Patrick Bond

Last weekend in New York heralded another of the annual UN heads-of-state summits at which inappropriate targets, processes and evaluation systems were reconfirmed.

The ‘Faustian Pact’ metaphor as explanation for the South African liberation movement’s 1990s capitulation to neoliberal capitalism is offered by Ronnie Kasrils.

“Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is always prefaced with the two words ‘much needed,’” my colleague Sarah Bracking insisted last week at a Zimbabwe NGO conference. “Have you ever heard FDI referenced without those two words?” We all shook our heads.

The main point of the summit of leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa last week was host Vladimir Putin’s demonstration of economic autonomy, given how much Western sanctions and low oil prices keep biting Russia.

With around 100 books of progressive political economy and political ecology penned about South Africa since 2000, the Marxist intellectual project here is utterly chaotic, but by no means in tatters.

Political symbols in South Africa are here today, gone tomorrow, but oppressive political economy endures.

Sometimes a single event reveals crucial stories about our strengths and weaknesses in advancing progressive social change and ecological sanity.

Last Thursday night in Cape Town’s Parliament hall, South Africa’s newest and cheekiest political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), fought gamely but lost their two-dozen seats for the evening.

The coming fork in the road provides three distinct directions. The poorly-lit one straight ahead suffers from potholes that force stop-start-reverse maneuvers.

In a Washington Post op-ed last week, ‘The IMF's Perestroika Moment’, Boston University political economists Cornel Ban a