South Africa and the internationalization of mineral extraction Duncan Money At the 2025 African Mining Indaba, leaders from across the Continent met representatives from multilateral lending institutions, energy companies, and US national security agencies to discuss how to “position mining as the continent’s foremost industry, driving sustainable investment and fostering economic growth.” The conference location, in… Read More After the Diamond Rush
Demands expressed in the Resolution of the General Meeting of the Crews of the Ships of the Line, Kronstadt Original Source: Pravda o Kronshtadte (Prague: Volia Rossii, 1921), pp. 46-7 Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews dispatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to… Read More Demands of the Kronstadt Insurgents; February 28, 1921
A brief history of the Italian Biennio Rosso (two red years) and the mass factory occupations of 1920 where half a million workers ran their workplaces for themselves. The reformist unions then negotiated an end to the conflicts, clearing the path for the fascist reaction – the Biennio Nero (two black years) of 1921-22. After… Read More 1918-1921: The Italian factory occupations and Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years)
Brian Osgood Recent raids carried out by the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in a rural California county have struck fear into immigrant communities as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House. CBP says that the operation in Kern County, which took place over three days in early January, resulted… Read More ‘Fields were solitary’: Migration raids send chill across rural California
“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels” “The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the… Read More Chris Hedges: How Fascism Came
Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6 Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Jan 18, 2025 Demand for MG-NREGA work growing, additional budget needed | Bharat Dogra Fifty days of Dallewal’s fast | Prem Singh Confronting India’s silent killer | Arkaprabha Sau The Tata group hounds a whistleblower | Upal Chakraborty Escalation of Indian Surveillance in… Read More Mainstream, Vol 63 No 3, Jan 18, 2025
Karanjeet Kaur We are back to that time of the year when a man who earns Rs 51 crore tells the rest of us that we need to work harder. At least once a quarter, India’s business leaders poke their heads out of their luxurious offices, and scold us into believing that a 40-hour work… Read More CEOs want us to work weekends without overtime. Don’t we ask the same of our cooks, cleaners?
Whether in America or Britain, working-class people only matter when immigration is an issue Kenan Malik On the one side stand Silicon Valley moguls and leaders of corporate America; on the other, longstanding Donald Trump loyalists and supporters of the Maga (“Make America great again”) movement. One side claims to be building America’s bright new future by… Read More Forget talk of defending workers, the US visa feud is about the market’s needs
Aditya Chakrabortty Since we’ll hear a lot, again, about “populism”, let’s remember, again, that 19th-century US populism had a healthy strain of leftwing politics. Defending workers, riling up bankers, decrying the “cross of gold” and economic conservatism: look past his Bible-bashing, and William Jennings Bryan was a precursor to Franklin Roosevelt. Yet for much of… Read More Why did voters abandon Kamala Harris? Because they feel trapped – and Trump offered a way out
By Erik English Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has perpetuated human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region under the guise of anti-terrorism and anti-extremism—subjecting them to forced labor, mass detention, and land transfers. Now, a new report reveals that some Chinese pharmaceutical products made using forced labor in… Read More How modern slavery, in China and elsewhere, undermines the fight against existential threats
