We live in apocalyptic times. This is the considered belief of an extraordinary contemporary philosopher, who also phrases it as Living in the End Times — the title of a book that appeared in 2010 (Verso), and which contains between its covers so many intellectual tours de force that I, for one, will not even […]
economy
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Keith Hart on money, memory and democratising the economy
Keith Hart begins his thought-provoking book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (Profile Books, London, 2000) with the statement: “Ours is an age of money. Half the world worships money and the other half thinks of it as the root of all evil. In either case, money makes the world go round. If […]
Posted inEnvironment, General
Is there a crisis of credibility in the human sciences?
On a previous occasion I elaborated on the growing natural scientific evidence that the world is at “Red Alert” status regarding a looming ecological crisis. The question arises, whether the human sciences (humanities and social sciences) are in agreement with their natural science colleagues on this issue. In light of the incontrovertible evidence in this […]
Posted inEnvironment
Three scary numbers
Last week I came across three numbers that left me numb[1]. Together they brought home the essence of the climate fix we’re in — and the massive profit margins that are riding on us failing to deal with the challenge. In essence it’s about the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere, and the […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
How poor is poor?
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. — James A Baldwin Poverty and hunger remain a global challenge. However fewer people live in extreme poverty in the 21st century compared to previous generations. According to the World Bank, between 1981 and 2008, the proportion of people […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, Health, Lifestyle
Why we choose materialism – part 2
Because, it is far easier to want a nicer, more expensive outfit than it is to ask ourselves why we can never conceive that we are enough as we are. It is easier to want a better, higher paying job than to ask ourselves what happened to the idealism that had once dominated our youth […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Cyber warfare
In The Information Bomb (Verso, 2005, p. 62), Paul Virilio says the following: “ ‘He who knows everything fears nothing,’ claimed Joseph Paul Goebbels not so long ago. From now on, with the putting into orbit of a new kind of panoptical control, he who sees everything – or almost everything – will have nothing […]
Posted inGeneral
The recurring historical struggle for freedom
Several things that I experienced recently contributed to a renewed reflection, on my part, on the meaning of freedom. Much has been written about it, and I, like everyone interested in the topic, have my favourite authors in this regard. Here, however, I want to take these experiences as my point of departure. The first […]
Posted inBusiness
Africa, time to get back to basics
As a point of departure, it is important to acknowledge that we know a lot about the challenges confronting the African continent today. Equally, we know more about the world today. It is in this context that a call for rethinking Africa’s political economy is made. Such a rethink is timely because the world economy […]
Posted inBusiness
Pravin needs to chide government
Pravin Gordhan’s call on South Africa to resolve its “labour-relations challenges” is timely, if not overdue. His appeal for “concerted action by organised labour, business, civic leaders and the government” although inclusive, is however, unlikely to yield any fruits. In the 19 years of transformation, the spirit of entrepreneurship that is needed to create the […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
The age of the indebted, mediatised, securitised and depoliticised
In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest book Declaration (Argo Navis, 2012) — although, probably given its brevity (just over a hundred pages) compared to the books comprising their trilogy (Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth), they refer to it as a “pamphlet” — they articulate the global crisis of the present era in terms of four […]
Posted inGeneral
What ‘wisdom’?
Can humanity today show itself capable of developing a way of life that may be called, against all odds, one marked by WISDOM? This seems highly unlikely, given the state of the world economy (which has a lot to do with short-sightedness and wastefulness), and more importantly, the planetary ecology. Fact is, humans have shown […]