Most Recent Content-
- Monday, Feb 01, 2010
ZMag Article Remembering an anti-apartheid organizer, prisoner, and poet -
- Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010
ZNet Article Patrick Bond replies to Robin Hahnel's ZNet article "Has The Left Missed The Boat On Climate Change?" -
- Wednesday, Jan 06, 2010
Commentary Dennis Brutus died at age 85 on December 26, battling cancer, climate change and capitalism. -
- Saturday, Dec 26, 2009
ZNet Article World-renowned political organizer and one of Africa's most celebrated poets, Dennis Brutus, died early on December 26 in Cape Town, in his sleep, aged 85. -
- Wednesday, Dec 23, 2009
Commentary In Copenhagen, the world's richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out. -
- Wednesday, Dec 16, 2009
Commentary Eight million people viewed Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff video since December 2007, and her new nine-minute Story of Cap and Trade received 400,000 hits in the two weeks after its December 1 launch. -
- Monday, Nov 30, 2009
Commentary Preparations for the December 7-18 Copenhagen climate summit are going as expected, including a rare sighting of African elites' stiffened spines. That's a great development (maybe decisive), more about which below. -
- Sunday, Oct 25, 2009
Commentary On a day that 350.org and thousands of allies are valiantly trying to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe, we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people depart and the props are packed up. No matter today’s activism, global climate governance is grid-locked and it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in Copenhagen on December 18. -
- Sunday, Sep 06, 2009
Commentary Here's a fairly simple choice: the Global North would pay hard-hit Global South sites to deal with climate crisis either through complicated, corrupt, controversial 'Clean Development Mechanism' (CDM) projects with plenty of damaging side effects to communities, or instead pay through other mechanisms that must provide financing quickly, transparently and decisively, to achieve genuine income compensation plus renewable energy to the masses. -
- Wednesday, Jul 15, 2009
ZNet Article If neoliberalism may have another breath of life, with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation applied from above by Barack Obama or the International Monetary Fund, much stronger pressure is needed from below to resist. Some forms have been well tested in social struggle, including three ‘pilot projects’ in genuine postneoliberalism: defending against financial degradation; restoring national power without the distraction of global governance; and re-establishing anti-imperialism so as to take advantage of unprecedented United States weakness. I focus here on some dimensions. -
- Friday, Jul 03, 2009
ZNet Article With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township "service delivery protests", rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa. -
- Saturday, Jun 13, 2009
Commentary With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township 'service delivery protests', rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa. -
- Monday, May 25, 2009
Commentary The state's most recent assault against the Delta left the villages of Opuye, Okerenkoro, Kurutie and Oporoza (site of the new documentary Sweet Crude - www.sweetcrudemovie.com ) burned to the ground in mid-May, with hundreds of Ijaw people - both armed activists (called 'militants') and civilians - feared dead. Journalists are banned from the area. -
- Tuesday, Apr 07, 2009
Commentary There are special places dedicated to the memories of Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi, Martin Luther King in Memphis, Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem and South Africa's own Hector Pieterson in Soweto. These and many other activists striving for social justice have been commemorated at the sites where they were felled. -
- Thursday, Mar 19, 2009
Commentary The movement for reparations against transnational corporations that profited from apartheid is finally making progress within the generally hostile US judicial system, using the 'Alien Tort Claims Act' (ATCA) and public pressure. Along with Dennis Brutus, I reported on the matter last year and there are interesting new developments, good and bad. -
- Thursday, Feb 05, 2009
Commentary The decision on February 3 by South African dockworkers to refuse handling of Israeli imports is of enormous importance for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and will prod more local Durban citizens - including academics and cultural activists - to also raise concerns about institutional linkages that give the Israeli state legitimacy. -
- Wednesday, Dec 24, 2008
Commentary Those who declare that the Great Crash of Late 2008 heralds the end of free market economic philosophy - "neoliberalism" for short - are not paying close enough attention. -
- Wednesday, Nov 12, 2008
Commentary One of Barack Obama's leading advisors has done more damage to Africa, its economies and its people than anyone I can think of in world history, including even Cecil John Rhodes. That charge may surprise readers, but hear me out. -
- Saturday, Oct 25, 2008
Commentary Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North's problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. -
- Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
ZNet Article The global economy’s vast financial sector expansion – in the context of productive sector stagnation tendencies – has increased the leading powerbrokers’ capacity to devalue large parts of the Third World (including major emerging market sites), as well as to write down selected financially volatile and vulnerable markets in the North (e.g. dot.com and real estate bubbles). In contrast to the 1930s, this set of partial write-downs of overaccumulated financial capital has not yet created such generalised panic and crisis contagion as to threaten the entire system’s integrity. Shifting and stalling the necessary devalorisation of overaccumulated capital, particularly as it bubbles up via financial sectors into speculative markets, entailed spatial and temporal fixes. -
- Sunday, Sep 21, 2008
Commentary The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride in and out of Southern African ruling-party politics, down the troughs of world capitalism, and up the peaks of radical social activism. Glancing around the region and world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual. -
- Friday, Aug 22, 2008
Commentary "We are the creditors!," insist African social activists victimized by the ongoing Third World debt crisis, but now gathered to fight back. -
- Sunday, Jul 06, 2008
Commentary A telling remark about US imperialism's double standards was uttered by Clinton-era deputy treasury secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who a decade ago was the driver of reparations claims against pro-Nazi corporations, assisting plaintiffs to gain $8 billion from European banks and corporations which ripped off Holocaust victims' funds or which were 1930s beneficiaries of slave-labor (both Jewish and non-Jewish). -
- Friday, Jun 13, 2008
Commentary In early June, the British-Dutch firm Shell Oil - one of Rodney's targets - was instructed to depart from the Ogoniland region within the Niger Delta, where in 1995 Shell officials were responsible for the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa by Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. After decades of abuse, women protesters, local NGOs and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) gave Shell the shove. France's Total appears next in line, in part because of additional pressure from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. -
- Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Commentary The low-income black township here in Durban which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a test performed on a Mozambican last Wednesday morning. -
- Sunday, Apr 27, 2008
Commentary South African neoliberal state brutality was on display last week in the famous Soweto suburb of Kliptown - where the African National Congress (ANC) "Freedom Charter" was signed 53 years ago - as the municipal-owned but commercially-oriented Johannesburg Water (JW) company felled a low-income resident with contaminated water. Cholera and E.coli scares spread across the city. Soon after, in nearby Lenasia, cops shot mercilessly at shackdwellers who were nonviolently protesting denial of water/sanitation services. -
- Wednesday, Mar 12, 2008
Commentary The March 29 election in Zimbabwe is very likely to result in Robert Mugabe winning, by hook or by crook, a slim 50% majority, so as to avoid a run-off. In the last presidential election, in 2002, his main opponent Morgan Tsvangirai - leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions from 1988-99, but subsequently also supported by business and most Western governments - officially received just 40% of the vote. -
- Wednesday, Feb 27, 2008
ZNet Article In the wake of the devastation wrought in Africa by two decades of ‘neoliberalism’--i.e., state policies that are market-oriented, export-led, subjet to fiscal austerity and characterized by the commercialization/privatization of public sector functions--this question repeatedly arises: have matters improved now that the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and major donor governments are permitting countries to improve their state health systems and increase spending? And what are civil society watchdog groups and debt advocacy movements such as the Jubilee network saying about recent modifications to neoliberalism, especially the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and Highly Indebted Poor Countries debt relief initiative? ZNet Article In the wake of the devastation wrought in Africa by two decades of ‘neoliberalism’--i.e., state policies that are market-oriented, export-led, subjet to fiscal austerity and characterized by the commercialization/privatization of public sector functions--this question repeatedly arises: have matters improved now that the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and major donor governments are permitting countries to improve their state health systems and increase spending? And what are civil society watchdog groups and debt advocacy movements such as the Jubilee network saying about recent modifications to neoliberalism, especially the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and Highly Indebted Poor Countries debt relief initiative? ZNet Article When it comes to anti-capitalist resistance, the most economically-marginalized sites are amongst the most interesting. Not because the greatest number of militant activists are out in force--but because the trials and tribulations they overcome along the way, and the consciousness they express, teach us vital lessons about uneven capitalist development. - All Most Recent Content
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Recent Books-
- Friday, Oct 12, 2007
Book "This is by far one of the best critical contributions from the left in the continuing controversial role which the World Bank and IMF play in developing countries' economies and societies. Bond comes from a dying tradition of the activist/scholar very much in the mould of Noam Chomsky."-Garth Pere, Executive Director of the Institute for Global Dialogue - All Recent Books
Featured Bond's Articles
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Patrick Bond's Bio Info: Patrick is a political economist based at the U... morePatrick is a political economist based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban, where he directs the Centre for Civil Society (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs). He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, raised in Alabama, and educated in economics at Swarthmore College, finance at the University of Pennsylvania, and geography at Johns Hopkins University. He is active with social movements in South Africa, Zimbabwe and internationally. Recent books are Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society (co-edited with Rehana Dada and Graham Erion for Rozenberg Publishers and UKZN Press, 2008, 2007); A Pilhagem na Africa (Sururu Produções Culturais, Lisbon and South Links, Rio de Janeiro 2008); Enclavity in African Economies (edited for CCS, Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa and International Development Economics Associates, 2007); The Accumulation of Capital in Southern Africa (co-edited with Horman Chitonge and Arndt Hopfmann for CCS and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2007); Looting Africa (Zed Books and the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006); Talk Left, Walk Right (UKZN Press, 2006, 2004); Trouble in the Air (edited with Rehana Dada for CCS and TransNational Institute, 2005); Elite Transition (UKZN Press and Pluto Press, 2005, 2000); Fanon`s Warning (edited, Africa World Press and CCS, 2005, 2002); Against Global Apartheid (Zed Books and University of Cape Town Press, 2003); Zimbabwe`s Plunge (coauthored with Simba Manyanya, Merlin Press, Weaver Press, Africa World Press and UKZN Press, 2003); and Unsustainable South Africa (Merlin Press and UKZN Press, 2002).
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