Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
If you were hoping for a change of heart from Joe Biden after a decades-long career as a hawk, we’ve got bad news: his incoming team helped shape some of the most militaristic policies of the Obama administration.
For Seattle’s ruling class, having even one socialist, Kshama Sawant, on city council is far too many. Which is why, Sawant writes in Jacobin, since she first won office in 2013, the attacks from Democrats, the Right, and corporate juggernauts like Amazon haven’t stopped attacking her.
A trillion dollars could maintain wages at pre-crisis levels for all workers in America, enabling people to stay home and stop the spread of the virus, for four months. Instead, it’s gone into the personal piggy banks of a handful of billionaire owners and investors.
Everyone knows the desperate need to stop fossil fuel extraction immediately to avoid climate catastrophe. But that hasn’t stopped a Trump-appointed financial regulator from trying to force banks to continue financing fossil fuel projects.
To avoid runaway climate change, we need to transform our societies’ economic priorities. But the Green New Deal can’t succeed unless it enjoys working people’s active support — and starts out from their existing moral assumptions.
In 1952, West Germany paid reparations to Israel — not as compensation to Holocaust survivors, but in the form of supplies to the Israeli state. Coming at the same time as denazification reached its end, the move had little to do with moral atonement, and everything to do with whitewashing West Germany’s international image.
Under the short-lived Medevac Legislation, 192 refugees were transported from offshore detention to Australia for medical treatment. Today, most of them are still imprisoned in hotels around the country, where they have to endure a total, indefinite lockdown.
The nightmare scenario of the winner of the Electoral College losing the popular vote didn’t happen this time around. But the Electoral College is still a fundamentally anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic institution. We should absolutely scrap it.
As inspiring as the Arab Spring uprisings of the early 2010s were, they failed to democratize the Middle East. The primary cause had little to do with the region’s cultural or religious characteristics and everything to do with the profound weakening of the Middle East’s working-class power under neoliberalism.
Rooted in Germany’s metalworks industries, IG Metall is one of the world’s strongest trade unions. But the need for climate action is forcing it to take a more critical approach to the industries where its members work — and fight for a green transition that creates new kinds of high-paid, fulfilling jobs.
Joe Biden’s first national security hires have been consulting for defense contractors or working for industry-funded think tanks. The picks are of a piece with Biden’s entire career of backing US imperialism rather than bucking it.
To many, Helen Keller is a symbol of unyielding perseverance in the face of adversity. Rightfully so. But she was also one of the most prominent American Marxists of her time. Here, we reprint her 1912 essay “The Hand of the World” in full.
Puerto Ricans dealt a severe blow to their neoliberal, two-party system in the general election this month, with progressive forces making a major breakthrough. For the first time in the island’s history, the Left has become a relevant player in the electoral arena.
The argument that we shouldn’t cancel student debt because it’s unfair to those who have paid off their loans doesn’t hold up. Don’t overthink it: we should cancel all student debt and make public universities, community colleges, and vocation schools tuition-free.
The anti-communist campaigns of the late 1940s attacked the Left on every front. As beacons of a broad-based cultural radicalism and messengers for change, American folk singers quickly found themselves in the FBI’s crosshairs.
By proposing defense spending increases alongside a pay freeze for workers at a time of massive economic pain, the Tories have revealed their priorities: war before workers’ well-being.
Last week, the Brereton Report documented terrible atrocities committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan. The political establishment has feigned shock at the revelations, but complicity in these crimes goes all the way to the top.
As tech companies tighten their grip on power, sci-fi visions of the future are proliferating. In Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer, automation meets the hyper-militarization of borders, only increasing exploitation. It’s a techno-dystopia alarmingly imaginable today.
Nurses at St. Mary Medical Center have been dealing with understaffing, long hours, low pay, and a lack of protective equipment throughout the pandemic. This past week, they decided to go on strike to push their hospital to take measures needed to keep patients safe.
The Biden campaign’s decision to forsake door-to-door canvassing may have cost Democrats dearly in down-ballot races. It was emblematic of the party’s disastrous abandonment of face-to-face organizing.