Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
After years of low wages and precarity, Metro grocery workers in the Greater Toronto Area have spoken loud and clear, voting 100% in favor of a strike. It’s a strong start to nationwide grocery sector contract talks in the wake of the pandemic profit surge.
Elliott Abrams is one of America’s worst living human rights abusers. That the Biden administration would nominate him to anything other than a prison sentence is baffling.
The transfer of stars like Karim Benzema to the Saudi Pro League has fed calls to stop its poaching of big-name players. But Saudi control is the natural outcome of the sport’s transformation into a plaything for billionaires.
In fealty to US foreign policy, Mexico has long refused to recognize Palestinian statehood. Last week, that finally changed, with AMLO’s government officially acknowledging Palestinian statehood and establishing a full embassy in Mexico City.
This week’s Israeli incursion into Jenin showed the violence of occupation and blatant disregard for Palestinian rights. At least 133 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the start of this year alone.
If handled correctly, British Columbia’s new Housing Supply Act can ease municipal roadblocks to adequate housing. In tandem with an increase in nonmarket housing, such legislation has the potential to help stave off the housing crisis.
Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago 1,234 miles off coast, has become a site of climate change–fueled conflicts around immigration and workers’ rights. Right-wingers have used the crisis to advance their own agenda — offering a cautionary tale for the Left.
Riots like the ones France is seeing after the police killing of a teenager don’t happen as a result of petty criminality. They only happen as a result of widespread anger at murderous policing, racial inequality, and social deprivation.
Sure, it can be a good thing if the Right is fractured and fighting among itself. But the Left can’t win simply by letting reactionaries fight among themselves — we need to fight for a vision of greater freedoms through improving the welfare of all.
A government willing to confront the housing crisis head-on, rather than focusing on fostering owner occupation and the numbers game of maximizing private house-building, would do better to invest in quality public housing.
In the UK, university staff are engaged in a grading and assessment boycott as part of a long-running dispute over pay, pensions, and precarity. But university administrations are refusing to listen, leaving many students unable to graduate as normal.
In 1997, the central slogan of the Teamsters’ UPS strike was “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” Today, as the Teamsters weigh another UPS strike, part-time workers at the company say their pay and working conditions are still unbearable.
Almost 50 years ago, metalworker and economist Harry Braverman published Labor and Monopoly Capital. It showed how bosses use technology to disempower workers — but that by taking control of the labor process, workers can free themselves from drudgery.
The poverty of industrial England was the backdrop of H. G Wells’s childhood. This experience instilled in him a clear-eyed realism with which he rejected both utopianism and progressive notions that socialism could be won without class struggle.
The French Marxist thinker Daniel Bensaïd grappled with the history of socialist defeats to supply us with a road map for the present. The result was a brilliant reformulation of Marxism that can guide today’s left-wing movements in their struggles.
The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of Stalin’s terror, has often been viewed as a martyr. It’s a critical reception that has veiled Mandelstam’s literary greatness, which was evident long before Stalin came to power.
In colonial regimes, dominant conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies.
An unbroken blanket of coniferous trees occupies the North American coast from California to the Alaskan islands. A wonder of the natural world, these temperate rainforests are essential to the continent’s health — and they must be protected.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot discontinue India’s popular rural job guarantee, the country’s most significant antipoverty program. He’s taken to underfunding and “appifying” it instead.
Despite both right-wing hysterics about “woke capital” and the optimistic claims of Wall Street, ESG has done very little to steer investment in more socially responsible directions. Aggressive state action is needed to rapidly green the economy.