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 -
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...
Regarded as one of the most important works in Western classical music, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, which includes lyrics from the poem “Ode to Joy”, has inspired resistance movements all over the world from Chile to China. Al Jazeera’s Witness has produced a fascinating documentary about the meaning that the symphony holds for activists from a diversity of backgrounds - all searching for freedom through fraternity.
According to Al Jazeera:
At...
Radical philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks to RT's Oksana Boyko about hatred, love, freedom, violence, Western values and geopolitical change. The political correctness of the Western world solidifies hatred towards others, contends Zizek. Westerners claim to have great permissiveness whilst looking down on other cultures as primitive. However, the logic of political correctness in Western societies is highly constraining, he argues. As the conversation shifts to the notion of “divine...
