Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The story of Senator Kyrsten Sinema — a former Green Party–aligned activist who happily rejected a minimum wage hike recently and is now one the most right-wing Democrats in the Senate — is about how a desperate thirst for power can debase even the most idealistic progressive.
Jordan Peterson claims to slay sacred cows and challenge prevailing orthodoxies. But what he’s really offering is a minor twist on tried-and-true conservatism — defending existing hierarchies and opposing the democratization of political and economic life.
Workers at San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate are unionizing with the ILWU, the longshore workers’ union with a long history of militant action and radical politics. We spoke with them about life and work at the chocolate factory.
Yesterday, Amazon workers in Italy held the first nationwide strike in the company’s history. Jeff Bezos’s firm has long used subcontracting, temporary hiring, and a maze of contracts to divide its workforce — but unionizing warehouse staff have made common cause with outsourced delivery drivers.
This year’s Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, went to French architects who rejected the demolition of public housing. Instead, the architects insisted on renovating and expanding public units to make working-class residents’ homes more modern, humane, and attractive.
A prosecutor in Sicily has charged twenty-one people, including the crew of the Iuventa migrant rescue ship, with aiding illegal immigration. The potential long jail terms show how European countries have criminalized aid for refugees — and how little they care about the thousands who drown in the Mediterranean.
Last week, the National Rifle Association successfully struck down an assault weapons ban in Boulder, Colorado. Five days later, Boulder was the scene of a mass shooting — reportedly with the same kind of weapon the city tried and failed to ban.
On the campaign trail, Joe Biden criticized Donald Trump’s support for the Egyptian ruler Sisi, his “favorite dictator.” But Biden has now approved fresh arms sales to Egypt, turning a blind eye to ongoing repression. This bipartisan betrayal of democracy has to end.
Socialists have punched above their electoral weight lately, sending candidates to state legislatures and city councils across the country. But to win the kind of power it will need to transform the country, the Left will need to run credible campaigns for governor.
Ten years ago, NATO forces intervened in Libya’s civil war with promises to liberate the country. The disaster they left behind offers a lesson on why imperialist wars must be resisted.
Socialists can and should continue to fight to banish corporate money from elections. But Canada is a case study in the limits of campaign finance reform. We need more radical action to limit the power of the rich in politics.
With sexist dress codes and personal harassment from the New York governor himself, women in Andrew Cuomo’s office found themselves facing one of the most pervasive forms of exploitation in the lives of working-class women: the boss’s attempt to control their bodies.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his far-right allies have begun proceedings to dissolve the left-wing, pro-Kurdish HDP and ban its leaders from political life. The war on the HDP must be resisted.
From fighting alongside communists in the Spanish Civil War to backing revolutionaries in Cuba, documentarian Ken Burns shows us the radical side of writer Ernest Hemingway in the new PBS docuseries Hemingway. Burns talks to Jacobin about Hemingway’s forgotten left-wing politics and why the writer still matters.
A recent thirty-day hunger strike by residents of Chicago’s Southeast Side did what lobbying through traditional channels couldn’t: stall the move of a polluting metal recycler into their working-class residential neighborhood.
For years, we were given reactionary tropes about welfare queens and the need to cut the deficit. But now there’s popular recognition that state action is needed to boost the economy and help working people. We need to make sure that the age of deadly austerity never comes back.
The outcomes of class conflicts throughout history have been influenced by how workers and rulers respond to pandemics. As we emerge from this pandemic, the fight for fairer work regimes is our urgent task.
As a member of the Irish Republican Army, I planted a time bomb at the Tory Party conference in 1984 and tried to kill Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. Here’s what led me to that point — and why I believe in the peace process today.
New data shows a huge drop in tax audits of the wealthy and corporations. The IRS is hounding working people but letting the rich get away with murder.
Newly released documents show Joe Biden’s White House staffers recently working as consultants for Lyft, billionaire foundations, and an Israeli facial recognition firm. It’s another reminder of the revolving door between big business and the state.