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The leadership race for Alberta’s United Conservative Party signals a further shift to the right in Canada’s most conservative province. But the province’s conservatism isn’t innate — it is a result of carbon producers’ domination of the economy.
China did not develop capitalism during the 18th century, despite having a market economy as strong as Britain’s. The raw material for China’s 20th-century capitalist takeoff came from an unlikely figure: Mao Zedong.
The battle against layoffs at Florence’s GKN auto parts plant may seem like a dispute from a past era. Yet the workers’ plan for the green reconversion of the factory shows how labor can point the way to the future.
Last last month, dramatic images of Chinese workers jumping over fences at the electronics giant Foxconn’s factories and walking home grabbed headlines. Despite China’s lack of independent trade unions, the workers took collective action and refused to work.
After years of uniquely repressive COVID policies, protesters across China are demanding the lifting of restrictions and democratic rights. But this eruption is the latest manifestation of conflict that has been roiling China for the past three decades.
A coordinated protest wave across China, the country’s largest since the Tiananmen Square movement in 1989, has been instrumental in prompting the government’s policy shift on COVID-19. It’s a culmination of tensions that have been building for years.
Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin’s center-left government lost this past weekend’s elections. Her administration had great promise — but it failed to take the measures that would have delivered real material gains for working-class Finns.
When politicians threaten police power, police often take matters into their own hands, frequently causing social chaos by refusing to perform basic duties. That’s likely to occur in Chicago. In fact, it might be happening already.
Ten years since its creation, the Alternative für Deutschland has established itself as a constant presence in Germany’s parliament. Now, it’s challenging the Christian Democrats — and seeking to tear down the historic barriers to the far right.
Greece’s general election handed a huge victory to the conservative New Democracy, as Syriza shed one-third of its support. With Alexis Tsipras’s party crushing any hope of an alternative to austerity, voters reached for right-wingers promising stability.
Poland already has a nationalist government, and the rise of the Konfederacja party threatens to pull it even further to the right. It wants to slash taxes and break up the welfare state — a radical agenda that’s rallying parts of the right-wing base.
Sweden’s “hands-off” COVID-19 response was hailed by libertarians abroad but also by most left-wingers at home. Far from enlightened, the Swedish left’s approach combined deference to authority with a disturbing faith in national exceptionalism.
Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar sits down with Jacobin to discuss freedom and democracy — and why socialists need to reclaim those words from the Right.
In Sweden, a center-left government’s pandemic response emphasized individual choice over state intervention.
American federalism is often touted as a source of local democratic engagement, political innovation, and responsive public policy. But in practice, the American states have served not as “laboratories of democracy” but as laboratories of autocracy and inequality.
Germany’s former Die Linke parliamentary leader Sahra Wagenknecht has founded a new party. She claims it’s a voice for the ignored middle and working classes — but the party is mainly focused on winning over Germans who’ve turned to the far right.
In Russia, signs of opposition to the war in Ukraine haven’t developed into a mass movement. State repression has closed off the avenues of mass politics, forcing dissidents into mainly symbolic protests.
In both Gaza and Lebanon, Israel’s attacks on hospitals and health care are part of a deliberate effort to collectively punish and depopulate large geographic areas.
While Joe Biden protected a failed health care status quo, Donald Trump promises disruption. But we need more: a radical reimagining of public health that empowers working people as both recipients and providers, not consumers in a broken system.
Canada, like the US and other countries, is grappling with acute political dealignment. Plummeting working-class support for center-left parties highlights the failure of liberal policies and the appeal of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s populism.