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Across Europe, lockdown measures have slowed the transmission of COVID-19, but the consequences for precarious workers and those in poor housing conditions have often been bleak. A socialist response has to go beyond telling us to stay at home — it has to challenge the deeper inequalities the pandemic has exposed.
Nine public housing towers in Melbourne have been put under a police-enforced “hard lockdown” without warning, with isolation effectively policed at gunpoint. It’s a measure reserved for inner-city public housing residents, despite the rising wave of infections throughout the city.
The anti-lockdown protests may currently represent a Trumpian minority — but that could easily change if the choice becomes going hungry or going back to work. We need a real alternative that refuses to accept the false trade-off between economic security and public health.
Libertarianism is marginal in Australian politics. But the governing coalition’s failings and the rise in support for right-wing anti-lockdown protests have given the dangerous Liberal Democratic Party an opportunity to make gains.
The UK’s Boris Johnson had been coasting through the COVID-19 crisis — but that was before his aide Dominic Cummings’s flouting of social-distancing rules set off a nationwide furor. It’s reminded the country of everything they hate about the Tories: their privileged obliviousness and their belief that normal rules don’t apply to them.
Under the short-lived Medevac Legislation, 192 refugees were transported from offshore detention to Australia for medical treatment. Today, most of them are still imprisoned in hotels around the country, where they have to endure a total, indefinite lockdown.
South Africa has imposed one of the world’s most draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, slapping hundreds of thousands of mostly black and working-class people with criminal charges. The authoritarian response highlights again the lost promise of the post-apartheid government and the deep disparities that still plague the country.
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has been praised around the world for her response to coronavirus. But while Ardern's response has been much more coherent and competent than, say, Donald Trump's, its economic protections for the country's workers are nowhere near enough.
We’re living through a bewildering moment for socialists. We talk to radical organizers Adolph Reed, Barbara Smith, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Jodi Dean, and Jane McAlevey about how they’re staying politically engaged under quarantine.
Faced with soaring case numbers, the Italian government has imposed tougher restrictions on businesses and social gatherings. Yet as millions face a miserable dilemma between personal safety and financial ruin, protesters have begun to defy the curfew — a sign of the fraying social consensus behind shutdown measures.
We talk to two public health experts about America's COVID-19 response and how poor households have borne a disproportionate share of the pandemic's hardship. We need to urgently fight for a more just society.
The COVID-19 crisis has hit South Africa's poor and working-class majority hard, with the government favoring the rich over the unemployed. Our friends at Africa Is a Country spoke with three South African organizers of the unemployed, who are fighting for decent public services — and a basic income.
This International Women’s Day, Chile’s feminist strike was bigger than ever, building on the anticapitalist protests that erupted last October. Now that a lockdown means street protests are no longer possible, feminists are thinking of new and creative ways to resist.
At Vaughn prison and elsewhere, we should demand transparency and stand with the inmates who dare to affirm their humanity.
People in Kashmir have been suffering a militarized lockdown since August, when India put an end to the region’s semiautonomous status. In a pandemic, that lockdown is set to continue, extending the disciplinary powers of India’s armed forces in a region where tensions are already at boiling point.
The US has never seriously considered far-reaching responses to the coronavirus pandemic like a national lockdown or a universal basic income that would allow people to stay at home without immiseration. The result: unnecessary mass deaths, with more on the way.
Much of Australia is back under pandemic lockdown thanks to Coalition mismanagement. The Liberals have used the crisis to bolster big business. Now the workers’ movement needs to champion its own measures to counter the pandemic and rebuild the economy.
The Australian far right has joined forces with New Age spiritualists, snake-oil salesmen, and wellness gurus to take advantage of social alienation caused by the pandemic. Despite the new branding, their anti-union, anti-working-class politics remain the same.
The COVID-19 crisis has shown that markets alone can’t meet our societies’ fundamental needs. But state measures to ward off economic collapse are just the start of a battle over the future — one where the principles of solidarity must be extended from health care to all aspects of society.
Since last year, the UK has seen sustained and powerful industrial action across its higher-education sector, with the latest strike wave only interrupted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the crisis sure to be exploited by the Tory government, universities and colleges are more under threat than ever, and union strength has never been more vital.