Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The politics of taxes, spending, and deficits are more congenial to the Left than they have been in years — but there are still some clouds on the horizon. Here’s a guide to where things stand on the Biden budget proposal.
Under the guise of helping businesses, the GOP is working to bar medical leave mandates in state by state across the country.
Mario Draghi’s new Italian government has been hailed for uniting all political forces from the center-left to the hard-right Lega. Yet the adulation of the former European Central Bank chief as a “national savior” continues a trend elevating technocratic economic decisions above democratic choice — and it’s working-class Italians who’ll suffer.
Some of the country’s most profitable companies, like Kroger and Amazon, have been escalating their hardball tactics against workers. Flush with cash, they’re more confident than ever — and they’re doing whatever they want.
American leftists are constantly wrestling with the question of how to relate to the Democratic Party. The history of the UK Labour Party’s formation through a break with the Liberals a century ago is full of lessons for socialists today.
In a 1911 article, legendary socialist Eugene Debs excoriated the US Constitution as an “autocratic and reactionary document” written by aristocrats and “in every sense a denial of democracy.” To mark Presidents’ Day, we reprint the fiery essay here in full.
Studying the writings of Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, reveals something important: that right-wing intellectual thought is little more than a series of dressed-up defenses of conventional social relations and traditional hierarchies.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was meant to signal political freedom and economic prosperity. But for many East Germans, the flash privatization of state enterprises and social dislocation meant being second-class citizens in a reunified country.
In postwar decades, Italy boasted the West’s largest communist party, yet by the mid-1970s, its promise of social transformation had been all but abandoned. Swallowing the basics of neoliberal economics, the Left became increasingly distant from workers’ material interests — with disastrous results.
The Great Recession sent Europe’s social-democratic parties into a tailspin, exposing the contradictions of their political model. Now they face the pressure of another economic downturn, without having recovered from the last one or developed a convincing new vision.
Catalonia heads to the polls today in its first election since Spanish courts jailed pro-independence leaders for sedition and banned the Catalan president from public office. Dolors Sabater, lead candidate for the anti-capitalist CUP, told Jacobin why the Catalan national question won’t go away — and why a referendum is the only way to resolve it.
The late poet laureate Philip Levine gave us a unique and loving set of portraits of the American working class. Six years after his death on Valentine’s Day, let’s mourn his absence and celebrate his work.
When Karen Lewis and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators took power in the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010, the landscape for labor in her city and country was bleak. She rose to the moment — and helped transform what was politically possible for a teachers’ union and the labor movement as a whole to accomplish.
The media made the Lincoln Project and New York governor Andrew Cuomo into heroes of 2020. Now they’re both engulfed in scandal, and it’s time to hold them accountable.
Anti-colonial revolutionary Thomas Sankara fought to transform Burkina Faso into a truly independent, self-governing nation before his assassination in 1987. But as a recent film shows, Sankara’s legacy continues to inspire struggles against oppression despite ruling elites’ efforts to erase him from public memory.
The late AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney was an admirable figure who had a vision for reinvigorated US labor unions. But he only tried to reform a union movement that needed a more fundamental refoundation.
France was once the heartland of revolution. Today, its left is battered, and its far right is rising. To understand why, we have to look at François Mitterrand’s socialist government’s turn from radical reform to neoliberal austerity in the 1980s.
After the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973, universities became a symbol of Greek democracy — and for decades, police were banned from even entering campuses. But on Thursday, parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities, as the right-wing government mounts a troubling crackdown on supposedly “dangerous” student groups.
Five years ago, Bernie Sanders proclaimed on national television, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.” If this was the one moment of note that emerged from both Sanders campaigns, all the time and money and effort still would have been worth it.
One of the top national security think tanks backing the Biden administration, the Center for a New American Security, has been taking money from every major defense contractor while pumping out a steady stream of research supporting those companies’ interests. It’s yet another sign that Biden’s promised “return to normal” has, unfortunately, arrived.