Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
In the 1930s, working-class radicals in the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party established Socialization Units, mass organizations parallel to the party. Their goal was to prepare for the democratic takeover of industry, and to build “socialism in our time.”
The documentary One Long Shift in the Weeds captures the devastation of Pittsburgh’s culinary industry since the pandemic began. But it also shows the life-changing effect of enhanced unemployment benefits, which offered millions a temporary respite from life on the edge of financial ruin.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement is rightly remembered as a crucial moment in the upsurges of the 1960s. Less remembered is the role that radicals, especially members of the Independent Socialist Club, played in that movement.
Antitrust lawsuits against companies like Facebook stand little chance of effectively breaking them up. Bringing Big Tech into public ownership is the only way to fight monopolization under surveillance capitalism.
John le Carré was the Cold War’s finest novelist. He was no leftist, but Le Carré’s portrayals of the British security establishment offer an enduring insight into the mindset of the ruling class.
In his recently released memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama has neatly removed Central America from his narrative of the first years of his presidency. Perhaps he thought no one would notice.
Democrats refused to seize a rare opportunity to outmaneuver Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. They settled for a COVID relief bill that skimps on benefits, provides tax breaks to the rich, and pulls us toward austerity extremism.
Walmart and Amazon, millions of whose workers and suppliers have struggled to make ends meet amid the pandemic, are flush with cash — and just as virulently anti-union as ever.
By providing workers an extra $600 every week in unemployment insurance, the CARES Act delivered the most significant expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s — and delivered the Left its most impressive policy victory in years. We should demand that the government do it again.
Reading and study are required for militants in any labor union. And there are few better resources for telling the heroic story of American class struggle to workers today than the classic labor history book Labor’s Untold Story.
The Trump-brokered deal between Morocco and Israel normalizes relations between the two states. But the outgoing president bought Morocco’s agreement by endorsing its ownership of Western Sahara — making the US the only major state to rubber-stamp an occupation regime condemned by international law.
Australia’s biggest supermarket chain has locked out its warehouse workers in New South Wales. The lockout is the first battle in a coming war over who will benefit from automation — solidarity with the Coles workers is vital.
For forty years, governments around the world have been cutting taxes on the rich, claiming that the result would be more jobs and higher incomes. A new study shows how catastrophically wrong that policy has been.
It’s good that we’re talking about the urgent need for Medicare for All. But democratic-socialist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t the ones standing in the way of an American welfare state. Let’s figure out how to actually build working-class power and win change.
The most exhaustive study on Medicare for All just came out. Its conclusion: a single-payer system would guarantee health insurance to all people while reducing overall health spending by hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson led the fight to give himself a tax cut of up to $205,000. Now he is citing budget concerns to block emergency $1,200 checks as America faces mass starvation.
With 18,000 dead out of a population smaller than Ohio’s, Belgium has suffered the world’s worst rate of coronavirus deaths. Belgian Workers’ Party leader Peter Mertens told Jacobin how the population has been abandoned by the country’s elites — and why things didn’t have to be this way.
Fifteen years after Evo Morales was first elected president of Bolivia, his socialist party has returned to power. The far right hasn’t given up — but the indigenous masses that reversed the right-wing coup and forced elections have proven themselves a formidable force for justice and democracy.
Two years on from his election, the anti-political wave that Jair Bolsonaro rode to office appears to have ebbed. In its place we are seeing a restoration of the reactionary forces that have ruled the country for most of its history.
Canada likes to see itself as a benign global actor, but its extensive history of military intervention tells a different story. A $70 billion upgrade of the Canadian navy now carried out by Justin Trudeau will strengthen its capacity for military action as a US sidekick in world affairs.