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If Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often reduced to greenwashing for naïve middleclass consumers, is there a more durable force to address excessive profit-taking and consequent underdevelopment? While the post-apartheid era in South Africa has been celebrated, with little foresight, for an economic boom that restored relative corporate profitability to levels last witnessed during apartheid's heyday, the same period saw worldclass social opposition to corporate power. Three areas are illustrative: the Treatment Action Campaign's street pressure and legal strategy to acquire anti-retroviral drugs for HIV-positive people; Sowetans whose street protests helped drive Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux out of Johannesburg and whose constitutional case over the right to water attacked its commercialisation policies; and climate activists who oppose carbon trading. Meanwhile, activists also demanded reparations from apartheid-tainted transnational corporations in the US courts through the Alien Tort Claims Act, while a “Corpse Awards” was launched by activists in part to mitigate against CSR efforts. The critiques of corporations – and CSR – and the motivation for social activism are informed by strategic principles of “decommodification” and “deglobalisation of capital”; the first cannot work without the second.
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