Patrick Bond

Africa can do better than invest faith and state resources in yet another Ponzi scheme — the “privatisation of the air.”

Patrick Bond makes a stinging critique of the recent report of the African Development Bank that claims that ‘one in three Africans is middle class’ and as a result, Africa is ready for ‘take off’.

The continent’s own elites, together with the West and now China, are still making Africans progressively poorer, thanks to the extraction of raw materials.

Meeting is great, Patrick Bond writes, but WSF activists need to converge on strategy, generate joint actions, and forge cross-sectoral ties.

The community of several thousand South African activists from whom I learn most–a group quite consciously pro-globalization-of-people and anti-globalization-of-capital–takes pride in the give-and-take lessons of international protest, solidarity, and local self-reliance gleaned during these past five years.

Officials of the United Nations and the host South African government looking hard in the mirror this weekend will have to judge the World Summit on Sustainable Development a failure.

At this crucial juncture, leadership appears to be lacking.

This essay considers Thabo Mbeki’s analysis of globalization, his strategy and demands for global-scale and continental socioeconomic progress, and his preferred alliances.

Let us take as a starting point that the broadly consensual strategy and basis for self-activity in what we can term Global Justice Movements is the following: to promote the globalization of people and halt (or at minimum radically modify) the globalization of capital.