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?
Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. Yet we're also often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism's most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. This isn't very surprising. In practice his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies and nasty dictatorships. Nevertheless, we shouldn't reject Marx too quickly. We ought to see him as guide whose diagnosis of capitalism's ills helps us to navigate towards a more...
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that our current brand of global capitalism is quickly outgrowing democracy and that a divorce between the two is inevitable. This leads to an array of social and geopolitical concerns regarding the public commons, including the emergence of new forms of apartheid. New walls are emerging between, for example, the United States and Mexico, Israel and the West Bank in addition to a new obsession with how to isolate Europe from Africa. The paradox of...
Lynn Parramore -
Whether she is Instagramming her butt, or spending $827,000 on gold-plated toilets for her new mansion, or in her latest exploit, posing nude on silver sheets for GQ, Kim Kardashian has the American media in a fawning frenzy of non-stop headlines.
Her body!
“Kim Kardashian Flaunts Cleavage In Leather Dress For Made In America” (Hollywood Life)
Her money!
“Kim Kardashian's $28 Million Year: How She Made More Than Ever Before” (Forbes)
Her fame!...
Both mainstream and leftist economists are heaping praises on French economist, Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In his review of the book, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues, "The big idea of (the book) is that we haven't just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we're also on a path back to "patrimonial capitalism," in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled…by family dynasties...This is a book...
On 9 April 2014, one of the world's most respected public thinkers visited the RSA to explore the hidden workings of capital. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, unraveled the paradoxes at the heart of capitalism. In this fascinating lecture and discussion the role of rapidly developing technology and its impact on labour is identified as a major challenge. Technology is actually removing labour from the dynamics of capitalism....
Are we at an inflection point in the development of capitalism? Can there be an intersection between business and values? Can capitalism be made to serve a just and equitable society? The traditional form of capitalism is to make money from a product or service in the marketplace. However, some business people contemplate that the real entrepreneurship is to figure out how the world is better off because of your product or service and bring that into the marketplace. The makers of the...
