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.
The House just passed a stimulus bill that breaks the 25-year bipartisan consensus that the very poor shouldn’t be eligible for cash benefits. It’s a watershed moment — and we should build on it by turning the US welfare state into a poverty-fighting machine.
With the passage today of the $2 trillion stimulus bill, deficit-phobia appears to be waning in Washington. But it’s not because lawmakers have been won over to redistributive policies — it’s because they think the working class is too weak to set off inflation.
The notion that we can change the world by “voting with our dollars” has become popular among progressives. But it’s a fundamentally antidemocratic idea that has more in common with libertarianism than egalitarian politics.
Companies have long been able to get away with funding climate change denial in secret. A new SEC rule could drag those dark-money donations into the open.
We talk to legendary filmmaker Adam Curtis about politics, power, music, and his new six-part documentary, Can’t Get You Out of My Head.
Everyone wants schools to reopen, but the Biden administration seems to be ignoring what mounting evidence from overseas shows: many of the newest COVID variants do in fact infect children and promote community spread.
Despite a vicious crackdown that has left scores of protesters dead, the worker-led movement against the military coup in Myanmar continues to rock the country. We spoke with three female garment workers who helped organize another general strike this week.
After yesterday’s ruling declaring former Brazilian president Lula da Silva eligible to run in next year’s election, Brazil’s ruling class is panicking. But for Brazilian workers struggling with economic hardship and the COVID-19 pandemic, Lula’s return means there is finally some hope for change.
Legendary actor and longtime progressive activist Danny Glover was recently in Bessemer, Alabama, supporting workers’ efforts to organize a union there. In an interview, Glover talks about what brought him to Bessemer, his own labor history, and why the Amazon workers’ “struggle has significance for all of us.”
New research shows why inequality is even worse than it looks on paper. Thanks to weak leverage, the same workers who earn the lowest wages also suffer the worst violations of labor rights at the hands of employers.
There are moments when even the most committed of democrats find themselves despairing of political democracy. But the system has proven again and again to be the last best hope of ordinary people in defending their pursuit of happiness against tyrants of all stripes — both public and private.
The current guest worker system prioritizes agricultural growers’ profits over immigrants’ and workers’ rights. Joe Biden should seek a different way: building an immigration system based on family reunification, community stability, and immigrant workers’ rights to decent wages, health, and housing.
The early German socialist movement was a largely male affair, with widespread sexist attitudes compounding a state ban on women taking part in politics. But by the 1900s, a proletarian women’s movement had forced working-class women’s demands onto the agenda — insisting that they didn’t need fathers and husbands, or bourgeois ladies, to speak on their behalf.
Watching Meghan Markle and Prince Harry talk to Oprah about the depraved monarchy last night, I couldn’t help but wonder why I live in a country where the Queen is the head of state. Canada needs to dump the British monarchy and never look back.
Fifty years ago today, a group of New Left activists executed a daring burglary of an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, exposing the bureau’s COINTELPRO operations against the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war activists, and socialists. We should remember these activists today as heroes.
On International Women’s Day, the good news is that the new COVID-19 relief bill will include a kind-of, sort-of universal child benefit — a policy that feminists have long called for. But the overly complicated, burdensome way the policy is implemented means that on this issue, the Left still has its work cut out for it.
Thousands of home care workers in New York are forced to work twenty-four-hour shifts while being paid for only half the time. That’s outrageous — and on International Women’s Day, we should heed their call in taking up the struggle for control over our time.
The bodies that govern international sport are riddled with corruption and in need of drastic change. We need an alternative socialist vision for how sports should be run that gives priority to social well-being and international cooperation over nationalism and private profit.
Lelio Basso was a major figure of the postwar Italian left who urged its parties to follow through on their revolutionary programs and avoid subordinating themselves to the ruling Christian Democrats. Italy’s Socialists and Communists should have heeded his advice.
In the twentieth century, socialists and communists used municipal power in Paris to build some of Europe’s most ambitious social housing projects — housing that was not only beautiful but made for and by the city’s working class.