The global battle over drug company patents for COVID-19 vaccines is the latest skirmish in the irrepressible conflict between property rights and human rights. It’s no surprise that Bill Gates, the monopolist billionaire, has taken the side of patents.
Joe Biden hits his 100-day mark in office this week. His foreign policy has been as bad as expected, animated by the grotesque idea that now and forever, the US should call the shots around the world.
A leading exponent of global labor history, Marcel van der Linden’s work looks beyond the Fordist industrial workforce to examine the ever-changing forms of exploitation on which capitalism relies.
Corporate logging has destroyed much of California’s once vast and majestic redwood forests. As environmental crises collide, the imperative to save the remaining trees is stronger than ever. That means challenging those who profit from the trees’ destruction.
Around the world, the global pandemic has spurred widespread public hunger for radical economic and political change. It’s a historic opportunity the global left must seize — or risk watching as it’s seized by the Right.
President Joe Biden has announced a new emissions reduction plan. It doesn’t do nearly enough to address the US’s climate impacts on the rest of the world.
Recognizing self-proclaimed Venezuelan president Juan Guaidó in 2019, Britain’s Tory government claimed to be standing up for democracy. Recently published ministerial diaries reveal the cynicism of the real discussions behind the move — showing how ministers explicitly saw the crisis as an opportunity to curry favor with Donald Trump.
In Australian politics today, the neoliberal consensus seems unshakable. But the experience of the Curtin and Whitlam Labor governments shows the potential of progressive populism to deliver social change — a potential we can also glimpse in the recent growth of the Greens.
Leftist lawyer Michael Tigar has spent his life in courtrooms defending a wide range of names big and small on the Left, from Vietnam War draft resisters to Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. He captures them all in a new memoir.
J. D. Bernal was one of the twentieth century’s great scientific minds, whose work nurtured the imagination of science-fiction writers. In a world where capitalist priorities distort scientific research, Bernal’s Marxist perspective on science is more relevant than ever.
Today, Italians commemorate the partisans’ victory over Fascism. But in recent years, a right-wing campaign has tried to equate the actions of the Fascists who started the war with the resistance fighters who helped end it.
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot recently announced a “co-responder” model for addressing mental health crises, pairing social workers with cops on the scene. That model is wrong. Social workers can’t aid people in need by partnering with a police department that has a long history of unchecked brutality.
Today’s Albanian election sees Edi Rama’s Partia Socialiste running for a third term, two years after a powerful student movement forced the sacking of half his cabinet. In one of Europe’s poorest countries, green shoots of protest are finally challenging the parties that led Albania to neoliberal capitalism.
The radical anthropologist Marshall Sahlins died earlier this month. Throughout his long career, he refused to divorce his academic work from his political commitments. He was an exemplar of a radical intellectual working within the university to change the world.
Canada’s Liberal government recently tabled its first budget since the pandemic began, and it contains some modest shifts away from austerity economics. But these policies fall far short of what’s needed, and the core of Trudeau’s budget is about maintaining the status quo.
Nina Simone is often remembered for her involvement in the civil rights movement. She was also engaged with the radical political currents of her age, including socialism.
With COVID-19 still traveling and mutating, mass vaccination is an urgent and international priority. But dealing with vaccine skepticism will involve more than just dismissing people’s doubt as irrational. It will require genuine engagement with the doubt and uncertainty that is also a fundamental principle of the scientific method.
Beginning in 2014, Brazil was consumed by a moralizing anti-corruption drive that helped right-wing forces oust the Workers’ Party and undermine Lula’s legacy. It took investigative journalism to unravel Lava Jato’s mythology.
Two years since his fuel tax hike was sunk by the Yellow Vests protests, Emmanuel Macron’s new climate law again exhorts the French to show “willpower” in the fight to “make the world great again.” But the law does nothing to impose limits on the most environmentally damaging businesses — instead blaming climate change on citizens’ failure to alter their habits.
For the Left, it’s easy to hate the media, with its entrenched centrist biases and loyalty to the status quo. But a world without high-quality news is a world where meaningful democracy is impossible. That’s the message of media scholar Victor Pickard, who argues for a transformation of our media system away from the model of commercial news and toward a “public option.”