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 Great Depression thoroughly discredited laissez-faire economics. But over the postwar decades, with the help of generous business funding and political connections, figures like Milton Friedman led a remarkable revival of nineteenth-century economic ideas. They did it by adopting a pseudo-populist rhetoric that celebrated individual choice and autonomy.
If Democrats subject the next round of survival checks to more means testing, Americans battered by the economic crisis will find it even more difficult to make ends meet.
Chadwick Boseman’s final performance in playwright August Wilson’s new Netflix adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a haunting but appropriate farewell.
This past year saw a wave of anti-Asian racism, egged on by a club of conservative “anti-anti-racist” commentators who brand opponents of bigotry as stooges for the Chinese Communist Party. It’s long past time to challenge their sly dog whistles and disingenuous smears.
The GameStop saga was more than a simple tale of upstart traders taking on big business. But it highlighted again how disconnected Wall Street is from ordinary workers — and new polling finds that even more Americans now resent Wall Street.
The American military has long been fertile ground for the far right. To weaken the radical right’s power, we need to dismantle the warfare state — and build in its place a humane welfare state that provides for all.
The term “Orwellian” has long been a vacuous cliché, and now even allies of Trump are making use of it to deride their opponents. But George Orwell, a self-described democratic socialist, always belonged on the Left.
From 2007 to 2017, Ecuador was a beacon of hope on the Latin American left, but the last four years have seen a neoliberal regime imposing IMF-driven austerity. The front-runner in polls for today’s presidential election, left-winger Andrés Arauz, told Jacobin how he’ll continue the Citizen Revolution — and build on his ally Rafael Correa’s legacy.
Cargill runs Canada’s biggest meatpacking facility and obliged its workers to come in despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the company is facing a criminal investigation — the first of its kind — after the sadly predictable deaths of workers and their family members.
Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is rumored to be the next president of the World Trade Organization. But placing an African woman at the top of the powerful institution will do little if it continues to push neoliberal policies that harm workers and farmers across the Global South.
We should all cheer on strikes like the recently ended Hunts Point Teamsters walk off in the Bronx. But there’s no substitute for socialists actually showing up on the picket lines to provide tangible material support and engage with striking workers.
From last year’s Democratic primaries to this year’s Biden agenda, TV news coverage of the health care debate is outrageously skewed against single-payer reform. To understand why, we need look no further than their business model.
Tech workers occupy a contradictory location in the American class structure. On the one hand, many are well paid and identify both as professionals and with management. On the other, the proletarianized aspects of their work can offer opportunities to seize for organizing as workers.
Attempts by companies like McDonald’s to use memes for marketing have flopped, with ad men unable to reproduce memes’ inherent reliance on collective creativity. Memes don’t fit with the logic of private appropriation — and social media sites looking for ad revenue are giving them ever less space.
The Write Stuff, a recent collection of essays from the ALP’s conservative wing, argues that Labor must shift even further to the right to become electorally successful. The book’s authors couldn’t be more wrong — to win, Labor must ditch the neoliberal policies they celebrate.
The military coup against Aung San Suu Kyi marks the end of Burma’s ten-year experiment with democracy. Her government spoke of national reconciliation while denying the military’s atrocities and doing nothing to stop its war on ethnic minorities — an explicit refusal to “take sides” which ensured the armed forces would continue to dominate the country’s politics.
Before Anton Pannekoek, astronomers sought only to interpret the cosmos — his goal was to change it. The renowned Dutch scientist who gave his name to an asteroid and a moon crater was also a Marxist revolutionary who debated with figures like Lenin about the road to power.
The massive farmer protests in India are facing down a Modi government that has no qualms about using repression to push through its neoliberal agenda. The farmers’ resolve has been remarkable — and they’re providing a glimmer of hope that Modi’s far-right government may not be as invincible as it seemed just months ago.
Universal cash assistance programs have provided an indispensable financial lifeline for households and the economy as a whole during the pandemic. But contrary to many advocates of a universal basic income, the past year’s experience offers no model for a left policy agenda in normal times.
By one estimate, Elon Musk owns more than a quarter of all active satellites orbiting Earth. Though his fantasy of becoming emperor of Mars probably won’t materialize, we have to scale back the unchecked power of deranged Bond villain types like Musk before it extends from Earth to the skies.