Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
Last night Italy’s prime minister declared that all nonessential workplaces will be shut down to stem the spread of COVID-19. For two weeks, social distancing has been undermined by employer pressure to keep production going. As contagion soars, other countries would be foolish not to learn Italy’s lesson.
Setbacks for left-wing parties across Europe have led many analysts to declare the end of the “left-populist moment” which began after the financial crisis. But these defeats don’t have to be permanent — and populist strategies remain a vital means of mass mobilization.
In fighting for a Green New Deal we can’t just focus on clean power and innovative ways to decarbonize our society and world. We also need to rethink what and how much we consume — without falling prey to left arguments that amount to austerity.
Iran is ravaged by coronavirus — and US sanctions are making the pandemic even more deadly.
Our economy is crashing hard and fast. But with a bold set of policies, like nationalizing the banks to fund a Green New Deal, we can save millions of workers from untold suffering — and transform the country in the process.
With classic rock riffs and fuzzed-out melodies, Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag wears their left-wing politics on their sleeves.
Coronavirus is pushing us from our workplaces, classrooms, and public spaces into our homes. High-speed internet is more essential than ever to maintain social ties. But millions are denied this fundamental right.
Despite the coronavirus outbreak, the University of Illinois has jacked up health care premiums for graduate workers and refuses to grant additional sick days to those who test positive for COVID-19. This is what workers have to deal with in the corporatized university.
With the appalling Senate scandal over coronavirus insider trading, it is no longer possible to deny it: we are governed by a caste of the unimaginably rich who don’t care if we live or die.
If we are going to avert the worst-case COVID-19 scenario and prevent unimaginable human suffering, we have to fight — and even nationalize — the corporations that are trying to profit off of this crisis at everyone else’s expense.
Faced with impossible choices between going to work and facing potential exposure to coronavirus or staying home and losing needed income, workers at a Brooklyn cafe got organized. To ensure a just response to coronavirus, millions more working people will need to get similarly organized in our workplaces, in our communities, and in politics.
In the face of inadequate health and safety protections against coronavirus on public transit, Detroit bus drivers walked off the job Tuesday demanding management take action. They won.
As Marxist geographer David Harvey argues, forty years of neoliberalism has left the public totally exposed and ill prepared to face a public health crisis on the scale of coronavirus.
COVID-19 teaches us why Medicare for All should be the floor of our demands, not the ceiling. As an epidemiologist argues, we need to radically rebuild our entire public health infrastructure.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen claims to represent the “spirit of Greta,” yet corporate lobbyists have more influence over Europe’s Green Deal than ordinary citizens do. The green transition ought to be controlled by the social majority, so it serves all our needs — not just the businesses who hold sway in Brussels.
During World War II, UAW leader Walter Reuther had a plan to reorient the economy toward needed production, centering the interests of labor rather than markets. As the global health system faces massive shortages in vital medical equipment, Reuther’s blueprints can help us generate our own mass-scale response to the crisis.
The “UBI” ideas being thrown around as a response to the coronavirus are, in many cases, neither universal, basic, nor an income. But they do show how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade.
Companies like Google and Facebook make money not just by predicting our behavior, but by influencing our choices. It’s an intensification of the surveillance that has always been at the heart of capitalism, not a new economic system.
The Democratic Party elite insists nothing can be done to mobilize working-class nonvoters. By challenging their cynicism, Bernie Sanders is rendering a profound service to American democracy.
At the start of the coronavirus epidemic, Norway’s government said it would help businesses by making it easier for them to get rid of workers. But trade unions and left-wing parties fiercely denied that these measures were “inevitable” — and they won a bailout to serve working people, not just their employers.