Now that economic rethinking is on the agenda, argues Richard Swift, it’s a good time for those who see the ominous writing on the wall to challenge the growth consensus and promote a package of serious degrowth measures, some of which align with historic left demands and the Green New Deal which seems to have faded from view.

As the US redefines its global role and its approach to international relations with Trump at the helm, the world is going to become a far more unstable and threatening place than it already is. In this enormously challenging context, the pivotal but still uncertain question will be the scale and strength of working class resistance and the popular struggles that are taken up.

This long-read offers a different explanation for the hard-right surge in Germany. It shows that German unification in 1990, signalling the triumph of liberal democracy and the onset of neoliberal globalization, unleashed a new form of nationalism—Deutschmark nationalism—which, after mutating into export nationalism for a while, became the ideological seed for the AfD.

There is no way for the moderate, left-of-centre approach to work within the larger neoliberal world economy. Unless the latter is subverted, or challenged with a new political project, the kinds of alternatives proposed in Andrew Jackson and Scott Sinclair’s article (including an expanded social safety net and caring sector) cannot come to be.

It has been almost 40 years since there was major debate in Canada about our relations with the United States. While the FTA was implemented after the 1988 election, a majority of voters supported a more active role by governments in shaping economic development. Today we are confronted with the very serious probability that the free trade era has come to an end.

Many vital left-wing books about global oil politics have been published over the last decade: Mazen Labban’s Space, Oil and Capital, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, and Simon Pirani’s Burning Up. Perhaps none have provided quite as sweeping and synthetic of an analysis as Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market.

As geographer Brett Christophers shows, many people now live in homes and rely on infrastructure like toll roads, hospitals, gas pipelines, data centres, water and sanitation services, telecom towers, and electricity generation facilities that are ultimately owned by pension funds, insurance companies, and banks through highly complex asset management schemes.

The Amazon organizing model poses three tests for labour and the left. Can traditional unionism bring power to Amazon workers and if not, what kind of trade unionism might? Can the struggle at Amazon contribute to transforming the labour movement? And are unions adequate to confronting modern capitalism or do they need to be supplemented by other forms of organization?

The number of workers forming unions by National Labor Relations Board-supervised elections is growing, but it’s still far too slow to change the balance of power at the heart of the economy. As labour scholar Kim Moody writes, the collective awareness and coordinated use of positional power offers a powerful alternative route—and an additional organizing tool.

Ecuador has historically spurned investor-state dispute settlement, a provision that allows companies to sue countries for alleged violations of trade agreements. This means companies can take states to court if their profits are put at risk by government policies. Since 1986, Ecuador has been forced to pay $10 billion for alleged breaches of its obligations to foreign investors.