The Law of Work | Valerio De Stefano | In March 2024, The European Union’s institutions reached an agreement to adopt a European Directive on Platform Work. To understand the content of this Directive, it is essential to know what European directives are and how they are adopted. I’ll try to explain this without boring non-European readers to death.
Communist Party of Ireland | The result of the double rejection of the government’s proposed amendments to the Constitution was not totally unexpected. The government tried to gain favour by removing outdated concepts of the family and the domestic role of women from the Constitution, while at the same time trying to place all responsibility for care within the family unit, completely absolving the state of any responsibility towards women as the primary caregivers, the disabled community, and other vulnerable members of society.
Jacobin | Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.
Monthly Review | According to most Western commentators, North Korea is an “enigma” plagued by “irrational” leadership, poverty, and pervasive food shortages. Zhun Xu charts the evolution of North Korean industrial agriculture and the country’s efforts to feed its population from the Soviet era up until today. What, Xu asks, can we learn from the country’s efforts to industrialize its agricultural sector, and what do they tell us about the future of agriculture under socialism?
The Disconnect | The platform isn’t a national security threat, but a challenge to Silicon Valley’s dominance
Canadian Dimension | Big Media in Canada, which are ruthlessly squeezing every last loonie out of our once-profitable news media, used their remaining political influence to shake down the digital giants with the Online News Act in hopes of cashing in big on the runaway success of the platforms. In the process, they have put Canada’s emerging online media and niche publications in the emergency ward.
Haiti is in the headlines again and, as usual, the headlines on Haiti are mostly negative.
CEPR | It was US and foreign support for Henry that pushed the situation to its dire state. But rather than letting a truly Haitian-led process play out, those same foreign powers have opted for a stability pact that, it would seem, is likely to lock in an unsustainable status quo at least in the short term.
Michael Hudson | CounterPunch | When interest-bearing commercial and agrarian debt came to be incorporated into civilization’s economic structure in the third millennium BC, it was accompanied by clean slates that liberated bondservants and restored to debtors the rights to the crops and land that creditors had taken.
Monthly Review | The recent arrest of Newsclick editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha is a chilling development in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign of repression…
The annual meeting of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is underway right now. The NPC is officially China’s highest deliberative body, ostensibly deciding economic and social policies each year. In reality, those policies have been drawn up by the Chinese Communist Party leaders in advance and then presented to the NPC to vote on (unanimously). Nevertheless, the NPC meeting offers the CP leaders an opportunity to spell out their policy answers to deal with the current economic and social problems of the country.
Democrats are losing working-class votes. A new study from Jacobin, ASU’s Center for Work and Democracy, and the Center for Working-Class Politics shows how few Democratic Party candidates use populist rhetoric, propose progressive economic policies, or come from working-class backgrounds.
Canada’s former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney reshaped the country with a mix of free trade enthusiasm and privatization. Lionized in his passing by Canada’s press, his legacy of undermining the country’s working classes shouldn’t be whitewashed.
An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.
CADTM | After the Second World War, in a growing number of Third World countries, policies diverged from those of the former colonial powers. This trend encountered firm opposition from the governments of the major industrialised capitalist countries whose influence held sway with the World Bank (WB) and the IMF. WB projects have a strong political content: to curtail the development of movements challenging the domination/rule of major capitalist powers. The prohibition against taking “political” and “non-economic” considerations into account in WB operations, one of the most important provisions of its charter, is systematically circumvented. The political bias of the Bretton Woods institutions is shown by their financial support to dictatorships ruling in Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Congo-Kinshasa and Romania.
Amidst the genocide against Palestinians and the war in Congo, human beings cling to hope. Saleem, in Rafah, dreams beyond the present, of Red Books Day and a brighter future.
Canadian Dimension | Aaron Bushnell’s supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is “self-defense,” the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world has described as a plausible genocide.
Jacobin | The South has long remained a nearly impenetrable citadel for labor. Fresh off of the success of its Big Three strike last year and looking to organize an Alabama Mercedes plant, the United Auto Workers wants to storm the castle.
Jacobin | The conflict between Evo Morales and Luis Arce for the Bolivian presidency in 2025 has not only split the ruling MAS party but also the social movements and labor unions that form its base.
Jacobin | Since Labor PM Paul Keating’s early ’90s privatization spree, Australian governments have been obsessed with public-private partnerships. It’s a model that spends public money to subsidize private profits — often with disastrous outcomes.
Jacobin | Finance’s dominance over the economy isn’t a deviant evolution of a “good” industrial capitalism. Finance and industry are interdependent — meaning solving problems like inequality and climate change will require a far-reaching democratization of the economy.
Professor Ilan Pappe spoke at IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day in London, UK on 21st January 2024, on the need to understand that the genocide of Palestinians we are currently witnessing, as brutal as it is, is also the demise of the so-called Jewish state. We need to be ready to imagine a new world beyond it.
Morning Star | The two-day hearing in London’s Royal Courts of Justice is considering Mr Assange’s application to appeal against the dismissal of most of his case that he should not be extradited, which was heard in 2020. Should this application fail, Mr Assange will face 17 charges in the US under the Espionage Act and one for computer hacking. If convicted, he could be jailed for up to 175 years.
Jacobin | International talks aimed at creating a treaty to prevent another COVID-19 catastrophe are nearing collapse. This impasse is due to the refusal of countries such as the US, Canada, and Germany to compromise on Big Pharma’s intellectual property rights.
People's World | Former Republican Oval Office occupant Donald Trump not only committed massive financial frauds to build his real estate empire, but his “complete lack of contrition and remorse” about them—when New York state caught him—“borders on the pathological,” the state judge who decided the case declared.
Canadian Dimension | Ten years since the Maidan massacre, nobody is in prison for the murders and attempted murders of activists and police officers, or for shooting at foreign journalists. The silence on the part of those who deny the false-flag event, or who call these claims a “conspiracy theory” and whitewash the mass murderers of the far-right, is both deafening and revealing.
Canadian Dimension | For-profit media ownership has decimated journalism in Canada and continues to gouge us with some of the highest prices in the world for telecommunications services such as cellular phones, cable TV and Internet access. The private equity players and US hedge funds that own most of our largest newspapers are now harvesting them for hundreds of millions in cash.
CounterPunch.org | Late 2023 marked a notable transformation in North Korea’s longstanding pursuit of peaceful reunification with South Korea after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un noted the failure of the policy in his end-of-year speech. This sentiment was reiterated during a January 15 meeting of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), where the country’s constitution was ordered to be rewritten to label South Korea as its “principal adversary.”
The Maple | The results of a recent Angus Reid poll should be cause for concern among unions and labour supporters alike.
At a time when the Ecuadorian government’s social disinvestment has wrecked the country’s economy and security sector, Canada is arguing for its right to deprive Ecuador of even more public money. Ottawa’s main concern is Ecuador’s resources: how to access them, and how to ensure Canadians can bring home as much profit as possible while exploiting them.
CADTM | China has been demonized by several commentators: it is said to be the main creditor of many countries of the South and to get the most of them through ruthless exploitation whereas the World Bank, the IMF, the Paris Club, that bring together traditional creditor powers, are supposed to do their best to help those countries burdened by too much debt.
China also uses propaganda. It parades as an ally of countries of the South, regularly announces debt cancellation and debt relief, and claims that it does not enforce neoliberal conditionalities as do the IMF and the World Bank. It also stresses its efficiency.
The Breach | If Canadian universities were not permeated by anti-Palestinian racism, why would police need to check out my small lecture?
The Breach | Celeste Trianon explains what Alberta’s new law means for the anti-trans movement in Canada
Jacobin | Colombian elites are determined not to let leftist president Gustavo Petro serve out his full term. As top judicial officials target him and his cabinet, drug cartels and their links to the far right remain uninvestigated.
Jacobin | A new Pentagon policy bars the US Defense Department from working on films that cooperate with Chinese censorship demands. It’s a new front in the economic battle with China — and it ignores the Defense Department
The nations that brag the most about "democracy" routinely ignore the will of their people. Support for Israel's war crimes in Gaza is but one example of this phenomenon.
As the second anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war nears, public support for the war has reached an all-time low. Nonetheless, NATO is escalating tensions along Russia’s border with a four-month military exercise involving 90,000 troops from 32 countries. For the Global North, it is not the Ukrainian people’s wellbeing that matters but the geostrategic necessity to ‘weaken’ Russia and China. In reality, there will be no military triumph in Ukraine, which is why the war must end and negotiations commenced.
The widespread ownership of crypto currencies in countries like Turkey and Argentina has created the grounds for a very reactionary economic understanding among broad social segments, especially among young people.
Indonesia has got the classic formula for development in poor countries in the world of 21st century imperialism. Its economy is founded on basic commodity production that is highly capital intensive, severely damages the environment and does not provide many good jobs for the people, while the rich pay little tax and public services are limited. And the old Suharto elite remain in control.
Tribune | On the same day that climate scientists announced the world had breached the warming limit of 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, Starmer effectively announced that he had given up the fight against climate breakdown.
Vijay Prashad | CounterPunch | On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage.
Jacobin | Each February 14, tourists flock to Terni, Italy, hometown of third-century martyr Saint Valentine. Yet Terni’s “city of love” identity is itself rather new, as politicians seek tourist dollars to replace its once-mighty steelworks.
CADTM | Series: 1944-2024, 80 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF, that’s enough!
Canadian Dimension | Canadians are fed up with the private sector’s encroachment on health care as much as they are with backroom corporate deals that would negatively affect their rights as consumers. It took less than one week to kill what may have been an incredibly lucrative financial agreement. Progressives would be mindful to remember the power of sustained direct action and bad publicity.
Cory Doctorow: "So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it."
Tricontinental | This February marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, when Hugo Chávez took office in 1999. In 2024, Venezuela will hold its sixth general election since that time. Already the US has begun to delegitimise the vote and destabilise the country with the reimposition of sanctions. Such measures are illegal as they are imposed unilaterally, in contravention of the UN Charter. As one US official recently stated, Washington believes it is ‘the police of the world’.
Labor Notes | For decades, foreign-owned auto companies have flocked to the US South to exploit cheap, nonunion labor. It’s been a disaster for autoworkers and organized labor.
Prabhat Patnaik | There are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement.
CADTM | In July 2024, the World Bank and the IMF will be 80 years old. 80 years of financial neo-colonialism and the imposition of austerity policies in the name of debt repayment. 80 years is enough! The Bretton Woods institutions must be abolished and replaced by democratic institutions serving an ecological, feminist and anti-racist bifurcation. To mark these 80 years, we are republishing a series of articles every Wednesday until July, looking in detail at the history and damage caused by these two institutions.
Pakistan’s adults vote today but with no prospect of obtaining an end to the disaster that it is Pakistan capitalism and landlordism and its military rule.