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?
Noam Chomsky -
It is not easy to escape from one’s skin, to see the world differently from the way it is presented to us day after day. But it is useful to try. Let’s take a few examples.
The war drums are beating ever more loudly over Iran. Imagine the situation to be reversed.
Iran is carrying out a murderous and destructive low-level war against Israel with great-power participation. Its leaders announce that negotiations are going nowhere. Israel refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation...
Paul Jay of The Real News Network talks to Vishwas Satgar, Senior Lecturer at Wits University, about the Marikana massacre.
“The ANC has embraced a neo-liberal economic model that has opened up this economy. The most they can show for it in terms of delivery is a social grant system mainly targeting the aged and children. The ANC can also show some delivery around housing. But, a lot of the apartheid pattern of urban and spatial development has continued. Beyond this, the ANC is...
Saliem Fakir -
Sometimes economic speak merely arranges the technical as a substitution for the moral. The technical itself becomes slanted by a polemic of legitimation.
The debate as to whether South Africa’s economy is productive or not often has a convenient scapegoat - the problem of the unproductive worker. Workers don’t work hard enough for the wages they earn, so they shouldn’t expect more because there is always somebody else willing to work for a lower salary, is the...
Anna Majavu -
Recent political developments have thrown the treatment of Black refugees and migrant workers into the spotlight, as governments all over the world clamp down further on opportunities for people of colour to live and work outside the lands of their birth.
The Australian labour government recently moved to revive the “offshore processing centre” in the South Pacific island of Nauru that it shut down in 2007. There, it plans to dump boatloads of migrants that it captures at sea....
Michelle Pressend -
President Zuma was hob knobbing at the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Heads of State Summit in Maputo while our country went up in flames a fortnight ago. Sadly, the 32nd Session of the SADC Summit turned out to be just another uninventive event where governments discussed more of the same – economic growth driven by the extraction of natural resources and infrastructure development to facilitate the expansion of corporate interests.
Top of the agenda was the SADC...
Many South Africans, particularly those on the left, are mourning the death of leading Marxist intellectual and activist, Neville Alexander. Alexander died on Monday, 27 August 2012, aged 75. In one of his last public addresses at a Steve Biko Seminar in September 2011, Alexander spoke about the "Politics of Truth". His remarks about the ANC are extremely pertinent today in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre. He said, “The ANC is locked into a paradigm of rule that is...
