Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
Alexa Avilés is a community organizer in South Brooklyn, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and candidate for New York City Council. In an interview, she discusses her history of education organizing, recent billionaire-funded scaremongering attacks against her, and why she’s running for office as part of a citywide socialist slate.
Democratic leaders claim to be powerless against the handful of conservative Democrats blocking progressive reform. Yet when it comes to government surveillance or funding war, those Democrats always know how to force rank-and-file lawmakers to fall in line.
Tasked with carrying out what ought to be state functions, but dependent on private interests, NGOs will never challenge the basic structures of capitalism.
Commonwealth College was a radical experiment in socialist education nestled deep in the Arkansas mountains. It taught and trained over 1,500 worker-activists before becoming an early casualty of American anti-communism.
The working class in capitalism is not a coherent class but a fragmented one — an amalgam of individuals trying to survive. It’ll take politics to change that.
The filibuster saga isn’t simply about Joe Manchin. It’s about the Democratic Party overall, and their continued interest in allowing process to prevent them from governing.
The US military spends trillions on death abroad that could be spent on improving life back home.
The last year has seen the largest increase in billionaire wealth in history, but it has little to do with innovation — states across the world are pursuing policies which guarantee that the rich get richer.
Historians often neglect Japan’s New Left protest movement in the late 1960s, but it was one of the largest in any country. Radical student activists brought the university system to a halt — and changed the future of Japanese politics.
The first installment of reporting based on the Pentagon Papers was published half a century ago today in the New York Times. Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg risked life imprisonment to expose the lies and brutality that the US war on Vietnam was based on.
In Britain, even as the Labour Party is in turmoil at the national level, left-wing city councils in places like Preston are bringing socialist policies to life at the local level.
Former Australian PM Kevin Rudd has come up with a plan for Labor that he calls the “Fourth Way.” But on closer inspection, Rudd’s would-be alternative is a rehash of the timid, conservative approach to politics that has kept Labor out of power for a decade.
After six weeks of massive protests against neoliberalism and state violence in Colombia, right-wing president Iván Duque is relying on brute force to stay in power.
Conservatives are rushing to ban “critical race theory” from public schools, arguing it is ahistorical propaganda. But their own version of US history is a sterilized, hagiographic account that closes off connecting the issues of yesteryear with the problems of the present.
Denmark’s parliament has condemned campus radicals’ political agenda for “undermining scholarly inquiry.” But the mainstream use of disciplines like economics shows that scholarship has always been political — the powerful just don’t like research that challenges their interests.
Disney has rebooted their legendary dalmatian-skinning villain, Cruella de Vil — and turned her into a scrappy, likable hero. The result is the complete mangling of one of the greatest Disney villains of all time.
One of the three hundred settlements founded by Franco’s regime, the village of Llanos del Caudillo is still today named in homage to the dictator. Villagers’ nostalgia for his regime reflects Spain’s failure to reckon with its past — and the ongoing struggle to gain recognition for fascism’s victims.
In 1966, Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers, and their families at Wave Hill cattle station started a nine-year strike against work conditions that amounted to slavery. Frank Hardy, a communist author, helped the strikers tell their story to the world.
Democratic Party leaders have accused Ilhan Omar of “moral equivalency” because she rejected the brazen double standard underpinning US foreign policy. But Omar is right: murderous violence against civilians is no less criminal when Israel or the United States are the perpetrators.
Novelist Suzanne Collins has returned with a prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy. This time, she writes about the fictional world of Panem from the perspective of its ruling class, which makes her satire on our own society all the more cutting.