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?
A New York high-rise developer is at the center of outrage for building what activists are calling a "poor door". Composed of high-end luxury apartments and cheaper units meant for low-income families, the building will have a special back entrance that those living in the less expensive apartments must use.
By including cheaper apartments in the building under the auspices an inclusionary housing programme, the developer is able to apply for tax breaks estimated at millions of...
Glenn Ashton -
Two millennia ago the Roman commentator Juvenal wrote of “panem et circensis,” bread and circuses, to demonstrate how the masses had abandoned political responsibility in exchange for full bellies and extreme entertainment. In Juvenal’s times entertainment was of the gladiatorial variety.
Today the violence of gladiators has been replaced by sports heroes and teams where rules constrain the violence, or by cinema and television featuring violence as gratuitous as the...
Saliem Fakir -
The reaction to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was to be expected – both great praise and rejection at the same time. Most studies on inequality, certainly, in the case of South Africa have tended to focus on the middle class, the employed worker and the unemployed through household surveys.
What Piketty’s book has done is to argue that economists have been focusing so much on the bottom of the economic pile that we have lost sight of what is...
Both mainstream and leftist economists are heaping praises on French economist, Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In his review of the book, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues, "The big idea of (the book) is that we haven't just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we're also on a path back to "patrimonial capitalism," in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled…by family dynasties...This is a book...
South Africa (SA) has the largest economy on the African continent worth about $300bn and could be an engine of growth. But SA’s growth is stymied by its extreme inequality, which places a drag on growth, argues professor of economics, Leonce Ndikumana of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
One challenge facing the SA economy is that it is a typical capitalist economy where the proceeds and the gains from growth basically accrue mostly to capital. The owners of capital get...
Gillian Schutte & Sipho Singiswa -
Oppression, when written about, is often reduced to one layer of suffering. Yet when one unpacks the lives and narratives of the poor it becomes clear that their struggle to survive takes place under many layers of oppression.
Layer One: The History of Racial Oppression
The most obvious layer of oppression is that of a history of colonialism, labour and apartheid. Colonialists created ‘race’ as a way of oppressing the colonised. This race construct was created on the...
