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?
Saliem Fakir -
The recent G20 meeting is prescient. It reinforces the idea, despite scepticism about state intervention, that only the state can bring back balance. The G20 statement is full of measures that speak to a throng of interventions that demonstrate the state’s capacity is not nascent, but real.
The financial crisis like the “War or Terror” legitimises state activism within the economy. If you thought the state was dead you cannot help but feel that its strident zest for life is...
Meizhu Lui talks at a seminar (in 2006, but still extremely relevant today) about issues covered in a book she co-authored with four others, The Colour of Wealth, which examines the racial wealth divide in contemporary America. Lui is currently director of the "Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative" at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. In the presentation featured in this post, Lui traces the historical antecedents of the racial...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
An emerging description of the South African economy is captured in the words "polarisation paralysis." The term has several renderings and different emphasis across academic disciplines, with important nuance and extensions. Another rendering is that it might provide a metaphor for the first 100 days of the Jacob Zuma Presidency, but also sets the challenge for this term of government. Two features prefigure the shadow boxing over economic policy since the start of the Jacob Zuma...
Glenn Ashton -
We South Africans have all grown up in a big brother state. For whites it was a big brother that smothered them in privilege at the expense of everyone else; for blacks it was a more sinister big brother. As different as our segregated societies were, we had much in common. We were all ruled by an apparently omnipotent, fascist, militaristic and bureaucratic state. Blacks had passbooks, whites had books of life. Now we all have identity documents.
We have not really moved away from the...
Dale T. McKinley -
With all the crocodile tears, gnashing of teeth, post-hoc analysis and mea culpa discourse on offer over the last few weeks of community protests and worker strikes, one could be forgiven for thinking that South Africa has suddenly crossed some kind of developmental and political Rubicon. It is as if recent events have triggered a sudden and combined rush of (relative) conscience over the plight of the poor/workers, a new found, critically informed concern about the character and role of our...
Glenn Ashton -
The current global economic turmoil gives rise to the question, "If capitalism dies, what alternatives exist, or will emerge, to replace it?"
The question inevitably provokes utterly predictable positioning. The stock response that capitalism has already trumped communism, to the degree that the old communist bogeymen of Russia and China have embraced the capitalist model, is dishonest.
Do we really have to take an either/or position regarding capitalism and communism? Western...
