South Africa’s more than R7 billion a year fruit industry is threatened with potentially massive job and financial losses. It is a looming crisis that calls for urgent and comprehensive action at governmental level before the threat, still restricted to the Western Cape province, can spread.
September 3, 2015
The most important lesson to learn: The very developments that are starting to make most of humanity redundant, causing horrendous suffering and social and economic dislocation around the world could become the means to collective — and truly democratic — decision making.
August 15, 2015
Large scale redundancies in the South African mining sector, running to tens of thousands of jobs, are probably inevitable. But only because of the system in which we have to operate. Even in the gold sector, there will be mines and shafts that remain profitable without job losses, but each shaft and each mine will […]
July 25, 2015
A façade of unity and cohesion continues to be promoted by Cosatu and, even more interestingly, by the SA Communist Party that is itself under pressure break from the ANC-led alliance. This pressure comes members who believe that party offers a radical alternative. But perhaps the SACP's red flag is now just "palest pink".
June 24, 2015
Is South Africa on the slippery slope to authoritarianism? It’s a valid question to ask since both the Cosatu and the national constitutions have been undermined. And they were both, in their own way, flag bearers of the democratic promise of the new South Africa.
June 15, 2015
Over more than a century there have been warnings that the current global economic crisis would arrive — and what would be the cause. Yet most mainstream economists and commentators persist with an almost religious belief that somehow, sometime, the tide will turn and all with reurn to as it was. It will not.
May 17, 2015
Some critics of South African nurses and teachers who have left to work abroad have dubbed them unpatriotic. They are not. They are part of the international army of migrant labour. In any event, since capital knows no boundaries nor should labour accept any borders .
April 28, 2015
Faced with what appeared to be a veritable swamp of ideology at a “socialist movement” conference in Boksburg this month, the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) has embarked on the process of creating a “Marxist, Leninist, revolutionary working class” political party. However, Numsa also facilitated the Boksburg conference, where representatives from 11 political groups or […]
September 13, 2015
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