Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
Today, Russians vote in a constitutional referendum designed to give Vladimir Putin a fresh burst of legitimacy. His feeble response to the coronavirus pandemic has ruined his “strongman” reputation — and it’s feeding a growing mood of popular discontent.
The point of a reading list should be to understand the world in order to change it. Here are ten essential books that can help inform the struggle for racial justice today.
After losing to Sinn Féin in February’s general election, Ireland’s conservative parties have exploited the pandemic to regain their footing and strike a coalition deal with the Greens. The new government won’t deliver the change Irish society needs, but Ireland’s left-wing forces still have a real opening in the coming years.
The Supreme Court’s abortion rights decision yesterday provides a brief respite to women across the South. But we’re still playing defense in the courts. Our offensive should be in the streets.
Newly published research confirms that poverty fell in April and May thanks to federal coronavirus aid. You’d think that would convince policymakers to pursue more such aid, but they aren’t — because America’s approach to welfare is both wrongheaded and cruel.
If federal unemployment benefits are not extended when they expire next month, millions of households will be facing both steep rent and unemployment with no assistance. And that means mass evictions.
Sixty years ago today, Patrice Lumumba marked the independence of the Congo with a blistering indictment of Belgian colonial rule. For the governments of Belgium and the United States, the speech made Lumumba a marked man: within a year, he was dead at the hands of their proxies.
The American public helped pay for the development of remdesivir, a COVID-19 drug. That same American public will now be charged $3,000 for a treatment — a treatment that experts say costs less than $10 to produce.
Seeking to maintain the momentum of the George Floyd protests, activists have launched an occupation outside City Hall in New York to demand a $1 billion cut in the NYPD budget. So far, there’s little sign that the city council or Mayor Bill de Blasio are prepared to give in.
Donald Trump claims he’s ending the “era of endless wars.” But over the course of his first term, he has come closer to starting new wars than ending the wars he inherited.
Argentina’s public health response to COVID-19 was far better than Jair Bolsonaro’s disastrous mismanagement in Brazil. Yet as the two countries seek to rebuild, both are enfeebled by their subordinate place in the global financial system, a subordination that is threatening to turn today’s shock into a protracted crisis.
In an interview, longtime socialist-feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham reflects on her decades on the Left, grappling with the reality of being a socialist from the middle class, and E. P. and Dorothy Thompson and the classic book The Making of the English Working Class.
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener’s chronicle of Los Angeles in the 1960s, Set the Night on Fire, isn’t just a stunning portrait of a city in upheaval half a century ago. It’s a history of uprisings for civil rights, against poverty, and for a better world that speaks directly to our current moment of mass protest.
John Bolton’s absurd, self-aggrandizing new book reveals a shocking secret: Donald Trump knows next to nothing about Africa. The continent is better off without his ignorant meddling.
Always on the cutting edge of innovation, the Trump administration has found a new way to enrich health insurance companies and screw workers in the middle of a pandemic: declaring that health insurance companies are not required to cover the costs of COVID-19 testing for workers returning to work.
Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015 as a veteran anti-war activist, only to have to spend the next five years apologizing for his supposed “racist allies” and “terrorist links.” The sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey shows how the space to criticize Israel has narrowed — but also how the Left has failed to defend its own right to call out injustice.
In post–World War I Paris, wounded Senegalese veteran Lamine Senghor used his experience to denounce the evils of imperialism. A militant in the French Communist Party, he married working-class politics with a consistent anti-racism — putting the unity of the colonized peoples at the heart of the fight against oppression and injustice.
With Jair Bolsonaro at the helm, Brazil’s democracy is in crisis. Veteran of the Brazilian left and the armed struggle against the dictatorship, and a principal strategist of the Workers’ Party, José “Zé” Dirceu spoke to Jacobin about the need for a broad front coalition to defeat Bolsonarismo.
In 1980s South Korea, hundreds of protesters were maimed and blinded by tear gas grenades fired by police. But the demand to stop the state’s use of tear gas soon itself became the focus of protests — a fight against police brutality which rallied millions of South Koreans behind the pro-democracy movement.
We absolutely need to defund the police and put the money in social services. To attack inequality and invest in poor and working-class neighborhoods of color, we need a massive increase in public spending. That means wresting resources from the rich.