of her longer pamphlets and, later, her books. The transition to more complex writing came easily.
During the state of emergency following the Sharpeville shootings of March 1960, First fled to Swaziland with her children, returning after the emergency was lifted, six months later, to continue as Johannesburg editor of New Age (successor to The Guardian).
On 9 August 1963, First was detained at the Wits University library. This took place following the arrests of members of the underground ANC, the SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe in Rivonia on 11 July. In the trial which followed, political leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki were sentenced to life imprisonment. However, First was not among the accused.
After 90 days First was released but immediately re-arrested on the pavement outside the police station. She was held for a further 27 days, during which she attempted suicide. During this time her father fled South Africa. Soon after her release First left with her children to join her husband, Joe Slovo, who had already fled the country to Britain.
The family settled in North London and First threw herself into anti-apartheid politics, joining the Anti-Apartheid Movement, holding talks, seminars and public discussions in support of the ANC and SACP.
During the 1960s, First researched and edited Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (1967), Govan Mbeki's The Peasant's Revolt (1967) and Oginda Odinga's Not yet Uhuru (for which she was deported to Kenya).
Following a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conference at the centre on 17 August 1982, First was killed by a letter bomb, widely believed to have been the work of security agencies within South Africa. Until her death, she remained a ‘listed’ communist and could not be quoted in South Africa.
My girlfriend works as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut, and her store just implemented an AI dispatch system that winds up sending a sizeable number of the store's orders to DoorDash. This of course screws her and the other drivers out of tips.
I offer this information both as a concrete example of how AI under capitalism harms workers, but also to express how upset I am at how I'm unable to help her. I've brought up the subject of unionizing, but I don't know that it'd help, or if she or her coworkers would even go for it. I've been trying to get her to jump ship for Domino's, but apparently they have a similar system in their stores, though I don't know if any of the locals have implemented it yet.
I understand why she doesn't quit mind, she's been doing it five years and it can be lucrative when business is up. But the shithead that run the company keep price gouging, and business has slowed down considerably as a result. That combined with this AI nonsense is a good argument for me pressing the issue again.
there's no bottom to these companies' greed. i drove for domino's last year and at the time i believe it was the only major chain who hadn't yet outsourced to doordash or uber. not sure what's changed since. i would usually net about $20 an hour, $10 from tips and $10 from wages. so these companies are really trying to pull the floor out from under their drivers and replace them with a doordasher who's lucky to net $10 an hour total after expenses. because they're too fucking cheap to pay their own workers $10/hour. to a pizza place that's almost free due to the massive margins involved.
not to mention that doordash drivers aren't provided with the hot bags needed to transport pizza… cold pizza is gonna make the pizza place look bad
Bastards, the whole lot of them. My last job involved a lot of fairly delicate hands-on work, but you best believe they would've replaced us with machines or outsourced our work to gig workers if they could've.
I couldn't say myself whether Domino's is using those services, but I'm going to get on her about at least looking into it. I don't think I'll have to try hard. Way she talks, I think this might finally be the last straw.