Month: February 2025

*18 February 2025* *SAFTU Statement on the Fourth Quarter 2024 Labour Force Survey - 18 February 2025* The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) notes with deep concern the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for Q4 2024, released today by Statistics South Africa. The data confirms what SAFTU has consistently warned: there is nothing to celebrate. The expanded unemployment rate remains catastrophically high at 41.9%, indicating no significant improvement in the dire jobs crisis. Even more troubling is that six out of nine provinces continue to suffer unemployment rates above 40%. This reinforces the deep regional inequalities and the failure of economic policies to address the desperate conditions facing millions of workers and job seekers across the country. ...

Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. There are days when the dusk of events settles heavily on me, and I try to find a way to retreat into a quiet corner and throw myself into the world of a book. It does not matter if it is a novel or a history book, as long as the author is able to conjure up a world that transports me from the flood of brutalities to an island of imagination. In recent months, I have been reading more and more novels – including Japanese crime fiction, a notable favourite – and finding in them characters with whom I can sometimes laugh and sometimes frown in bewilderment. Madness is not new to our world. It has been there before. I have before me Seichō Matsumoto’s Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958) and Suna n...

Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Lost in a colonial fog of inferiority, writers across Asia imagined a world that was beyond the reach of colonialism’s devastation. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) wrote a remarkable story called ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’; the story, published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, came out when the great French science fiction novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) was only seven years old. Dutt’s account is not strictly science fiction, but largely futuristic. The eighteen-year-old opened his story with this line: ‘The people of India and particularly those of the metropolis had been subject for the last fifty years to every species of subaltern oppression. … With the rap...

On the 31st January 2025 Maduro's dictadorship sealed an agreement with Richard Grenell, representative of the new U.S. government of Donald Trump, by which, instead of continuing to exploit venezuelan oil, Trump wll support the dictasdorship. the workers and people of Venezuela together with the peoples of the world we must reject this sell- out and imperialist agreement made by the dictadorship for the benefit of the millonaire owners of the multinationals imperialist. While the opposition representative of the democratic unity roundtable (MUD) the opposition, María Corina Machado, is silent about the agreement, we denounce the chavismo of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela ( in Spanish, PSUV) and the 99% of the world left, the socialdemocrats, stalinists, former guerrillas and b...

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