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Leftnews.org is a collection of daily news and views from the political left-wing found around the web.
Leftnews is a project of the Citizens' Press.
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 The government tried to gain favour by removing outdated concepts of the family and the domestic role of women from the Constitution, while at the same time trying to place all responsibility for care within the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.
Haitian Prime Minister Henry Agrees to Resign as CARICOM Announces Formation of Presidential Council
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.
There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times: The Tenth Newsletter (2024)
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.