Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
J. B. Pritzker is a billionaire Democrat who hasn’t even signed on to Medicare for All. But the Illinois governor has captured the imaginations of some progressives simply by doing what most Democrats won’t: running on popular ideas and following through.
For politicians and the media, the big question seems to be, are we technically in a recession or not? For the millions of people struggling, the question is: What’s the difference?
Elon Musk and his billionaire brethren have all sorts of harebrained solutions to fix US transportation. But we already know what would benefit workers: well-funded public transit and fast trains, powered by a renewable energy grid that serves everyone.
Labor’s climate bill is little more than symbolism. With escalating climate disasters and soaring inflation, it’s bad policy and even worse politics.
For a few days in July 1877, workers took over St Louis and a communist party ruled the Midwestern city. The often forgotten St Louis Commune was a landmark event that showed the US isn’t immune to Paris Commune–style eruptions of class consciousness.
In a global economy defined by overproduction and underconsumption, American and Chinese corporations are struggling to extract profits from developing nations. Without massive wealth redistribution, consumption won’t return to stable levels.
Tabitha Arnold is a socialist textile artist whose work focuses on working-class organizing. In an interview, she discusses her work, how art is warped by wealthy patrons’ dictates, and why artists shouldn’t confuse their art with political organizing.
Both labor and the reproductive rights movements are fighting for the same thing: the right to control our own lives.
Inflation is eroding paychecks and rising interest rates are hurting people with mortgages. Anthony Albanese’s government could defend workers’ living standards by taxing the rich and controlling prices, but Labor’s neoliberal orthodoxy stands in the way.
China did not develop capitalism during the 18th century, despite having a market economy as strong as Britain’s. The raw material for China’s 20th-century capitalist takeoff came from an unlikely figure: Mao Zedong.
Canada’s Starbucks organizing wave is moving eastward from British Columbia, with a store in Alberta going union earlier this month. Poetically, the Starbucks union win is on anti-labor Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s home turf.
Henry Cuellar, the conservative, antiabortion Democratic congressman — who Nancy Pelosi called a “fighter for hardworking families” — has shocked the labor movement with a radical bill seeking to eviscerate workers’ rights.
The British rail union leader Mick Lynch has recently gone viral for his media appearances defending his union’s strike. In an interview, Lynch discusses that strike, the media firestorm he’s helped spark, and how workers can defeat Britain’s superrich.
Writer-director Jordan Peele’s mysterious third film, Nope, draws on genre tropes from both alien invasion films and Westerns, but it ends up with something altogether original: a Hollywood spectacle about spectacle.
The internet feels like an antisocial, dystopian wasteland. Capitalism made it this way. But if we can pry the web out of the hands of the profit motive, we can build a better internet.
Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin have reached a deal for an energy, health care, and tax policy bill after Manchin has delayed and watered it down. But the exact details of the bill, as well as its passage, are still far from guaranteed.
In early February, Bernie Sanders advocated US involvement in peace talks to head off an “enormously destructive war” in Ukraine. We should have listened.
Biden’s climate bill is better than nothing — but just barely. “It’s a renewable energy revolution on top of a fossil fuel build-out,” says one climate advocate: in other words, a historic clean energy investment chained to a fossil fuel giveaway.
In 1945, Italian fascists saw US forces as occupiers, not liberators. Yet in postwar decades, neofascists sought to insert themselves into the Western anti-communist alliance: an “Atlanticism” that continues to inspire the far right today.
Over 50 years ago, German philosopher Günther Anders warned that space travel was in danger of being used for power and profit. Against the “provincialism” of space capitalism, he wanted the view of outer space to meaningfully expand our horizons on Earth.