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 -
One of the obvious and glaring things about the financial crisis is how much of it involves saving the rich rather than the poor. And, how much the poor continue to be disadvantaged by the failures and reckless pursuits of the rich – there is certainly a deferment of their interests.
Noam Chomsky, in a recent article of the Boston Review (September/October 2009), showed how other pressing crises such as food shortages, desertification and lack of progress on the Millennium Development...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Often civil society activism seems like a mixture of dissatisfaction and hope without much impact on the real world. Activists are usually conscious of the formidable odds against “change” because of the all encompassing and rarely adequately defined structures of power.
Underlying this idealism is the idea that planting the seeds for alternatives today will flower into something new at some undefined point in the future. In other words, in spite of all the work, the likely...
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...
Kim Nicolini -
Rumble of revolution. Factory coming back to life.
District 9 is not a pretty movie. It doesn’t look pretty. Its message isn’t pretty. It hurts the eyes to watch. In fact, District 9 is an outright ugly movie, but it is an ugly that is perfectly crafted and takes ugly to the heights of a new aesthetic. The screen is full of unflinchingly realistic ugly slums, banal ugly interiors of institutionalized spaces, and ugly people whose entire lives and bodies have been corrupted by the...
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...
Stephen Greenberg -
An important question facing humanity at present is how to ensure enough food is produced so that everyone has enough. There is a distribution issue that is unresolved in a capitalist system: the market distributes, and those without the resources to participate in the market are excluded. This produces the reality of obesity in some countries side by side with starvation in others, and surplus production that goes to waste or is fed to animals, side by side with food deficits in other...
