Jeremy Seekings

Bio: Jeremy Seekings is an academic researcher from University of Cape Town. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poverty & Politics. The author has an hindex of 32, co-authored 168 publications receiving 4230 citations. Previous affiliations of Jeremy Seekings include Yale University & Stellenbosch University.

Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa

Abstract: The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the "distributional regime." The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.

The continuing salience of race: Discrimination and diversity in South Africa

Abstract: The end of apartheid has brought a resurgence of research into racial identities, attitudes and behaviour in South Africa. The legacy of systematic racial ordering and discrimination under apartheid is that South Africa remains deeply racialised, in cultural and social terms, as well as deeply unequal, in terms of the distribution of income and opportunities. South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid ‘redress’, in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups. There has been little racial integration in residential areas, although schools provide an important opportunity for inter-racial interaction for middle-class children. Experimental and survey research provide little evidence of racism, however. Few people complain about r...

The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991

Abstract: The new South Africa cannot be understood without a knowledge of the history of the UDF and its role in the transition to democracy. As Professor Gail Gerhart has written, \"Without the UDF, the politics of the contemporary ANC would have been entirely different, its accession to power more difficult, and the character of its subsequent actions undoubtedly both different and probably much less successful. The UDF was far more than a John the Baptist to the ANC's second coming: it was actually the mechanism through which the ANC, in exile for 30 years, effected its successful return, adaptation and reintegration as South Africa's post-apartheid government.\" This is a major study of an organisation that transformed South African politics in the 1980s. By co-ordinating popular struggles on the ground and promoting the standing of the African National Congress, the UDF played a central role in the demise of apartheid and paved the way for South Africa's emergence as a democracy. Based on extensive documentary and interview sources, this title traces the UDF's birth, career and dissolution. It is a remarkable tale of strategic and tactical decision-making: of how opponents of apartheid made choices that helped to seal the fate of white domination whilst avoiding the general bloodbath that always threatened. Jeremy Seekings is an associate professor in the sociology department at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of a book on youth politics in the 1980s as well as many articles on politics and society in South Africa.

"Two Nations"? Race and Economic Inequality in South Africa Today

Abstract: South Africa has long been infamous for its very high level of inequality. Speaking in Parliament in 1998, then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki described South Africa as divided into "two nations, the one black and the other white": One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographical dispersal. It has ready access to a devel oped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. This enables it to argue that, except for the persis tence of gender discrimination against women, all members of this nation have the possibility of exercising their right to equal oppor tunity, and the development opportunities to which the Constitu tion of 1993 committed our country. The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor, with the worst-affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled. This nation lives under conditions of grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. It has virtually no possibility of exercising what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity, that right being equal within this black nation only to the extent that it is equally incapable of realisation.1

Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age@@@The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society

Abstract: Introduction Part I. Theory of Collective Action: 1. The construction of collective action 2. Conflict and change 3. Action and meaning 4. The process of collective identity Part II. Contemporary Collective Action: 5. conflicts of culture 6. Invention of the present 7. The time of difference 8. Roots for today and for tomorrow 9. A search for ethics 10. Information, power, domination Part III. The Field of Collective Action: 11. A society without a centre 12. The political system 13. The state and the distribution of social resources 14. Modernization, crisis, and conflict: the case of Italy Part IV. Acting Collectively: 15. Mobilization and political participation 16. The organization of movements 17. Leadership in social movements 18. Collective action and discourse 19. Forms of action 20. Research on collective action.

Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment

Abstract: dismantling the welfare state reagan thatcher and politics of retrenchment are a good way to achieve details about operating certainproducts. Many products that you buy can be obtained using instruction manuals. These user guides are clearlybuilt to give step-by-step information about how you ought to go ahead in operating certain equipments. Ahandbook is really a user's guide to operating the equipments. Should you loose your best guide or even the productwould not provide an instructions, you can easily obtain one on the net. You can search for the manual of yourchoice online. Here, it is possible to work with google to browse through the available user guide and find the mainone you'll need. On the net, you'll be able to discover the manual that you might want with great ease andsimplicity

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming

Abstract: he global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—“plagues of the ‘new world order,’” Jacques Derrida (1994: 91) calls them, unable to resist apocalyptic imagery—have been the subject of clamorous debate. Others receive less mention. Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of “homogenization and difference” (e.g., Barber 1992); on the simultaneous, synergistic spiraling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a “new feudalism,” a phoenix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf. Connelly and Kennedy 1994).1 For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant