Wouter van de Klippe is a freelance journalist and writer based in Europe. He is particularly interested in organized labor, social and environmental justice, and social welfare states.
In a staggering display of cruelty, South African police laid siege to an illegal gold mine near Johannesburg, leaving at least 78 workers dead by mid-January. Informal miners are the shadow of an exploitative mining industry — one inextricable from apartheid.
This week, as Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was attempting to further gut the US government, his rocket company SpaceX was cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency.
Love Hurts is the Valentine’s Day–themed action movie you never asked for.
Born to Rule makes it clear that wealth and inheritance, not merit, are still the way to get ahead in Britain. Its case for a meritocratic elite, however, misses the point: Britain’s problems run much deeper than talent misallocation among its upper classes.
Immanuel Wallerstein was convinced that the capitalist system would end within the next few decades and would either be replaced by a more regressive world-system or a more democratic and egalitarian one. In his view, the odds were 50-50 each way.
In his attempts to reshape the federal workforce, Donald Trump is drawing on the American tradition of treating workers’ employment as completely subject to their bosses’ whims.
In his latest book, Peter Beinart calls on American Jews to see the horrors of Gaza and abandon blind Zionism in favor of a justice-driven Jewish identity. Blending biblical critique with political observations, it rethinks the meaning of Jewishness today.
In Colombia, coastal erosion caused by a combination of climate change and environmentally destructive industrial agriculture is displacing the country’s poorest citizens. But the scale of the disaster means that it has no easy solutions.
From the smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution to today’s neural nets, technology has always been a double-edged sword that carries the promise of liberation for workers. But cashing in on that promise requires control over how technology is deployed.
Wolfgang Streeck’s new book Taking Back Control? argues that the neoliberal era of free trade and trickle-down rhetoric lies in the past. He spoke to Jacobin about the political shocks this might bring.
Donald Trump once told voters he was fighting a corrupt political system. With Elon Musk operating with impunity throughout the federal government, Trump has taken political corruption to new and unprecedented lengths.
Elon Musk’s claim that South Africa’s land expropriation laws are part of a broader attack on the country’s white minority is divorced from reality. But it represents South African elites’ inability to understand the class tensions that define their nation.
Defeating the GOP’s proposed Medicaid cuts, which will then fund huge tax cuts for the rich, is an urgent priority. It’s a chance to reestablish the popularity of the welfare state in American politics and hand Donald Trump and Elon Musk a much-needed defeat.
Elon Musk would like you to think he is invincible right now. But the world’s richest man is actually extremely vulnerable to public pressure at the moment — public pressure that federal workers and their unions can take advantage of.
Pundits like Thomas Friedman claimed that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was a reformer committed to liberalization. In reality, the Saudi kingdom remains unflinchingly authoritarian, combining traditional and ultramodern repressive techniques.
A burst of enthusiasm among the membership has given Germany’s socialist party Die Linke what might be its last chance at renewal. But becoming a party of the working class will take a lot more than a last-minute turnaround at the polls.
Throughout the entire history of left-wing and working-class organizing in the United States, the participation in and building of institutions of political education has been key.
Americans are trading bar culture for wellness apps and mocktails. But despite alcohol’s many shortcomings, our national sobering up is not a simple cause for celebration. We’re also losing social spaces and traditions in an increasingly alienated society.
Donald Trump has fired more than a dozen inspectors general, officials who provide independent oversight of federal agencies. At least five of them worked at agencies with previous or ongoing investigations of Elon Musk’s business practices.
Italy’s Five Star Movement was long a classic “populist” movement, rejecting ideological labels. Its recent decision to join the left-wing group in the EU parliament is the latest step in a turn toward a more distinctly pro-labor, pacifist stance.