Jonathan Sas has worked in senior policy and political roles in government, think tanks, and the labor movement. He is an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post, the Tyee, and Maisonneuve.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a change of priorities, as states buy up masks and ventilators regardless of the cost. Basing economic decisions on human need, not our ability to pay, imposes a principle of equality — allowing us collectively to decide what kinds of production we really need.
The G20 has announced it will allow 76 poor countries additional time to pay back their loans. But it’s not an act of benevolence — it’s a desperate maneuver to maintain the global debt peonage that undergirds neoliberal capitalism.
The COVID-19 pandemic will transform our world. Massive state intervention is essential to head off an unprecedented slump. We must come out of this crisis with a better society.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has apologized to Italy for the EU’s underwhelming response to coronavirus. But faced with economic meltdown, battle lines are hardening between the German-led bloc and the states of the Southern periphery — and the splits are about to become even more irreconcilable.
Democratic Party liberals got what they wanted in a Joe Biden nomination for president — and yet they’ve never been more contemptuous of Bernie Sanders supporters.
Poor and blockaded Cuba not only has better health indicators than the United States, but its international medical efforts save thousands of lives a year. We should be applauding the Cuban health system — and learning from it.
With Joe Biden releasing racist anti-China ads and Donald Trump trafficking in his usual toxic xenophobia, it’s becoming clear liberals and conservatives alike are trying to stoke a New Cold War with China. Democratic socialists must stand against it.
Mexican elites have done everything in their power to discredit and undercut President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador since he first took power. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they’re ramping up their attacks.
After he left Siberia in 1900, Lenin would spend much of the next decade in London. He didn’t much like the food — but his time in the émigré milieu would help make him the revolutionary he was.
Small business owners, who feature prominently in the anti-shutdown protests, occupy a unique place in capitalism’s class hierarchy — although many share the same kinds of struggles experienced by wage workers, as a class, they’re often drawn to the far right.
Even as Iran’s coronavirus death toll nears 5,000, US sanctions continue to bear down on the country’s health care system.
The massive oil price crash we’ve seen this week is an opportunity for governments to do what we have long needed to do: keep the remaining fossil fuels in the ground and invest in a Green New Deal to save the planet and stimulate the economy.
A decent welfare state should provide the basics of life so everyone can flourish. The United States’ patchwork of poorly funded safety net programs is doing the opposite — dropping people through a trapdoor as the pandemic ravages the economy.
The foundation of Israel is tied up with David Ben-Gurion, its first prime minister. Through examining his life, we see how Israel’s creation was from its beginnings doomed to create an apartheid-like state maintained by an oppressor nation.
With Bernie Sanders now out of the race, commentators from left and right are finding fault with the campaign itself, arguing that there was too much class politics or not enough. But the problem wasn’t Bernie’s campaign strategy — it was the full force of the Democratic establishment that so effectively consolidated against him.
Captured on a thousand Instagram feeds, the UFO-like monument to the Bulgarian Communist Party is one of the Eastern Bloc’s most famous architectural relics. A battle to save it from decay has brought Bulgaria’s past back into political debate — and highlighted the death of the radicalism that motivated the project to start with.
Claims that the working class no longer exists often suggest it’s been replaced by a “precariat” who don’t get a regular salary. But this precarious condition has been the experience of most workers throughout capitalism’s history — and where we did get stable employment, it was because we organized.
For more than a year, Benny Gantz bestrode the stage of Israeli politics as the standard-bearer of that country’s version of Anyone-But-Trumpism — a hollow politics of “restoring dignity” in the face of Benyamin Netanyahu’s outrages. Now that project has collapsed, leaving Israel’s sclerotic and prostrate left more adrift than ever.
Faced with wall-to-wall obstruction from the Burlington, Vermont city establishment, a newly elected Mayor Bernie Sanders won a series of early fights that showed the country what a creative, pro–working-class socialist government could accomplish at the local level.
With millions of people put out of work, analysts across the political spectrum have proclaimed that the time has come for an Unconditional Basic Income. But this safety net won’t be enough unless we take on the biggest problem we face — an economic model based on high rents and high personal debts.