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.
Our current model of pharmaceutical research is based on patent monopolies designed to enrich drug company executives and shareholders. But there’s a better way to develop new drugs and vaccines, based on public funding and open-source research.
In the 1920s and ’30s, a summer school for industrial working women built an economics curriculum around the perspective of labor rather than capital. It offers a visionary example of worker education that emphasizes class struggle and worker empowerment.
The case against former Brazilian president Lula da Silva is over and fully discredited. Now the path is clear for Lula to take on Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing government and save Brazilian democracy.
Joe Biden’s inadequate stimulus is the best workers can expect if they aren’t organized and fighting. But if we’re to see more policies that benefit and empower the working class, we’ll need more workplace organizing, more strikes, and more class struggle.
In a 1902 article, Eugene V. Debs described his journey from young labor organizer to militant socialist. We reprint it here in full.
In the 1920s and ’30s, German publisher Willi Münzenberg built a network of magazines, newspapers, and film studios that terrified big business interests. It became the largest left-wing media operation in history.
Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.
The United States has been locked in a mental health crisis over the past year, one exacerbated by the miserable material conditions faced by millions. Democratic leaders should promise easement from that sense of dread through redistributive policies, connecting our mental well-being to our material well-being.
Inspire Brands — which owns Jimmy John’s, Arby’s, Sonic, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Dunkin’ — bragged in internal documents about its role preventing workers from getting a living wage. $15 an hour and a union is the least we should be demanding from predatory corporations.
When it comes to foreign policy, Joe Biden represents a continuation of the imperialist status quo. We need a leftist alternative that weakens US empire and prizes democracy, rather than one that assumes the US is right to dominate the world.
Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic love Britain’s monarchy because “royals” are emotionally potent mascots of extreme inequality and deference. There’s no reason this heinously undemocratic institution should exist.
Baristas and other workers at multiple Colectivo Coffee locations in Wisconsin and Illinois are organizing a union. We spoke to a Colectivo worker about the working conditions under COVID-19 that spurred them to organize, allegations of union-busting, and the need for workers everywhere to “get over the fear that [unionizing] can’t be done.”
For decades, ordinary residents have been pushed out of cities like London and New York to make room for offices and luxury apartments. But the pandemic has massively reduced demand for these same locations — turning city centers into ghost towns, full of shiny new buildings that no one needs.
The Trump-nominated postmaster general Louis DeJoy is still in charge of the US Postal Service — and he’s still trying to run it into the ground. Joe Biden must do everything he can to boot DeJoy from office.
Sweden is a famous for its welfare system, but recent decades’ neoliberal reforms have made life for working people ever more precarious. The Left Party’s new chair, Nooshi Dadgostar, told Jacobin why rebuilding a strong safety net is decisive for shielding Swedes from the pandemic — and reassuring workers worried by the green transition.
With Bernie Sanders on his way to Bessemer, Alabama to support warehouse workers voting on a union, and the company facing increasingly negative press over working conditions that include drivers being forced to urinate in bottles, Amazon’s PR operation is getting defensive.
When COVID-19 sent the global economy into meltdown, European leaders insisted they wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes they made after the 2008 crisis. But in Italy, a familiar cast of technocrats are again touting the same neoliberal recipes — hobbling the country’s public sector and driving ever-wider inequalities.
Records show how right-wing groups have used a network of conferences to teach Republican lawmakers how to gerrymander their states and suppress voting rights. Georgia is just the beginning in the war on democracy.
Led by Australian unions, the Hunter Jobs Alliance is organizing workers, environmentalists, and Hunter Valley communities to oppose the right-wing narrative on climate change. We don’t have to choose between protecting jobs and saving the planet: a plan based on public investment can do both.
France waged a brutal colonial war in Algeria during the 1950s. But a group of writers clustered around Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes played a courageous role, exposing French war crimes and supporting the right of the Algerian people to self-determination.