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?
SACSIS promotes the principle of just economies. We are opposed to economic development that violates social and economic rights and increases inequalities in the pursuit of economic growth.
Saliem Fakir -
At times it’s hard to take at face value whether what is being said in ANC discussion documents is for real or just rhetorical flush.
The latest ANC buzzword is this notion of ‘the second transition’. The first transition, an ANC discussion document argues, is the consolidation of democracy (a coded way of saying consolidation of the ANC’s power).
The second transition is about social and economic transformation. To some it may sound like a new idea, but in...
Gar Alperovitz -
On Monday (March 6, 2012), Bloomberg News estimated that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 27-year-old founder, will be worth about $21 billion based on his company's forthcoming initial public offering. Although he won't qualify (yet) for a slot among the planet's richest 20 people in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg will still enjoy iconic status as an entrepreneur of mythic proportions. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal credited Facebook with creating "a new way of living,"...
Vanessa Baird -
"You can’t evict an idea," read a sign posted in the window of 21-29 Sun Street, in the City of London.
The grey concrete office block, owned by the Swiss bank UBS, had been invaded and turned into a ‘Bank of Ideas’ by members of London’s Occupy movement.
Inside, instead of screens and monitors showing the ups and downs of the markets, walls were decorated with Banksy-style graffiti art. Where there might have been a boardroom table, ping pong...
Richard Pithouse -
There's a new buoyancy in certain circles following Jacob Zuma's announcement of an impressive programme of infrastructural development. In a country that has seemed to be drifting rather aimlessly in the icy waters of the global economy, it's no surprise that a more decisive posture from the President, backed up with lots of concrete plans, is animating renewed optimism.
And in a moment in which the wheel of history is steadily bringing down the influence of the old imperial powers as it...
Saliem Fakir -
One of the strangest twists to the “nationalisation debate” is that everybody outside of the ANC opposed to the nationalisation of mineral wealth has somehow managed to see the now widely publicised ANC report emanating from a commissioned study on mining and nationalisation, except key members of the party and its alliance partners.
NUMSA was furious that they could not get access to the document and were told to wait. Meanwhile, some in the media have been pouring over its...
David Morris -
The word anarchism has been so stripped of substance that it has come to be equated with chaos and nihilism. That's not what it means.
On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism.
Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism has been so stripped...
