‘Schmalhausen’s Law is a general principle that organisms in unusual or extreme conditions, at the boundary of their tolerance for any one aspect of their life conditions, are extremely sensitive to stressors in all aspects of their life conditions … A whole-system...
Poverty
Malawi: A country on the edge of collapse | by Reinford Mwangonde
Malawi’s president recently declared war on his citizens after they shook the country with protests on 20 July 2011, doubtful of their leader’s ability to alleviate the country’s problems. At the opening of an agricultural fair in the southern commercial city of...
Fighting for our right to work: organising the unemployed in South Africa | by Amandla! editorial staff
‘There is no third force, political party or communist academic behind our struggle. It is oppression at the hands of the African National Congress that has driven us into the rebellion of the poor. We are in rebellion because we are being forced to live without...
Africa: escaping the slums | by Jean-Christophe Servant
Africa, the least urbanised continent, still has the highest urban growth rate, nearly 7% per year; 40% of Africans now live in towns, compared with 3% in 1900. By 2030 there will be 760 million Africans, and if current trends continue, more than 70% will live in...
Tibet: dream and reality | by Slavoj Zizek
The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is – and China too.All the...
Tibet: dream and reality | by Slavoj Zizek
The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is – and China too.All the...
Global Vision for Rio+20 and Beyond | by Mukul Sanwal
The various mechanisms evolved through global negotiations to deal with shared environmental problems, such as climate change, fall short because they are not located within a larger debate on dealing with human well-being and instead focus only on limiting damage....
South Africa pushed to the limit | by Hein Marais
The political economy of changePraise for Hein Marais’ latest book“An extraordinary achievement. This is, by a considerable margin, the best book yet on the political economy of South Africa. Marais combines an unrivalled knowledge of the literature with a prose style...
AIDC warns: NGP? Do not repeat the tragedy of GEAR as a farce!
Glimpses of clear sunlight in a long winter only indicate that summer is possible, but are not summer itself (not even spring). The Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC) welcomes that the government’s New Growth Path (NGP) document recognizes the hard...



