Jonathan Jansen is Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State and President of the South African Institute of Race Relations. Amandla!: How did you become involved in education? Jansen: First of all, I wasn't very good at education. I had most of my schooling...
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Knowledge. The final frontier
Some suggest that unemployment rates are high because of laziness or a dependency effect created by social grants, but numerous studies have failed to find empirical support for these claims. The one drum of this kind that continues to be beaten is the claim that...
Why socialists need feminism | by David Camfield
The relationship between socialism and feminism has been getting more attention in online discussions recently. This is both for good reasons — such as the article by Sharon Smith of the International Socialist Organization in the US that looks critically at how the...
Letter From Haiti: Life in the Ruins | by Amy Wilentz
Sometimes you can't help but be sickened by the behavior of certain international organizations helping Haiti recover from the devastating January 2010 earthquake—hit, that is, by a wave of real physical nausea. The other day, I spent an afternoon in the displaced...
The Weirdness Closes In
On the face of it, Mamphela Ramphele's long political Calvary has not seemed so strange. It has been clear ever since she returned to South Africa, flushed with neoliberal propaganda and plugging effortlessly into the right-wing smear campaign against President Mbeki,...
After the World Ended (III): A Qualified Franchise
February 14, 2013 Hurrah for the University of Johannesburg Trots! They have launched the first ultra-left political party since the 1994 elections! Isn't this what the Creator has been calling for all along? Well, yes and no. It hasn't been launched or even...
Whose strike to whose gain? | by Christian Selz
Alongside the prominent demand for R150 a day, striking farm workers in the Western Cape are demanding an end to labour brokering – an uphill battle that they are likely to lose given that some of their perceived leaders appear to trade in that very business. It is...
Global health crisis
The world is facing a global health crisis characterised by growing inequities within and among nations and millions of preventable deaths, especially among the poor. These are in large degree due to unfair economic structures which lock people into poverty and poor...
Euro crisis: the economics of class warfare
Conversation with Özlem Onaran From the start, the neoliberal project in Europe was marked by a striking pro-capital redistribution of income, wealth and power. This seemed to be a good solution to overcome the profitability crisis, but it sowed the seeds of another...






