Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
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.
If you’ve found yourself impulsively shopping online during quarantine, you’re not alone. And there’s no shame in it. But this is our corona-capitalist dystopia: purchasing things we may or may not need while desperately needed public services are left to rot.
For the better part of a year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo has basked in an absurdly undeserved, media-driven reputation as a wise and competent COVID-19 statesman. Now reality is finally catching up with him.
The first round of Ecuador’s presidential election handed first place to left-wing candidate Andrés Arauz. It was a total repudiation of Lenín Moreno’s neoliberal agenda. But more work is needed to cement a coalition that can win power and an anti-austerity program.
Socialist New York State Sen. Julia Salazar has some harsh words for Andrew Cuomo’s botched handling of COVID-19, his “power grab” at the pandemic’s beginning, and his refusal to tax the rich: “It is dangerous for Gov. Cuomo to continue to be the most powerful person in our state.”
An attack on El Salvador’s main opposition party has left two people dead and amounts to one of the worst acts of political violence since the peace accords signing in 1992. The country’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, should be held responsible for helping to stoke the violence.
Governor Andrew Cuomo is threatening retribution against progressive elected officials demanding answers about underreported COVID-19 deaths and his effort to help an industry group shield nursing home executives from liability. Between his cover-ups and his bullying, Cuomo might as well be New York’s Richard Nixon.
Despite the best efforts of former AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney, organized labor has continued its decline. Not only have we been politically defeated, but our very historical memory of struggle is under assault. We desperately need to find a way to make “big labor” truly big again.
In a viral moment last night, Joe Biden told an eight-year-old girl at a CNN town hall that kids rarely contract or transmit the coronavirus. But the science says otherwise — yet the media recklessly let Biden get away with spreading misinformation.
The Democrats’ confused and inept handling of the final stage of the impeachment trial revealed the contradiction at the heart of the party’s politics: whether it’s trying to represent bold change or simply a return to the pre-Trump status quo.
At Collin College, an institution of higher learning in McKinney, Texas where two professors involved in union organizing were recently fired, the president proudly boasts of the school’s “Amazonification.” The episode offers a dire picture of the direction higher ed is rapidly heading nationwide.
What Texans are suffering through is a failure of deregulation and markets — a neoliberal ideology promoted not just by the fossil-fuel-loving right, but even many environmentally conscious liberals.
Upon its launch ten years ago, Germany’s Industry 4.0 program promised a fourth industrial revolution changing the way we work. Yet for all the talk of novelty, it followed age-old capitalist imperatives: using labor-saving technology not to lessen our workload but subject us to even tighter workplace discipline.
The mass inequality of America’s first Gilded Age thrived on identity-based partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we’re headed down the same path.
So far the Biden administration’s stated climate policies have shifted the US government from a stance of death-wish climate nihilism to one that resembles a typical center-right European government. But without a sharp move to the left on the economic aspects of climate transition, even that much progress won’t materialize.
Inequality is on the rise in the West but globally it’s in decline. Economist Branko Milanovic speaks to Jacobin about the shifting dynamics of capitalism, and why going back to its so-called “golden age” is not an option.