Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
Today, a 1,400-person strike by Teamsters Local 202 ended. Workers won an immediate 70-cents-an-hour raise, and gave up no concessions to their bosses. It’s a victory worth celebrating and proof that going on strike works.
The 1970s were a high-water mark for the US labor movement, with work stoppages, wildcat strikes, and sit-downs spreading up and down the country, involving workers in all industries.
The massacre of the Indonesian left in 1965–66, backed by Washington, was one of the great crimes of the twentieth century. A new generation of scholars has uncovered its long-suppressed history of slaughter of up to a million people in the name of anti-communism.
Team owners in Canadian football made record profits while many of their players had to work second jobs to make ends meet. Now they’re using the pandemic as an excuse to claw back wages even further — a player fightback is the only way to change the game.
Hank Aaron will be remembered for his astonishing achievements as one of the all-time great baseball players, not least because he broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. But Aaron also ceaselessly fought to defend black people in a hostile, racist society.
Last Friday, the Dutch government had to resign in scandal, after thousands of parents were wrongly accused of making fraudulent childcare benefit claims. The affair was driven by racist demonization of welfare recipients deeply rooted in the country’s politics.
Joe Biden has long prized bipartisanship above all, and some of his early actions indicate he simply wants to restore the country to its pre-Trump form. That would be a disaster.
Joe Biden promised to be the most pro-union president in modern history. He has a chance to prove it by passing the PRO Act, a sweeping labor law reform bill.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, has taken an extraordinary step — following many Palestinian and human rights groups around the world — in calling the state of Israel what it is: an apartheid regime and thus anything but a democracy.
Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment refuse to push Medicare for All even as COVID-19 continues to ravage the country. That’s all the more reason for us to demand, alongside Bernie Sanders, that everyone get the health care they need free of charge until the pandemic is over.
In his inauguration speech Wednesday, Joe Biden promised health care that will be “secure for all.” But no amount of rhetorical triangulation can erase the fact that a single-payer system is the only viable alternative to the status quo.
The legacy of Margo St James, the trailblazing sex worker organizer who died earlier this month at 83, is more than her brazen personality, more than her bold and flamboyant tactics. She recognized that economic exploitation and gendered harassment are inextricably linked to police violence.
Joe Biden’s new ethics order will limit one revolving door loophole between government and lobbying — but not the loopholes Biden’s own cabinet picks used to make their fortunes.
In the first 24 hours of the Joe Biden administration, Teamsters are on strike in the Bronx, Chicago teachers are preparing to stop work, and even the staff of the New Yorker are engaged in a work stoppage.
In his inauguration speech yesterday, Joe Biden rightly identified a crisis of ignored truth and unending lies in American politics. Donald Trump enflamed that crisis, but the political class, the media industry, and Biden himself helped create it.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party immediately faced a violent wave of repression, killing hundreds of militants. As policemen, business elites, and even liberal politicians swung behind Benito Mussolini, no party resisted the Fascist threat more than the Communists.
Inspired by the hardships faced by peasants in his native Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara was one of the great anti-fascist novels of the twentieth century. But his own political journey was deeply conflicted, as he left behind his Bolshevik past to become a strident anti-communist.
The Italian Communist Party was founded 100 years ago today. One of its most remarkable early militants was Francesco Misiano — a keen internationalist who fought gun in hand in the German Revolution before becoming a leading light of Soviet cinema.
Founded 100 years ago today, the Italian Communist Party fought its most famous battles in the country’s Northern industrial heartlands. But in the Southern city of Naples, it had to tailor its activity to a more complex reality — a city whose large informal economy reflected the deep inequalities on which the Italian state was founded.
Joe Biden has issued a raft of executive orders that are surprisingly progressive. But we know who to thank: the organized left, which has helped transform US politics.