South Africa
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Western diplomats offer rotten climate carrot, and wield broken sanctions stick
5 December 2022 - by Patrick Bond, Desmond D’Sa
In 1965, Ho Chi Minh described U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s half-baked $1 billion gift to the Vietnamese – and simultaneous threat of endless bombing – as a “rotten carrot and broken stick.” The National Liberation Front’s aim was to achieve (...) -
Decarbonisation financing foiled in Egypt: World Bank and Pretoria sabotage global climate justice
12 November 2022 - by Patrick Bond
In Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where the 27th United Nations annual effort at solving the climate crisis is half-way to failure, negotiators and anyone interested in South Africa’s welfare might get the wrong impression, given hype flowing in (...) -
Austerity budget accelerates both South Africa’s “Arab Spring” and climate crimes
1 November 2022 - by Patrick Bond
Can activists in South Africa link campaigns against debt and climate, consistent with a broader international push that heralds a “Loss & Damage” showdown with the Western establishment in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt at the United Nations climate (...) -
Thorny questions for Western and South African “Just Energy Transition Partnership” negotiators (from whom we won’t get satisfactory answers)
21 October 2022 - by Patrick Bond, Desmond D’Sa
What kind of monetary carrot is needed to help high-polluting middle-income countries to rapidly decarbonise? Mainly because of a South African pilot project supposedly worth $8.5 billion, the worlds of high finance and climate justice are (...) -
In South Africa, resistance rises to the World Bank’s climate-killing mega-projects
16 October 2022 - by Patrick Bond
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund Annual Meetings have witnessed protests in Washington and many other sites. Nearly 100 protesters from community, environment and youth groups joined Extinction Rebellion and the DebtForClimate.org (...) -
Philanthrocapitalism seen from South Africa
9 August 2022 - by Patrick Bond
Presentation to the African Philanthropy Academic Conference, 2 August 2022 University of the Witwatersrand Business School Centre on African Philanthropy and Social Investment, by Patrick Bond, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University (...) -
Privatisation of distribution
4 July 2022 - by Dick Forslund
An important step in the privatisation of electricity sales in South Africa is about to be taken. The process the government has embarked on is in effect a privatisation of sales, as in any privatisation of public property. Private investments (...) -
The G7 prepares a divide-and-conquer trap, as BRICS countries spall, fall and try to reconstitute
24 June 2022 - by Patrick Bond
On Friday June 24, a hasty one-day virtual summit of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa will occur, hosted by Xi Jinping. The date is important because on Monday June 26, two of the three intrinsically pro-Western leaders from the bloc – (...) -
Latest IMF controversy unveils biased policies and a Harvard economist’s skewed views
12 January 2022 - by Patrick Bond
“It is more fun to be Santa than Scrooge.” The catchy phrase was deployed for data manipulation on behalf of multinational corporations and nearly lost her managing directorship because her statistical fraud was to China’s benefit, angering the (...) -
Das Kapital’s Unfortunate Fate, in South African Left Scholarship and Political Strategy
17 December 2021 - by Patrick Bond
Abstract: One of the great paradoxes in what has been for the last half-century amongst the world’s most intense sites of class struggle, South Africa, is how few anti-capitalist activists and scholars are familiar with the main book explaining (...) -
Can South Africa urgently evolve, from victim-globalisation to passive-deglobalisation to active-localisation?
29 November 2021 - by Patrick Bond
Capitalism is necessarily recalibrating its scale in various places, and perhaps nowhere are national stakes higher than South Africa, where the November 24th discovery of a new, more virulent, multiply-mutated Covid-10 variant – Omicron – (...) -
Lessons from the assassination of Fikile Ntshangase: Climate violence, the “Right to say No!”, uncompensated resource extraction, financial profiteering and unpaid ecological debt in South Africa’s coal mining belt
22 October 2021 - by Patrick Bond
Fikile Ntshangase died aged 63 on October 22, 2020, assassinated by three thugs who entered her house – with several grandchildren playing nearby – and shot her six times, following her success in stalling a local mine’s expansion. The murder was (...) -
BRICS New Development Bank Corruption in South Africa
5 September 2021 - by Patrick Bond
1. Introduction: Raised – and dashed – expectations for the BRICS replacing Western banking In 2013 in Durban, at the heads-of-state summit of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, a New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent (...) -
Global North ‘climate reparations’ to prevent Southern fossil-fuel conflict
19 August 2021 - by Patrick Bond
Abstract The climate crisis is amplified by socio-political and economic injustices everywhere but in 2021, perhaps nowhere as acutely as northern Mozambique. There, the Cabo Delgado province is a site for military intervention against Islamic (...) -
What can be done now to ameliorate poverty, unemployment and inequality?
2 August 2021 - by Jeff Rudin, Jonathan Cannard, Bruce Baigrie, Maxine Bezuidenhout, Jaco Oelofson, Keamogetswe Seipato
“What are the status quo limits to what can be done about poverty, unemployment and inequality?” This sentence, buried deep in a recent Daily Maverick article by one of us, evoked a sizable response, some sympathetic, others hostile. The already (...) -
South Africa: Towards a General Strike
19 July 2021 - by Amandla, Zwelinzima Vavi
“If we strike one by one, we will be defeated. […] And the discussion must be, ‘fix the economy, fix the economy, this growth path is going to reproduce this poverty, unemployment, and inequalities, fix that’.” Amandla! interviewed Zwelinzima Vavi, (...) -
China’s role in amplifying Southern Africa’s extreme uneven development
30 June 2021 - by Patrick Bond
Like so many regions of the world, the 14 ‘Southern African Development Community’ countries are grappling with the complex problem of Chinese state and corporate involvement in divergent societies, politics, economies and ecologies. There is (...) -
Measuring Capital’s Super-Exploitation of People and Nature in South Africa: First-Cut Empirical Evidence drawing upon Rosa Luxemburg’s Methodology
7 April 2021 - by Patrick Bond
Introduction Super-exploitation is again a hot topic of debate within international political economy scholarship, in part because “accumulation by dispossession” (using David Harvey’s phrase) is so evident at this stage of the long capitalist (...) -
South Africa: Vaccine Apartheid or Equality?
30 January 2021 - by Rehad Desai, South African Federation of Trade Unions
We are in the middle of a global shortage of supplies of COVID-19 vaccines. We are reliving the saga that happened early in the pandemic around access to personal protective equipment (PPE), where each country fought for its own patch. Getting (...) -
As South African climate justice veterans fall, consciousness begins reviving, from below and across
2 January 2021 - by Patrick Bond
On three days last week – December 23-25 – South Africa’s east coast province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) lost three of its clearest voices for social justice and environmental sanity: rural women’s leader Sizani Ngubane (74), trade unionist Patrick (...) -
Putting an end to the EU’s neo-colonial policies in the field of trade and investment: Economic pressures from above, social reaction from below
22 September 2020 - by Patrick Bond
Summary: The European Union and Africa have had exceptionally conflictual relations even after slavery and colonialism ended. Still today, African-European civil society relationships from below are often arrayed against a nexus of state and (...) -
World Bank’s rating obsession will negate debt justice
31 August 2020 - by Patrick Bond, Dominic Brown
The international financial system’s reliance upon credit ratings – usually based on dubious premises – needs urgent rethinking. The Covid-19 pandemic is just one of the catastrophes leaving many low-income countries – and soon middle-income (...) -
Unleashing the power of pension funds and debt cancellation to finance a just energy transition
25 August 2020 - by Dominic Brown
“Debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, the lenders won’t die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure.” Those were the words of the revolutionary former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas (...) -
IMF: if you didn’t like the starter, wait for the main dish
5 July 2020 - by Amandla
The Treasury has made clear that it is seeking a smallanyana three to five year loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of $4.2 billion, at a smallanyana interest rate of 1 or 1.1%. It will also be looking for a loan of $55-60 million (...) -
South African should be wary about long term repercussions of new IMF loans
5 June 2020 - by Patrick Bond
Amidst this raging debate about the role of IMF loans to pull out countries from the economic mess triggered by the outbreak of the pandemic, Patrick Bond, professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government in an interview to (...)
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