Faced with another global recession, many governments are responding with even stronger state interventions than they did in the 2008 financial crisis. But stimulus packages to prop up businesses must also pose the question of public control — not just bailing out corporations, but repurposing their operations to confront the disasters ahead of us.
Around the world, the global pandemic has spurred widespread public hunger for radical economic and political change. It’s a historic opportunity the global left must seize — or risk watching as it’s seized by the Right.
The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a series of emergency measures to reorient our economies toward the public health care response. The crisis offers a glimpse of how production could be made to serve social needs — but only if we defeat those who want a return to capitalist normality.
World War II made the economically impossible suddenly possible. As our capitalist states mobilize for the pandemic, the Left has another golden opportunity for worker empowerment.
China’s response to the pandemic has sharply contrasted with Trump’s, with a far stronger public health response in China but little aid for the poorest. Both countries’ responses to the crisis show that a strong state doesn’t stand in contradiction with neoliberalism — rather, it’s a key element of it.
Instead of letting Amazon use coronavirus to dominate even more of the economy, the company should be nationalized and reoriented to serve the public good instead of predatory capitalism.
Across the Global South, the coronavirus crisis has highlighted how IMF “structural adjustment” policies have undermined public health care. But the devastation wrought by the economic shutdown also owes to a longer-term ill: an exploitative global trade regime where the poorest countries finance the rich.
Almost half of the women workers in the United Kingdom who have lost their jobs under the coronavirus pandemic cite lack of childcare as a factor. It's time to recognize childcare as a public good, a right for everyone, and make it available to everyone.
Liberals are right to condemn Donald Trump for his disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and his undisguised contempt for democracy. But Trump is no aberration: his rise was only possible because of a Republican and Democratic political consensus that has ravaged American politics and society for a generation.
Once the proud land of Lincoln, downstate Illinois — devastated by unemployment, deindustrialization, and an infamously corrupt political class — is quickly becoming a failed state.
For decades, oligarchs like Real Madrid chairman Florentino Pérez have made Spain's old-age care sector a favored cash cow. Today, the coronavirus deaths caused by their penny-pinching are a grim monument to the failures of privatization.
Faced with the coronavirus shutdown, more people are getting meals delivered straight to their homes. At a time of mass panic buying, the state should step in to guarantee a smooth food supply — and start by turning platforms like Uber Eats and Grubhub into a public service.
In the United States of 2020, millions are desperate for help, and they’re forced to compete for scraps from Twitter philanthropists.
Australian workers are finally being addressed in the government’s rescue packages, but the measures go nowhere near far enough. National Secretary of the United Workers’ Union Tim Kennedy argues that the crisis offers an opportunity for genuine pushback and transformation.
With Italy’s tourist sector sunk by the pandemic, authorities are now hiring cruise ships as floating jails for refugees. The migrant prisons show capitalism’s ability to restructure in times of crisis — but also the potential resistance to it.
The dysfunctions of modern capitalism have left us perilously exposed to a public health catastrophe. We must build on the solidarity engendered by this crisis to fight for a different world.
The coronavirus shock has shaken the world’s stock markets, imposing the need for massive state bailouts. But the measures to deal with the crisis risk spurring an authoritarian controlled capitalism — one that protects corporate interests while offloading the costs onto the rest of us.
Hurricanes, pandemics, and droughts are acts of God. Private markets in housing, health care, and food — and the resulting deaths — are not.
It’s fashionable to claim that the “rise of the robots” or the “disappearance of work” have changed everything about labor in the twenty-first century. But when it comes to extracting profit from workers, today’s era of ruthless capitalism is fundamentally the same as those of the past.
As coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, outpacing our capacity for testing, let alone treatment, the long-anticipated monster is finally at the door. And with global capitalism so impotent in the face of this biological crisis, our demands must be for properly international public-health infrastructure.