Friday, 19 July 2019
Now that the votes have been counted, the poisonous idea that money and property are more important than people must be countered by popular democratic organisation – the most effective way to rein in liberal hubris.
South Africa needs to develop a viable route towards a genuinely democratic and egalitarian society. Cyril Ramaphosa does not offer a meaningful alternative.
Fielding an election candidate accused of terrorism, Pragya Singh Thakur, could be a desperate move by Modi to retain power. But it could also destroy India’s secularity.
After former president Joseph Kabila and the political class stole the people’s revolution, the Congolese youth movement’s radical wing offers the best chance to free the DRC.
Despite the questionable internal democratic practices of the mineworkers’ union, state attempts to deregister it can be ascribed only to political motives.
South African politicians are simultaneously encouraging and legitimating xenophobia, and denying that attacks on migrants are xenophobic.
To claim that protests are being organised suggests sinister motives. But all protest is organised. So are cake sales and shopping expeditions.
In a true democracy, popular democratic action would be respected and regarded as legitimate and everyone would have the right to engage freely and safely in public debate.
MetroRail commuters experience frustrating delays every day. Will the president’s being stranded recently on a stalled train prompt improvements to the service?
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has gutted most environmental protections in favour of capitalist interests including mining and agriculture, further devastating the Amazon.
The authorities have failed black footballers, who are racially abused in numerous stadiums across Europe. This is why they will have to take matters into their own hands.
If the court grants Joao Rodrigues a stay of prosecution for the murder of activist Ahmed Timol, it will set a dangerous precedent for other apartheid-era crimes.
The state is separating the South African-born from migrants born elsewhere in Africa. Such exclusion and xenophobia can be fought only by cultivating horizontal forms of solidarity.
Wars on terror waged by the US and others have normalised the violent Islamophobia that laid the foundation for the mosque massacre in New Zealand.
The insurance industry’s top dogs are making billions from impoverished people’s funeral policies – and the government is doing little to introduce relatively simple regulations.
Surviving the environmental breakdown requires a confrontation with the zombie logic of neoliberalism.
Legal repercussions for those accused of political murders are a ray of democratic hope after years of escalating assassinations, mostly carried out with impunity.
The latest national budget suggests a turn to austerity. But that tactic has failed, most recently in Europe, where limited tax increases favoured the rich, not the poor.
Ahead of elections, India faces a policy crisis in Kashmir amid resurgent insurgency and realigning regional politics.
Despite its image as a friendly and welcoming country, New Zealand is a settler colonial society with a history of exclusivity when it comes to immigration.
South Africa’s biggest city stretches over the horizons, instead of into the skies above it. New policies offer part of the solution to this apartheid hangover.