[DEBATE] : Amandla Forum on the Crises, Wits

[Devan Pillay]

The Amandla Forum and the WITS Department of Sociology invite you to a Panel Discussion on

 

Deepening Global and National Crises:

What is Left? 

 

The current global financial crisis is a direct result of financial liberalisation – a key pillar of the neo-liberal “market fundamentalist” logic that has underpinned the global and national political economy since the 1980s.  In South Africa this found expression in the 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR).

 

Since 1996 South Africa has experienced growing unemployment, increasing inequality and persistent, widespread poverty – while a few have become filthy rich.  Continuous global crises and mounting resistance forced government to back-track from full-blown neo-liberalism, but the social crisis has intensified, with deep political effects.  This has led to a change in the ANC’s leadership at Polokwane last December, the removal of Thabo Mbeki as the country’s president in September 2008 – culminating in the real possibility of a breakaway from the ANC.

 

Do these developments represent a victory for the “Left” in the Alliance, such that a true, redistributive,  participatory democracy as envisaged in the RDP and Freedom Charter is back on track - or is it the case of one elite faction ousting another, such that A Loota Continua?  Indeed, who or what is “Left”?  Has the way now been opened for an alternative, more substantive, Left project?

 

Debating these issues will be  NUMSA official and SACP member Dinga Sikwebu; prominent writer Hein Marais; former Gauteng SACP secretary and COPAC director Vishwas Satgar; and prominent environmental sociologist  and activist Jacky Cock.  The chair will be head of Sociology and former unionist Devan Pillay.

 

Wednesday 29 October 2008,

18:00

Wits University

Venue: Southwest Engineering Building,

Ground Floor, Room 10 (Graduate Seminar Room)

 

There is safe parking (entrance Yale Road or Senate House)  and

EVERYONE IS VERY WELCOME.

 

AMANDLA: DEBATING ALTERNATIVES