Since slavery and colonialism, the denial of humanity to more than half the world’s population remains part of the broad framework of our world system. In 2021, the life of an Afghan civilian is made less worthy than the life of a US soldier. In South Africa, the Black Consciousness movement and its community programmes (1972-1977) provide lessons on how to resist racism and dehumanisation, making the struggle for freedom something precise and worthwhile for the dignity of existence rather than an abstraction.

From the recent attacks on the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to the assassination of South African trade union leader Malibongwe Mdazo last month, political violence by the right wing against those who seek to amplify the voices of the people has become routine. When these leaders are assassinated or when buildings are burnt, a light begins to flicker. Those who carry out the violence expect that the flame of resistance will die down and that the people will be cowed into submission, but the other outcome is just as likely: that these deaths and this violence will inspire courage.

A billion people live without shoes in the 21st century. Yet the global footwear industry produces 24.3 billion pairs of shoes a year, namely three pairs of shoes for every person on the planet. What times we live in when we are called upon to be reasonable in a world where disorder is the norm, the disorder of wars and floods, pestilence of one kind or another. With or without shoes, the need to break through the disorder is immense.

The expansion of the Islamic State in Africa is a ‘striking development’. Even more striking are the underlying problems: the control and theft of resources and the attendant social problems produced by this theft, namely the great distress experienced by the people of Africa. In Mozambique, it is estimated that 80% of people cannot afford an adequate diet and 2.9 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity. The real security problems are food insecurity and the humiliations of poverty, which produce all kinds of unrest – including al-Shabab.

Attention is on COP26, where the powerful Global North will once more push for ‘net zero’ carbon dioxide emissions and thereby reject deep cuts to their own emissions while insisting that the Global South forgo social development. In the face of the climate crisis, we are left with two paths, as Evo Morales said: the path of ‘pachamama (Mother Earth) or the path of the multinational. If we don’t take the former, the masters of death will win. If we don’t fight, we will be guilty of destroying the planet’.