The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Richard Pithouse -
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. - Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin, 1920
As Freedom Day roles around each year it has become something of a cliché for pundits and politicians to observe that while we have political freedom the majority of our people have yet to attain economic freedom. This platitude masks an extraordinarily anaemic view of political freedom. ...
Richard Pithouse -
The degeneration of the African National Congress has reached the point where it poses a clear and present danger to the integrity of society. Julius Malema is one of the more flamboyant examples of how a movement committed to national liberation has become, in the words of Frantz Fanon, ‘a means of private advancement’. But Malema is hardly alone. The Communication Workers Union is entirely correct to have diagnosed an ‘embedded and deep-seated Kebble-ism’ within the...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
About a decade ago, there was a fashionable rebuttal for developmental alternatives within the broader configuration of power called the ANC. That rebuttal was simply that alternatives were "intellectual gymnastics."
The criticism was at once soft and devastating.
In a single stroke, a double critique unfolded. First, that alternatives existed in the realm of ideas and being "intellectual" had little practical value. Second, that because political office bearers...
Richard Pithouse -
In the salad days of our democracy it seemed fair enough to buy into the idea that our most pressing social problems would be steadily resolved in time. But the time when an easy assurance of a better future could justify the failures and horrors of the present has past.
Democracy is not consolidating and poverty is not being rolled back. These days the self-evident clichés that propped up optimism for so many years look as strangely dated as yesterday's propaganda.
By some...
Dale T. McKinley -
For several years now, but particularly since the ascendancy of Jacob Zuma and his SACP and COSATU allies within both the ANC and the state, 'the left' in South Africa has come to be almost completely associated with (and presented as) the SACP, COSATU and to a lesser extent, the ANC itself. Even though this state of affairs ignores a wide range of organisations and people that can stake a serious claim to being part of 'the left', the fact is that contemporary politics in South Africa are...
Richard Pithouse -
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919
Kader Asmal was quite right to warn that powerful people in the African National Congress (ANC) are actively working to build an anti-democratic constituency. Fikile Mbalula's response, crafted with all the delicate subtlety of a blue light cavalcade shooting motorists out of its path, offered quick confirmation of the patently...
