Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a fleeting sense of radical possibility quickly gave way to a wave of cuts and privatization. After COVID-19, get ready for a repeat, as leaders around the world push for austerity again.
The German socialist thinker Erich Fromm developed a powerful critique of authoritarian culture in response to the rise of Nazism. Today’s Left has much to learn from that critique, and from his defiant political optimism in the face of dark times.
Movie theaters are set to reopen soon, but neither the safety of viewers, nor support for the film industry itself, can be guaranteed.
The Black Lives Matter protests have had an electrifying impact. To build on that momentum, we need to forge strategic unity between different struggles against oppression, in the US and the wider world.
Trump just scored a victory for workers at the Tennessee Valley Authority — but on the Right’s reactionary, anti-immigrant terms. All while the socialist left was AWOL.
For the past three months, shipbuilders at Bath Iron Works in Maine have been waging the US’s biggest private sector strike of the year. With a tentative agreement now in place, it’s looking like they’re in for a big win.
The DNC is the four-yearly apotheosis of the Democratic Party’s love of progressive symbolism and empty rhetoric in place of real political vision. This year, it’s not even committing to that.
Sex panics keep happening because they tap into Americans’ deepest fears about the need to protect innocents from the threat of evil — fears that are endemic among the Left as well as the Right. Meanwhile, lives are destroyed in the process.
For-profit health companies are launching a new national ad campaign to persuade Democrats to abandon their plans to create a public health insurance plan — something many elected Democrats are very happy to be convinced of.
A new report shows that union health plans, while better than employer-sponsored health care, pale in comparison to Medicare for All. The labor movement should take notice: union members would be better off with M4A than the health plans they have to fight so hard to protect.
The protests in Belarus have widely been painted as a pro-Western “color revolution” or “Minsk Maidan,” ignoring the deeper reasons for popular discontent with president Alexander Lukashenko. Jacobin spoke to left-wingers in Belarus about the forces behind the protests and the prospects of organized labor asserting its own agenda.
To develop the desperately needed vaccine for COVID-19, we need to test that vaccine on human subjects. Socialists have to fight to make sure for-profit medical companies don’t abuse those subjects.
Joe Biden’s choice of running mate Kamala Harris reveals a bleak truth: nothing the Left has done, from two Bernie Sanders campaigns to the biggest uprising in US history against police brutality, influenced his thinking at all. Big-money donors, on the other hand, did.
White-collar crime is barely prosecuted in the United States. It’s time for that to change.
Almost half of the women workers in the United Kingdom who have lost their jobs under the coronavirus pandemic cite lack of childcare as a factor. It’s time to recognize childcare as a public good, a right for everyone, and make it available to everyone.
Labour MP Dawn Butler talks about being stopped by the police, the far-right campaign of abuse which followed, and why she will keep fighting the racism that plagues policing in Britain.
Gay identity became possible thanks to capitalism’s emancipatory side: its liberation of the individual from material dependence on the family. But that sexual freedom wasn’t automatic — it required decades of militant struggle. Today, we need more such struggles to combat the oppressive aspects of capitalism, which keep gay and straight people alike from living fully free lives.
The Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1941) produced an important and influential analysis of capitalism, and he played an active role in Austrian and German politics before falling victim to Nazism. He still has a lot to teach us about the way modern capitalism works.
It’s now widely understood that black Americans have been disproportionately hit by the coronavirus. But though mainstream commentators are willing to recognize this basic disparity, and the role of racism, they perpetually obscure the question of class.
The myth of our democratic rights is that they were handed down to us from on high by liberals. But the ruling class resisted extending the franchise at every turn — and socialists were the ones who fought them for the right to vote.