New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy

In search of a ‘developmental state’

2024-03-14T09:23:28+00:00

This Special Issue on Economics and Labour is divided into two sections. It pairs contributions on current economic development with three articles presented at a conference marking 50 years since the Durban Strikes of 1973. That said, all of the authors reflect widely on history and on immediate challenges, both for South Africa and the continent at large.

A Practical Guide to Levitation: Stories by José Eduardo Agualusa

2024-04-05T14:02:54+00:00

Mozambique-based writer José Eduardo Agualusa and his wonderful translator, Daniel Hahn, have a way with words, the fantastical and the surreal. They bring ghosts to life with dry humour, and immerse us in alternate cosmologies, showing us other ways the world might be.

New Agenda 92

2024-04-05T13:44:16+00:00

Download the full issue here.

Degrowth in an African periphery

2024-03-15T09:36:50+00:00

In this article Roland Ngam focuses on Africa and the disarticulated colonial model on which it is built and argues that in order to build a fairer system that works for the majority, the world needs to quickly shift to an ecocentric degrowth ontology that leverages Africa’s rich cultural heritage for the wellbeing of all people.

Where is the development in SA’s developmental state?

2024-03-15T12:59:54+00:00

The ruling party defines South Africa as a ‘developmental state’, but with its rising job losses, growth that is lower than most of its African neighbours and rising inequality can that really apply? What’s missing, asks John Matisonn.

Lessons for South Africa

2024-04-05T12:19:59+00:00

China’s four decades of spectacular economic growth may now be slowing down, but the lessons for South Africa – with its own development challenges – remain important. DOUGLAS IAN SCOTT argues South Africa should re-orientate its relationship with China so as to learn from, and recreate, the successes of China’s “reform and opening up” era.

South Africa’s migration policy mess

2024-03-15T13:41:18+00:00

Alan Hirsch comments on the draft White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection issued by the South African government in November 2023. The government wants to make laws still tighter when it is unable to implement existing laws. He finds that what is proposed simply won’t help and suggests what could be done to fix the urgent need for better migration policy.

Farming support must switch to black smallholders

2024-04-05T12:45:25+00:00

Job creation in South Africa is an urgent and paramount project and one of the target areas has to be the agricultural sector. Other targeted economic sectors can deliver jobs for urban matriculants and graduates, but JOHN MATISONN argues farming and agro-processing have the potential to provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs for black citizens in rural areas without advanced education as well as for graduates.

Cosatu’s mute response

2024-04-05T13:23:10+00:00

Cosatu’s failure to be the voice of the working class in times of crisis, such as during Covid-19 and the July 2021 unrest in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, reflects its inability to envision a future beyond the ANC, writes uMBUSO weNKOSI. He argues that as long as organised labour is locked in an alliance with the ruling party it cannot be rooted in community struggles, to the detriment of the social movement unionism of the anti-apartheid struggle.

40 years of shop floor resistance

2024-04-05T13:31:14+00:00

Based on four decades of ethnographic research into growing workplace resistance and militancy in the 1980s and 1990s at a Durban rubber factory, SITHEMBISO BHENGU adds his own study of the factory workers – their struggles, identities and everyday lives – more than a decade into democracy. In piecing together their narratives over a span of four decades, he identifies the clear continuities in the objective conditions workers live and work in, as well as in their subjective consciousness, and also the significant discontinuities between the two critical eras of worker formations and struggle in South Africa.

Making sense of the labour movement as we confront the burden of the future

2023-10-23T13:19:20+00:00

Professor MONIQUE MARKS presents a unique take on the new challenges and opportunities facing the labour movement in South Africa today. In a speech she gave at the 1973 Durban Strikes 50th Remembrance last year to celebrate the significance and the gains of the ‘Durban Moment,’1 she emphasised the need to provide hope and a sense of belonging to those currently relegated to the margins of society.

Dateline Africa

2024-04-05T13:51:04+00:00

1 December 2023 to 29 February 2024