Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
Figures like Tucker Carlson have hailed Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán for marrying cultural conservatism with protectionist economic measures. Yet for all his demagogic attacks on finance, Orbán’s policies have favored local oligarchs and sharply increased social inequality — pointing to the hollowness of his American fans’ own “pro-worker conservatism.”
Australia’s pension funds control nearly $3 trillion of workers’ capital, but they’re currently dominated by corporate interests. The labor movement should take back control over them from bankers and use the funds to build a better future.
Jason Kenney’s government seems increasingly desperate, conjuring up dark conspiracies to explain its own failures. Beneath the lurid rhetoric, there’s a last-ditch effort to keep the fossil-fuel industry profitable and prop up a conservative “success story” that couldn’t endure.
Strikes are the labor movement’s muscle, and when unions don’t strike, that muscle atrophies. Unfortunately, the latest data shows just how atrophied that muscle is. Simply put, workers aren’t striking.
The Left’s strategy for fighting the Right isn’t constant — it depends on which segment of the right-wing coalition is dominant at any given time.
Slowly but surely, the idea of social housing — a public housing model most commonly associated with the socialist government of “Red Vienna” — is moving from being a leftist dream to a concrete policy agenda item in a number of US states.
The story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s assassination by Chicago Police and the FBI has finally been made into a movie. Judas and the Black Messiah is uneven as a film, but it’s a small step toward a serious reckoning with America’s past.
On Thursday, Australians woke to find Facebook had banned all news on the platform. Liberal PM Scott Morrison has refused to back down over the laws that triggered the move. Beneath the rhetoric, Morrison’s stand is about serving the interests of News Corp, not saving democracy.
An interview with Andrés Arauz on his surprising journey to the verge of state power, what his ally Rafael Correa accomplished in Ecuador, and how he plans to win April’s election, rebuild his party, and deepen the Citizens’ Revolution.
Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it’s fully safe. And while many teachers’ unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing.
New York legislator Ron Kim confronted Governor Andrew Cuomo over his move to give nursing home executives immunity for their deadly negligence during COVID. Cuomo responded with threats of retribution. We talk to Kim about the episode.
In Sunday’s Catalan elections, pro-independence parties topped 50 percent support for the first time. But with popular mobilization on the decline, pro-independence forces will need to answer the social needs of the working-class majority if they are to rally a broad front against Spain’s inflexible constitutional order.
This week, Emmanuel Macron’s higher education minister alarmed researchers and students by calling a formal investigation into the alleged “Islamo-leftist” atmosphere in France’s universities. The announced witch hunt is a worrying assault on critical inquiry — and shows the neoliberal government’s willingness to amplify baseless far-right talking points.
What a surprise — the Texas energy disaster has been turned into a yet another culture war scrimmage field, pitting right-wing advocates of fossil fuels against liberal supporters of renewable energy. But the red vs. blue framing conceals something important: when it comes to the climate, Texans are far to the left of their representatives.
With the Chicago Tribune’s publishing company on the verge of being swallowed up by the hedge fund industry, capitalism’s ongoing destruction of the free press through downsizing and asset-stripping has become the number one threat to American democracy.
The union organizing campaign currently underway at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama could prove to be the most important labor fight in the South since the failure of Operation Dixie, the movement’s last large-scale push to organize the South in the late 1940s. The story of that historic effort holds lessons for the struggle today.
Leftists have been burned so many times by Hollywood depictions of radicals. So it’s a welcome surprise when, once in a blue moon, mainstream filmmakers actually do the history of American radicals justice, as in the new film on Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, Judas and the Black Messiah.
Rush Limbaugh was a right-wing demagogue who also happened to have considerable talents as a broadcaster — and he used them to make the world a worse place for the ordinary people he claimed to speak for.
Republicans are gearing up to use gerrymandering yet again to entrench their power and smother democracy at the state level. But Congress has the constitutional authority to ensure a “republican form of government” prevails at the state level — and it should act immediately to quash partisan gerrymandering and attacks on voting rights.
Some prominent academics have taken to lecturing teachers and their unions for insisting that reopening schools is still too dangerous. Those academics are wrong: teachers are insisting on a safe, solidaristic approach to opening schools back up that protects parents, students, staff, teachers, and all of us.