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.
How might we imagine a transition to a socialist economy? There are clues in unlikely places: the management practices of some private corporations, which have been developing planned economies in miniature.
Many states are racing to reopen their economies, even though the daily number of new confirmed coronavirus cases is holding steady nationwide. Without a comprehensive nationwide plan, if workers go back to their jobs now, we will likely see more cases — and more deaths.
Liberal pundits argue that Bernie Sanders’s policies were too radical for “ordinary Americans.” But primary voters are much richer than the average voter in the general. Among working-class Americans, ideas like Medicare for All are becoming common sense.
New York Democrats have struck Bernie Sanders from the ballot, canceling the state’s June primary. It’s left a bitter taste in the mouths of his supporters, whose disillusionment with the Democratic Party will only deepen.
Michael Moore has defended the rights and interests of working people for decades. But his new film, Planet of the Humans, embraces bad science on renewable energy and anti-humanist, anti–working class narratives of overpopulation and overconsumption.
Bernie Sanders didn’t just put policies like Medicare for All on the map nationally — he also insisted we need to build a mass movement to win. The next phase of the Sanders movement must involve building democratic, nationwide membership organizations.
Norway has become famous for its social harmony and relatively generous welfare system. But the social-democratic compromise we know today doesn’t owe to some eternal national character — rather, it was a product of the revolutionary struggles of the interwar period.
Bernie Sanders didn’t just put forward a set of progressive policies that we can fight for — he showed us that a completely different way of doing politics was possible.
In states like Iowa, right-wing governors have used the coronavirus pandemic to continue their assault on workers — forcing thousands to go back to work prematurely and promising to pull unemployment benefits for anyone who has the temerity to put their health first.
Since the 2003 war against Iraq, a massive 70 percent of the country’s health care infrastructure has been destroyed. As hospitals are besieged by victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, a state enfeebled by two decades of conflict is again at a breaking point.
The people of Kashmir have been left badly exposed to COVID-19 by a state that spends lavishly on tools of repression while neglecting public health services. The Indian government is using the lockdown to extend its regime of surveillance and control.
Pakistani authorities made a bad start to the coronavirus response, using the crisis to push through an IMF agenda of hospital privatization. Faced with protests by health professionals, the government immediately opted for repression — showing that it considers health care for the masses mere unnecessary spending.
With Adam Bandt as leader, the Australian Greens are charting a leftward course and developing the country’s most ambitious policy proposals. The next step is to build a strong movement behind it — and to achieve that, it will need a democratically empowered membership.
Even as governments halt nonessential travel, thousands of workers are being flown from Eastern Europe to pick farm produce in Britain. Housed several workers to a caravan and often paid below minimum wage, their experience shows how “flexible” seasonal hiring allows bosses to flout the most basic workers’ rights.
A year before the coronavirus pandemic, graduate workers at the University of Illinois-Chicago went on strike for three weeks and won. Last month, they built off of the infrastructure created during that strike to demand and win COVID-19 protections.
The feminist movement in Chile is one of the strongest in the world, last month bringing millions of women into the streets for International Women’s Day. Building on the mass protests that erupted in October, their movement is only growing bolder, and articulating meaningful alternatives to the country’s neoliberal order.
The term “post-democracy” refers to the recent process where democratic institutions have been hollowed out and citizens increasingly excluded from decision-making. But a serious response to this problem can’t just denounce its “populist” symptoms — rather, we need to examine the deeper social ills stemming from economic liberalism itself.
By recruiting notorious neoliberal economist Larry Summers to advise him on coronavirus policy, Joe Biden has shown that since 2008, liberal elites have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
There’s only one way to get the political education, organizing skills, and institutional support you need to be an effective socialist: join a socialist organization.
Today, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target are striking and asking customers to stage a one-day solidarity boycott. They’re fighting for what they deserve — and we should have their backs.