Low testing rates and the undersupply of masks for hospital staff highlight the weakness of the French government’s reaction to COVID-19. As Danièle Obono MP tells Jacobin, Emmanuel Macron’s administration has based its response on the resources left after years of cuts — not on what the health system actually needs.
As tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis, the richest Americans saw their wealth rise by hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not a coincidence.
In recent years, firms like Google and Facebook have used the Global South as a test bed for new and unregulated forms of data collection. Faced with coronavirus, the same mechanisms are being rolled out across the world — with for-profit data collection becoming increasingly central to states’ management of their welfare systems.
A few weeks ago, we had a democratic-socialist presidential campaign with several million donors and over a thousand-person staff. Today, we have no mass organization to carry on the struggle. We can change that — but only with Bernie’s help.
Through decades of marketization, universities have replaced permanent teaching staff with temporary and often low-paid hires. Faced with COVID-19, they’re pulling the purse strings even tighter — as students pay high fees for online seminars with a shrinking band of overworked lecturers.
Since 2011, Arab labor organizations and left parties have been central to movements for democracy and social justice in the Middle East. Frequently overlooked in Western media coverage, from Egypt and Tunisia to Algeria and Sudan, they’ve carried on this fight against tremendous odds.
The anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century wasn’t just about winning political independence — it was about shattering the global hierarchies that subjugated the Global South and winning an egalitarian world for all.
A telltale sign of a broken society is when medical workers are forced to beg for supplies on GoFundMe and parents have to write compelling stories to convince random people to pay for their kid’s cancer treatment. Instead of crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, we need a generous welfare state that ensures everyone’s basic needs are met.
Benjamin Netayahu’s newly convened government, the largest in Israeli history, is also facing the country’s greatest economic crisis in decades. As signs of public disaffection start to grow, it may try to avoid challenges to its power by provoking a violent confrontation with Palestinians.
The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a fresh round of soul-searching in establishment media outlets about the problems of urban America. Unless we address the root cause of those problems in the structure of our economic system, we’ll never be able to solve them.
It’s hard to overstate the wickedness of Big Pharma’s lobbying efforts to ensure patent protection for COVID-19 drugs and potential vaccines. But the real architect of these crimes is not CEOs or shareholders, but the market.
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.
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.
Mutual aid networks cropped up all over the United States at the start of the lockdown, helping communities organize themselves in the absence of adequate state support. Those projects have a deep history in the US, especially within early organized labor.
The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged influential figures like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to press for new structures of global governance. But the system they have in mind won’t be democratic. We need a radically democratic world government.
In the Depression-era United Kingdom, the National Unemployed Workers' Movement mobilized thousands to resist the indignities of unemployment. We're entering another period of massive economic crisis — and just like workers then, unemployed workers today can fight back.
The music industry bounced back from a seemingly terminal post-Napster crisis, but the profits from streaming go to big companies and a handful of top artists. Can we build an alternative model that encourages more innovative — and more radical — music?
In recent years, the European Union’s member states have built their migration policies around an evermore elaborate system of filtering people and finding ways to expel them. This effort to put up obstacles isn’t just expensive or inefficient, but outright antihuman — subjecting migrants’ lives to the whims of recruiters and opaque bureaucratic processes.
The destruction of California’s once vast and magnificent redwood forests is entwined with American expansion westward, violent dispossession, and the ravenous commodification of nature. The remaining redwoods demand our protection.
When it hit the Bay of Bengal in May, Cyclone Amphan caused apocalyptic scenes, flooding whole districts and flattening villages. Amid a pandemic and in a region already riven by food insecurity, storms like these are catastrophic.