The far right’s victory in elections for the Constitutional Council may be the death knell for a progressive constitution in Chile. It’s also a needed wake-up call for the Chilean left.

China’s recent pledge to send a peace delegation to Ukraine in the hope of resolving the country’s ongoing war with Russia is a hopeful sign the bloody conflict may soon come to an end. But the US’s general hostility to Chinese peace initiatives suggests there may be serious limitations to Ukrainian sovereignty. The choice between continuing the conflict, or suing for peace, may not be Kyiv’s to make.

If you are reading this newsletter on your smartphone, then you should know that this tiny instrument has billions of miniscule transistors that are invisible to the human eye. The scale of the developments in digital technology is staggering. Earlier conflicts took place over energy and food, but now this conflict has heated up over – amongst other matters – the resources of our digital world. This technology can be used to solve so many of our dilemmas, and yet, here we are, at the precipice of greater conflict to benefit the few over the needs of the many.

'The threat to privacy and data security posed by language models like ChatGPT is real enough. I frankly doubt that there's any practical way to contain them. The most effective means that I can think of…to counter the spread of malicious doctrines and ideology are education in critical thinking, organization to encourage deliberation, and modes of intellectual self-defense.' —Noam Chomsky

In an interview with The Breach, the scholar discusses Canadian imperialism, the dangers of NATO and building a better future

So-called ‘core inflation’ (excluding food and energy) remains ‘sticky’, so that even in a slump, inflation rates are likely to stay above the average rates prior to the pandemic slump. But it’s the slump that will end high inflation (as it did in the early 1980s), not interest-rate hikes or price controls.

The late historian Eric Hobsbawm recounts the history of International Workers' Day.

Capitalism is built on the meritocratic idea that everyone gets what they deserve in the marketplace. This May Day, let’s reject that idea — wealth creation is a fundamentally social process, and the rich have no right to hoard all the resources and power.

Water protectors, environmentalists, and scientists are campaigning to stop Canada's plan to release treated tar sands tailings waste into the Athabasca River

Will LLMs be a game changer for capitalism in this decade? Will these self-learning machines be able to increase the productivity of labour at an unprecedented rate and so take the major economies out of their current ‘long depression’ of low real GDP, investment and income growth; and then enable the world to take new strides out of poverty? This is the claim by some of the ‘techno-optimists’ that occupy the media.

Lawmakers around the world are again calling on the US to halt its unprecedented prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. For the first time, they are being joined by US congressmembers, led by Rashida Tlaib.

The Tricontinental | Dossier no. 63 explores the origins of the debt crisis in Africa, exposing the Western financial chokehold as its source and exploring what alternatives can be built.

States, faced today with the international economic crisis articulated with the consequences of the climate and health crises, should invoke the “fundamental change of circumstances” to stop reimbursing their creditors in order to come to the aid of their populations. Because, ultimately, human rights must effectively prevail over creditors’ rights.

In an interview with The Hindu, Ghosh talks about gender blindness of official policies, inequalities in society, the state of women empowerment and why women face multiple disadvantages in India.

If the current banking crisis becomes systemic, as it did in 2008, there will have to be ‘socialization’ of the losses suffered by the banking elite through government bailouts, driving up public sector debts (already at record highs); all to be serviced at the expense of the rest of us through increased taxation and yet more austerity in public welfare spending and services.

In Finland, the coalition led by centre-left Sanna Marin was defeated after promising utopian visions but failing to materially improve people’s lives – providing an important lesson to the global Left about delivering change and remaining relevant.

Canadian news media is in a panic about alleged Chinese influence in Canadian politics. Their coverage is promoting anti-Chinese sentiment and creating farcical levels of paranoia about foreign interference.

For two years, the GKN auto parts plant in Florence, Italy, has been occupied by laid-off workers. It’s the longest factory occupation in Italian history — and its retooling for green production shows how workers can reorganize the economy while saving jobs.

The use of hate and arbitrary power and calculated killings by Hindu nationalists reveal an ominous disregard for democracy, a forewarning of what is to come.

Even if Ukraine were in some sense to win the war, what sort of sovereignty would the Ukrainian people, its working class, possess? What social forces would be dominant in this victorious Ukrainian state, where all opposition parties and media have been banned and whose reconstruction would depend entirely on American and European generosity?