Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The child poverty rate has exploded, with over 3.7 million children sinking below the poverty line thanks to the expiration of Joe Biden’s Child Tax Credit program. The disaster proves that poverty in a rich country is a choice its government makes.
Last week’s paint-by-numbers attack on members of the Squad, vaguely sourced to “top Democrats,” is another sign that party leaders are resigned to defeat and looking to blame the Left — and that “nonideological” Beltway journalists are eager to help.
Community college professor Michael Phillips spent the past year speaking out against a right-wing “purge” of progressive faculty at his college. Then he was fired.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has sent tanks into the Donbas on dubious pretexts. But a far bigger danger awaits if the West seeks an escalation that will only pour fuel on the fire.
Let’s be real: the PRO Act isn’t going to pass anytime soon. Labor unions need to figure out how to organize under current conditions or perish.
No one deserves riches, and yet we all do. This moral puzzle is key to our love for Anna Delvey, the con artist and “fake German heiress” who is the subject of Netflix’s flawed but irresistible series Inventing Anna.
For decades, military repression and oligarchic control have kept the Left on the margins of Turkish public life. But the recently created Workers’ Party of Turkey has brought the far left back into parliament for the first time in half a century.
Alberta’s United Conservative Party is using the health care crisis caused by the pandemic to its ideological advantage. Citing backlogs in surgeries — resulting from overrun hospitals — the party is seeking to privatize the province’s health care system.
Published this day in 1848, The Communist Manifesto didn’t offer blueprints for a communist future. But in showing that capitalism is not eternal or natural, Marx and Engels explained how the crises of the present prepare the way for our future liberation.
Following the Vietnam War, global progressive movements sought to refashion the world in the interests of the majority. The failure of this project, and the subsequent triumph of liberal interventionism, explains the arrogance of the US foreign policy elite.
Evangelical Zionists want Jews to move to Palestine to set the stage for the divine requital of Armageddon. This hasn’t stopped Israel from sealing alliances with even nakedly antisemitic evangelicals, so long as they support the dispossession of Palestinians.
With Cold War divisions once again rising to the fore, the US is returning to its old ways in Latin America: trying to exert influence in its “backyard” to enlist the region in the ongoing project of US global domination.
The banning of neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn was hailed as proof of Greece’s return to normality after the painful crisis years. Yet far-right ideas are now firmly established in the mainstream, including within the ruling conservative party.
From California to Massachusetts, companies like Uber and Lyft are promoting legislation that misclassifies gig workers. What’s worse, they’ve convinced some people that their pursuit of cheap labor is actually a crusade for equality.
You can redistribute income and power from capital to labor. But if you want to make sure that the final income distribution is sensitive to differences in household composition, there is no substitute for a universal welfare state.
In the days of the British slave trade, “commercial abolitionists” urged against the purchase of slave-made goods. This business-friendly approach counseled consumer abstention as a form of political advocacy — just like the “ethical capitalism” of today.
From brutalism to Stranger Things, Western pop culture is full of nostalgia for Cold War aesthetics and lost futures. Young people in ex-Soviet countries have developed their own version, Sovietwave — a music genre that summons up the spirit of the space age.
Jeff Bezos and other billionaires are investing big in anti-aging science. There’s nothing wrong with that — but there is something wrong with a world where the rich can fund their pet research agendas while ignoring crises that primarily affect the poor.
Processing chips have become central to our lives, running smartphones and TVs alike. But disruptions in the chip industry are driving up inflation — and exposing the industry for the ugly capitalist oligopoly that it is.
Dark money groups funded by the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch are lobbying Supreme Court justices to block the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse gas emissions.