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.
Australia has been hit by one ecological disaster after another this year: first the devastating bushfires, then the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are part of the same rising environmental crisis, and without meaningful action, we’re headed toward dystopia.
Yugoslavia’s partisan movement singlehandedly defeated Nazi occupation and paved the way for a radical transformation of society. Yet socialist Yugoslavia was ultimately broken by its own internal contradictions — and its unwillingness to push that transformation further.
For decades, Europe’s big economies outsourced the problem of pollution by literally shipping their trash to China. When Beijing banned the toxic trade in 2018, it could have served as a wake-up call — but instead, the big polluters have rerouted their garbage to low-wage, low-regulation countries inside the European Union.
While public-health guidance tells citizens to work from home, for millions of low-wage workers, this has never been a realistic option. As Europe’s governments ease the lockdown, it’s working-class people who are on the firing line of a second wave of infections.
Period dramas too often treat their subject with polite reverence and slavish accuracy. Tony McNamara’s new show, The Great, flips the genre on its head, telling the story of Russia’s great Empress with all the grotesque comedy the eighteenth-century Russian court deserves.
The G20’s plans to postpone 76 emerging countries’ debt repayments are a band-aid on fundamental injustices in the global economy. Rebuilding the Global South after the pandemic will require a complete upending of the international order — and the defending states’ sovereignty rather than financial markets’.
The famed historian Walter Rodney was also an important political leader in his native country. In this republished essay, Rodney sets out a biting critique of the Forbes Burnham dictatorship that went on to murder him in 1980, forty years ago today.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, calls to cut police budgets have spread like wildfire. In an interview with Jacobin, two Chicago city council members explain why they’re calling to defund the police and why the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot can’t credibly call herself a “progressive.”
The police were first created to suppress labor militancy and the Left, before becoming a tool to bludgeon the most marginalized in society, particularly poor black people. We must dismantle this brutal instrument of social control.
Mass protests across the country have beat back police repression and won public support for scaling back police power. The Democrats who built the overpolicing and mass incarceration regime now feel left out and want to channel that energy back into familiar territory: getting them reelected.
Don’t let opponents of the current racial justice protests fool you by citing public opinion polls — such polls often showed the majority of American opposed to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Public opinion is not immovable through protest.
A new study is the latest to undermine widespread claims of electoral fraud by Bolivia’s Evo Morales. It isn’t the first such debunking — yet democracy remains betrayed in Bolivia, and “pro-democracy” voices don’t seem too bothered.
Conservatives are spreading lies about Karl Marx. Not only was Marx a consistent campaigner against slavery, he supported the efforts of all those who organized to fight it.
Many in the newly reborn American socialist movement fervently hope that someday, in the face of numerous structural barriers, they can get a viable new party off the ground. But unfortunately, we can expect unions to be among the last to get on board with such a party.
Even before COVID-19 hit Latin America in earnest last month, one-third of the region’s population was facing food insecurity. Now, as the economy contracts under lockdown and supply chains falter, overhauling the continent’s market-driven food system is more necessary than ever.
In spite of mass unemployment and a public health catastrophe, the stock market has been thriving, thanks to massive intervention by the Federal Reserve. We have to break the doom loop that links the Fed to the interests of financial megafirms.
A coronavirus-era partnership between the United Electrical Workers and Democratic Socialists of America has given birth to what may be the most innovative labor organizing campaign since the ’30s: the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
National support for Black Lives Matter has soared — while President Donald Trump’s approval rating has plunged ten points in a single month. The movement for racial justice is more popular than Trump’s presidency.
Critics of the demand to “defund the police” cite current polling snapshots as supposed proof of protesters’ electoral malpractice. They’re politically shortsighted — and confused about the key role of mass protest movements in dragging such demands from the margins to the mainstream.
Minneapolis bus drivers provided a model of solidarity during the George Floyd protests by refusing to transport police officers. We spoke with the president of the bus driver union’s black caucus about the inspiring action and the need for a labor movement that fights for more than just bread-and-butter economic gains for its members.