Since the turn of the millennium, Argentina has been hobbling from debt crisis to debt crisis. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, the country is set to default for the third time in twenty years — an event that would plunge the country into chaos.
Arundhati Roy has a tendency to rile India’s media and political elites like no one else on the subcontinent. Perhaps that’s because no writer today, in India or anywhere in the world, writes with the kind of beautiful, piercing prose in defense of the wretched of the earth that Roy does.
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.
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.
The G20’s plans to postpone 76 emerging countries’ debt repayments are a band-aid on fundamental injustices in the global economy. Rebuilding the Global South after the pandemic will require a complete upending of the international order — and the defending states' sovereignty rather than financial markets'.
The Korean War, which began 70 years ago today, inflicted unimaginable horrors upon the people of Korea, north and south of the 38th parallel. From carpet-bombing to mass executions, the US and its South Korean allies were responsible for some of the worst atrocities.
The United States claimed to be fighting in defense of democracy in South Korea. In reality, however, it propped up a series of dictatorships. The people of South Korea only won their freedom decades after the war, through brave struggles against US-backed military strongmen, like the heroic Gwangju Uprising of 1980.
Liberalism is often presented as a loose set of principles like reason, freedom, and the rule of law. But over almost two centuries, the Economist has provided a window into the dominant strand of liberalism in action — with imperial conquest and undemocratic regimes defended in the name of upholding “free trade.”
For a century our cities have been transformed by the car industry, making way for drivers at the expense of cyclists and pedestrians. A renewed movement for urban public transport is pushing back.
As the world’s premier Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s intellectual range was unrivaled. Never one to pander to conventional politics, he was often a brave voice of dissent. Today more than ever, Hobsbawm’s work deserves serious examination.
States across Europe and East Asia are closing nuclear reactors and replacing much of their electricity-generating capacity with offshore wind energy. Socialists should embrace the growth of this industry — and use green reindustrialization to fight for well-paid, stable jobs.
Everybody has to go to the bathroom, yet toilet access is currently severely limited and essentially privatized throughout the United States. That must change — we need clean, free public bathrooms for all.
Canada isn’t the beacon of social democracy that many progressive Americans imagine. But when faced with the coronavirus crisis, the US’s inept political class and for-profit health system couldn't even match a country with a moderate welfare state and functional government.
The Fernando Tatís Jr controversy this week shows how absurd many of baseball’s “unwritten rules” are. Imagine the NBA’s Zion Williamson or NFL’s Patrick Mahomes having the game of their life and the focus afterward being their need to do less.
David Graeber will remain for me a model for how to live to the fullest a scholarly and activist life.
As the political center has withered in recent years, self-described moderates have often expressed nostalgia for the "normal" politics of the 1990s. But the era of Blair and Clinton really wasn't a golden age of progress — and it brought a wave of market fundamentalism still sowing havoc today.
Before he became Vietnam’s foremost communist, Ho Chi Minh traveled across Europe and the Americas as a ship’s cook. In Rio de Janeiro, he encountered a world of inequality, but also of defiant class solidarity — an experience that helped forge one of the twentieth century’s greatest revolutionaries.
For Golden Age Hollywood, Kaua’i became synonymous with paradise. But Anthony Banua-Simon’s new documentary Cane Fire traces the reality of life on the island, from domination by sugar companies to its transformation into a low-wage service economy.
World War I wasn’t a war for democracy — it was a catastrophic, barbaric conflict that left tens of millions of people dead and set the stage for anti-democratic rollbacks for years to come. Anti-war socialists were right to oppose it.
The entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank is saturated with the absurdity of twenty-first-century capitalism. But watching it, you can’t help but think about how its basic premise — helping ordinary people with extraordinary ideas implement them on a wide scale — could be carried out under socialism.