Australia’s privatized employment services system doesn’t help people find work. Instead, thanks to reforms first introduced by the Labor Party, it punishes welfare recipients with a bureaucratic maze of “mutual obligations.”
The radical idea at the heart of republicanism is a challenge to private bosses and public tyrants everywhere: that we can live free from the whims of arbitrary power. Democratic socialists should embrace the radical currents of this ancient philosophy.
The war in Ukraine provided a pretext for tight government control over this weekend’s local elections in Russia. Yet with the situation clearly worsening, the vote has given rise to signs of popular dissent.
As energy bills soar, Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, proposes short-term measures to prop up suppliers with public money. But we won't be “back to normal” anytime soon — and it’s working-class Britons who will suffer.
For Chileans who resisted Augusto Pinochet’s regime, the election of left-wing president Gabriel Boric offered hope. Yet the rejection of a proposed new constitution threatens to hobble his government and reverse the democratic breakthrough of recent years.
Justin Trudeau’s recent housing initiative announcement was better than nothing but woefully inadequate to the scale of Canada’s housing crisis. We need social housing now.
After the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the young radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley proclaimed he was deserting “the odorous gardens of literature” for “the great sandy desert of politics.” Instead, he infused literature with revolutionary political ideas.
Migrant workers have served as the foundation for Germany’s rapid economic growth in the postwar years, but the benefits of that growth have not been evenly distributed. Today, precarious workers are pushing back against Germany’s exclusionary economic system.
Even though most Canadians would prefer an elected head of state, Charles III is the country’s new king. But enduring monarchism does suit Canadian elites, whose worldview is sustained by the idea of inherited privilege and power embodied by the crown.
The American Revolution was inspired by ruthless criticism of the British monarchy. Why stop now?
When the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike against Mayor Rahm Emanuel ten years ago, corporate education reform was on the march. The CTU won that strike, beat back the neoliberal Democrats, and turned the tide in favor of public education.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Joe Manchin struck a deal to fast-track approval of new gas and oil pipelines as part of a must-pass spending bill. House progressives have the ability to block it — but most won’t say whether they will.