Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
President Biden recently requested leniency for low-level marijuana offenders. The Republican governors who rejected that call are also getting big donations from private prison corporations.
After independence, Kenya’s political class understood that defeating socialism at home was the best way of securing Western support. Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president, led a vicious campaign to take power by defeating his rivals on the Left.
Today, the right to abortion is secure across Australia. It wasn’t won by parliamentary means, however, but by militant campaigning and union solidarity.
Miners in Alabama went on strike in April 2021 after the company hit them with wage and benefit cuts. A year and a half later, with the company continuing to post record profits, the miners and their families are still on strike — and still refusing to back down.
The common picture we get of the US South is one of resolute conservatism. But the region has a radical history, too — as seen in Atlanta’s role as a center of opposition to apartheid South Africa.
Research repeatedly shows that expanding inequality is intimately tied up with the destruction of the planet. We can’t save the world without taking on the rich.
Ludwig von Mises, the influential right-wing economist, thought of himself as a sober, scientific critic of socialism. In reality, he was a free-market ideologue, using dressed-up dogma to prove why workers should bow before their capitalist masters.
The Australian Greens won three new lower house seats and the Senate balance of power at the last election. By combining radical reforms and community activism, they are building a mass organization with the power to challenge the political establishment.
A series of crises have shaken the liberal triumphalism of recent decades and produced new antidemocratic forces. Historian Geoff Eley tells Jacobin why it still makes sense to speak of “fascism” — and why the new forms of reaction aren’t just a return to the past.
The dreaded wage-price spiral, the price hikes thought to be the result of wage increases, is the explanation for inflation preferred by bosses. The logic behind the idea is simple: bosses’ rights to profits can never, ever be infringed on.
With the Fed’s recent turn to brutally tight money, it’s easy to forget that its post–Great Recession policy of “quantitative easing” was an unprecedented experiment with loose money — whose distorting effects still shape the economy today.
The new series Fire Country revolves around an incarcerated California firefighter. Based on a real program, the drama is made possible by California’s budget priorities: few resources for climate protection or fire services and abundant investment in prisons.
The Right’s claims about the country aren’t just wrong, they’re often downright goofy. But conservatives’ complete disconnect from reality is nowhere near enough to dislodge them from power.
This week, French writer Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In an interview, she explains how her class background and the reality of class divides shape her writing.
The pandemic pushed University of Michigan nurses to the breaking point, as supervisors forced overtime work to account for understaffing. So nurses organized through their union, winning a contract that should inspire nurses everywhere.
The last big energy crisis in the 1970s helped trigger a drastic shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. Today, we need to move in the opposite direction, away from the carbon-fueled neoliberal order responsible for another outbreak of economic chaos.
For a generation, academics have described a virtuous circle of democracy, free trade, and the empowerment of workers in developing countries. That’s simply not what neoliberalism has meant in practice.
Economic orthodoxy blames inflation on everyone except corporations and their windfall profits. It’s time to think about responding to inflation and recessions with policies that make corporations pay, not average workers.
In recent years, European coastguards have illegally pushed tens of thousands of people back across the EU’s sea borders. Now, a court challenge is exposing EU border agency Frontex’s conduct — and an immigration regime that deliberately drowns people.
Anjali Appadurai, democratic socialist leadership candidate for British Columbia’s New Democratic Party, is rattling the party establishment. Her bold left-wing politics have provoked what appears to be a smear campaign by operators within the party itself.