Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The center has no convincing way to account for unemployment and low wages. Workers are compelled to choose between the solutions provided by the Right and the Left — and unionization can make all the difference in how they choose.
From a lack of investment in public health care to mishandling vaccine production, Narendra Modi’s right-wing government has failed the Indian people during the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a result.
Even before the pandemic, Bulgaria’s public health system had been wrecked by privatization. Now suffering among the world’s highest COVID mortality rates, Bulgaria provides a case study in how “market reforms” hobble public infrastructure and suck skilled workers from the European Union’s poorest countries to its richest.
Labour’s dismal polling for today’s Hartlepool by-election show its awkward, flag-waving nationalism isn’t convincing anyone. Too bad Keir Starmer won’t stop playing on the Right’s terrain and start offering working-class voters real economic populism.
Restaurant and bar owners whining about the difficulty of finding workers to toil for low wages and no benefits never seem to consider the possibility of raising those wages and benefits to try to attract such workers. But they’re also ignoring something more basic: the coronavirus pandemic wiped out an enormous swath of the restaurant workforce.
Joe Biden has the power to eliminate federal student debt, make colleges and trade schools tuition-free, and end high-stakes testing. We just passed his 100-day mark. He hasn’t done any of it.
Chicago Public Schools has constantly found itself in fiscal crises in recent years, crises that then justify brutal austerity. But those crises didn’t come from nowhere: they were the logical outcome of turning to Wall Street for funding on credit instead of taxing the rich.
At its core, the movement calling to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel is about defunding apartheid and military occupation. It’s a movement that’s worth supporting.
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has announced his retirement. Over the last decade, he brought the radical left to the heart of Spanish politics — but its challenge to the establishment ultimately fell short.
Forty years ago today, the death of the Irish Republican Army’s Bobby Sands inspired protests all over the world and sent Sinn Féin on a path toward its current position of strength in Ireland. Whether Sands himself would have approved of that journey is anyone’s guess.
Karl Marx’s final years of life are often overlooked as a period of intellectual and physical decline. But his thought remained vibrant to the end, as he addressed political questions that are still relevant to us today.
Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning Danish drama Another Round celebrates the ways in which alcohol can bring joy to a midlife crisis — but there’s no way the coming Hollywood remake can avoid American moralism.
What began as a massive general strike on April 28 is quickly becoming an open challenge to Colombia’s authoritarian neoliberal order.
The only way to prevent devastating COVID-19 crises like the one currently underway in India is to challenge the power of Western states and corporations.
The CIA made waves this week for a video that uses social justice language to try to gin up recruitment. But opposing racism and achieving social justice means opposing everything the CIA stands for.
Last week it was announced that an Italian court will put Egyptian state security agents on trial for the 2016 kidnapping and murder of labor researcher Giulio Regeni. For years, Egypt’s military regime has refused to cooperate with the investigation — and in recent months it has continued to “disappear” researchers who defend workers’ and women’s rights.
China doesn’t have an empire. The United States doesn’t need to saber-rattle. And we really don’t need to fight these forever wars.
Across Europe, lockdown measures have slowed the transmission of COVID-19, but the consequences for precarious workers and those in poor housing conditions have often been bleak. A socialist response has to go beyond telling us to stay at home — it has to challenge the deeper inequalities the pandemic has exposed.
Two bandmates saw their sons both overdose on fentanyl in the space of a few years. The synthetic opioid crisis is more out of control than many realize, and the coronavirus pandemic has only made it worse.
Many political and business leaders are defending unethical vaccine patent hoarding. But Sen. Chris Coons recently achieved new levels of repulsiveness, invoking Red Scare rhetoric, the Capitol riot, and the Constitution to justify protecting Big Pharma’s profits.