Blaming the global meltdown for SA’s woes is intellectually disingenuous
FOR many years the progressive trade union movement, under the leadership of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) before its domestication, has consistently raised pertinent issues that are worth repeating today in response to the unfolding socioeconomic crisis.Our starting point is that SA has still not woken up to the 2008 world economic crisis, an Asian flu epidemic in 1997 or even the mining and steel crisis. Our crisis predates all of these.We inherited our socioeconomic crisis from colonialism of a special type, which we defined as a dynamic and self-reinforcing combination of white domination, gender oppression and class exploitation.It is intellectually dishonest for the finance minister to say that all of a sudden the challenges we face can narrowly be situated in the 2008 global crisis of capitalism.In saying this, we are not in any way denying that we were affected by that crisis — of course we were, and a million jobs were lost as a result, and many new en...
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