Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
In Portland, federal agents have been snatching up protesters while hyper-militarized police crack down on demonstrators. It’s a frightening display of state repression — one with roots in the attacks on the anti-corporate globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate for New York’s state assembly, has officially won his race. His campaign shows us what a serious socialist electoral bid looks like: class-conscious politics, an uncompromising program, and deep face-to-face organizing. There should be many more like it.
New York state legislators just passed a bill limiting Governor Andrew Cuomo’s attempt to shield his big donors from COVID-related lawsuits. But nursing home CEOs are still protected for negligence or wrongdoing that took place earlier this year.
Rashida Tlaib, one of Congress’s most unapologetically left-wing members, is under threat from a challenger backed by super PAC money. The Left must defend her.
After his death, the followers of economist John Maynard Keynes embraced the myth of a “natural” market economy that required “intervention” from the government to keep it stable. But there is nothing natural about the market — and the Keynesians’ mistake led to a withering of the radical potential of Keynes’s ideas.
Business interests are eager to reopen schools so they can get the economy running again and turn a profit. But teachers across the country are insisting that schools should only be reopened when it can be done safely — and they might just go on strike to fight back against the billionaires.
Michael Brooks’s ability to understand and analyze the similarities among authoritarians across the globe meant that he had little time for narratives that sought to portray non-Western culture as the source of barbarism and authoritarian rule.
The socialist magazine Mot Dag trained some of Norway’s key public figures, including three Labor Party prime ministers and the cofounder of the World Health Organization. Their experience shows how left-wing media can build a socialist common sense in wider society — and help socialists in parliament resist establishment kickback.
In St. Louis, the demand to defund the police has dovetailed with long-lasting struggles against cash bail and the abuse of prisoners. The Board of Aldermen’s passing of a bill that promises to start closing the city’s most notorious jail reflects the movement’s strength — but also the need for pressure to ensure that abolitionist demands are not watered down into merely cosmetic reforms.
José Garza, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is set to become Austin, Texas’s next district attorney after a movement-based campaign promising to end the drug war and radically downsize the carceral state. He says the Left is finally making its mark in Texas politics.
After we put out a call for remembrances of Michael Brooks, we received deeply emotional emails from his viewers and listeners all around the world about how he changed their politics — and often their lives.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos aren’t obscenely wealthy because they work harder than everyone else or they’re more innovative. They’re obscenely wealthy because their corporate empires drain society’s resources — and we’d all be better off without them.
Michael Brooks was one of the funniest, most intellectually curious human beings I’ve ever known. He was also deeply committed to creating a better world.
Stacey Abrams shows every sign of becoming a fixture of national Democratic politics, thanks in part to unwaveringly positive press attention. Yet little of that media coverage has focused on her centrist legislative record or her coziness with the business world.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s blistering speech yesterday powerfully connected her experience of sexism with the broader issues of patriarchy and workplace harassment. It was proof, once again, that it’s very nice having democratic socialists in office.
With the push to reopen public schools amid a still-raging pandemic, many teachers are sounding the alarm. We spoke with one Philadelphia high school teacher who has been organizing his coworkers — and the end result may be a massive strike.
Since Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp reopened the economy, infection rates have skyrocketed. But the state has found a way to deal with the problem — by making the surge of new cases disappear from the government’s official COVID-19 tracking website.
In recent years, the European Union’s member states have built their migration policies around an evermore elaborate system of filtering people and finding ways to expel them. This effort to put up obstacles isn’t just expensive or inefficient, but outright antihuman — subjecting migrants’ lives to the whims of recruiters and opaque bureaucratic processes.
The music industry bounced back from a seemingly terminal post-Napster crisis, but the profits from streaming go to big companies and a handful of top artists. Can we build an alternative model that encourages more innovative — and more radical — music?
Hailing from a working-class Pennsylvania background, Robert Eshelman-Håkansson led the life of a bohemian intellectual before rising to become chief aide to the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He leaves behind friends and admirers throughout the US and in half a dozen countries around the world.