10 Ways Corporations Have Exploited Covid-19
For many, 2020 has been a nightmare; for others, it’s been a moneymaker. Big corporate interests have profited from the pandemic – and screwed the workers who kept society running.
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Ko Leik Pya works as a teacher and writer in the UK and Myanmar. He writes here under a pseudonym.
For many, 2020 has been a nightmare; for others, it’s been a moneymaker. Big corporate interests have profited from the pandemic – and screwed the workers who kept society running.
2020 was a difficult year for trade unions – from mass redundancies to ‘fire and rehire’ schemes. But there were also seeds of worker militancy, and these provide hope for the struggles ahead in 2021.
As we head into 2021, Grace Blakeley reflects on the first months of A World to Win podcast – and remembers some of the show’s highlights along the way.
The commodification and marketisation of care – and its unloading onto the underpaid and unpaid – has been brutally exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. In its wake, we need an entirely new system.
Neoliberalism has marketed itself on efficiency and pragmatism for almost fifty years, but Britain’s experience of Covid-19 has exposed those claims as false – at the cost of many thousands of lives.
This year, students exposed the myth of England’s ‘meritocratic’ education system and overturned the government’s A Level results. But dealing with the class divides in our schools will be a far longer struggle.
For much of the twentieth century, Ireland’s ruling class resisted social-democratic reforms. Instead, they treated poverty as a moral failing – and built a brutal carceral state to correct it.
Rumours that Home Secretary Priti Patel was exploring the reintroduction of the death penalty were met with surprise – but it would just be the latest chapter in a decade of Tory governments devaluing human life.
The doomy sound of Belarusian group Molchat Doma has resonated with both western and eastern youth. Is it a musical Soviet nostalgia or something more telling about our own times?
The ‘big five’ tech giants – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft – have extraordinary control over our lives. Regulating them isn’t enough, they have to be brought under democratic public ownership.
Earlier this month, Ella Kissi-Debrah became the first British person to have air pollution recorded as a cause of death – but she won’t be the last. In poorer urban communities, it is increasingly a matter of life and death.
William Morris is most famous for his iconic patterns, but a new collection of his writings shows the other passion of his life: a conviction that only the overthrow of capitalism could liberate humanity.
In 1937, Tribune ran a Christmas editorial paying tribute to workers imprisoned in the struggle against fascism and capitalism – and calling for a renewed fellowship of labour across the world.
For Diggers leader Gerrard Winstanley, any Christianity which focused on individual salvation was bankrupt – Christ’s message was a revolutionary doctrine that demanded rebuilding society in the common interest.
In his literary works, Charles Dickens told the story of a society blighted by inequality – and the cruelty of a ruling class which kept so many living in grinding poverty.
Last week, a Southwark family won their appeal against a council which accused them of ‘deliberately’ overcrowding their one-bed flat – but there’s only one thing worth blaming for overcrowding: the lack of decent council housing.
Robert Tressell, author of ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,’ was born 150 years ago. His writing left an indelible mark on the socialist movement — but the man himself was almost forgotten by history.
This month, domestic staff at Great Ormond Street hospital won an in-housing agreement with the help of their union. Their victory is one we should replicate across the NHS.
We republish Tony Benn’s classic lecture on the revolutionary social imperative of Christian teachings.
This week, Keir Starmer committed Labour to exploring greater powers for the Scottish parliament – but in rejecting outright the idea of a referendum, he undermined what little good will the party might have earned.