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?
Visit the archives.
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...
Richard Pithouse -
There is an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. It is diverse, dynamic and unstable and it includes elements that are emancipatory, contradictory and reactionary. This degree of sustained popular dissent – long organised and expressed outside of liberal frameworks, and increasingly also organised and expressed at a distance from the ruling party – provides fertile ground for building popular organisations. But, with important exceptions, the vast bulk of the...
Saliem Fakir -
South Africa’s unemployment problem has been persistent since 1994 and long before the migration of Africans from elsewhere making their way south.
Foreigners do not occupy all the formal jobs that the South African economy creates because there would have to be good reasons for employing foreigners in the formal sector due to our labour laws, immigration policies and employment equity rules. Those employed in the formal sector constitute about 4% of the formal workforce.
Where...
David Graeber is an anthropologist, a leading figure in the Occupy movement and author of the book, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. He addresses the current age of ‘total bureaucratization’, rife with rules and regulations, in which public and private power has gradually fused into a single entity whose ultimate purpose is the extraction of wealth in the form of profits. Graeber considers what it would take, in terms of intellectual clarity, political will and imaginative...
Chris Hedges -
The pathology of the rich white family is the most dangerous pathology in America. The rich white family is cursed with too much money and privilege. It is devoid of empathy, the result of lifetimes of entitlement. It has little sense of loyalty and lacks the capacity for self-sacrifice. Its definition of friendship is reduced to “What can you do for me?” It is possessed by an insatiable lust to increase its fortunes and power. It believes that wealth and privilege confer to it a...
Dominique Doyle -
On the 7th of January 2015 the Yemenese branch of Al-Qaeda took responsibility for a brutal attack on the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. Eleven people were gunned down and a further eleven people injured. The attackers justified their violent actions because they found the way in which the newspaper depicted the Prophet Mohammed insulting, disrespectful and exemplifying Western carelessness over other people’s beliefs and cultures.
The cruel attack rightly outraged France...
