Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
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.
Trump just installed a former Republican National Committee chair to lead the board that oversees the USPS. Now the agency faces allegations that it is being used to rig the 2020 election.
Federal unemployment has dried up, rent is past due, evictions are proceeding, the cupboards are bare, and the Senate has adjourned without passing a new coronavirus relief package. Their abandonment of the working class is shameless, but hardly shocking.
With her deep and long-standing ties to the Silicon Valley elite, Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s running mate has corporate leaders breathing a deep sigh of relief. In picking the California senator, Biden couldn’t be clearer that his will be an administration dedicated to shoring up a crumbling status quo.
In Belarus, a populist government that long claimed the support of its people finds itself repressing a historic protest movement — and its demands for a more democratic politics.
The German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht died on this day in 1956. His newly released book Refugee Conversations draws on his own years in exile to tear apart the anti-immigrant politics which still plague us today.
Seth Rogen’s new film prompted him to ask some searching questions about Jewish education in the diaspora today and drew significant attention after his criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But An American Pickle is a superficial portrait of Jewish experience in the New World and a corny rags-to-riches story of immigration.
Widely publicized cases of police brutality have led to an incredible uprising across the United States and the world demanding an end to police violence. But those cases can also mean big business for companies selling technology based on the empty promise of providing greater police accountability and improving public safety.
In the days after Alexander Lukashenko stole Belarus’s election, the state has unleashed intense repression against all who dared to protest. But now workers from metro drivers to oil refinery employees have gone on strike against Lukashenko’s fraud — a powerful stand for their democratic rights.
Founder of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, Amadeo Bordiga is little known today, even among scholars of that country’s Marxist traditions. Fifty years after his death, the first English-language collection of his writings shows why Bordiga shouldn’t be overlooked.
I worry that the racial discourse on COVID-19 could help pave the way for a eugenics-state that will ultimately do damage to poor black and brown people.
When the pandemic began, defenders of our for-profit health system — including many Democrats — scrambled to insist we didn’t need a Medicare for All system. Yet new infections are still surging in the US while countries with national health care programs have long since gotten a handle on coronavirus.
The absurd allegations against progressive Congressional candidate Alex Morse have now been exposed as a hoax. But they couldn’t have been better calculated to excite a Left prone to mindless sex panics.
Fidel Castro inspired revolutionaries around the world — and also provided them with direct material aid. On what would have been Castro’s 94th birthday, veteran anti-apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils salutes the Cuban leader’s solidarity with liberation struggles in Southern Africa and beyond.
Thinking about racism as some kind of existential “original sin” that will always be with us no matter what we do, no matter what efforts we undertake to fight it, is a political dead end. Through organizing, we have struck blows against racism in the past — we can do so again today.
Michael Brooks, who would have turned 37 years old today, wanted the Left to do better. In the last year of his life, he’d started to write a book about what that might look like.
Despite media warnings of imminent danger, Ilhan Omar, one of Congress’s most left-wing members, cruised to victory in her primary this week, defeating a well-funded primary challenger. It’s another clear indication that the Left’s electoral insurgency is here to stay.
Workers in the book industry often suffer poor conditions and low pay, but are supposed to feel grateful for the privilege of working near books. Casting off such illusions is the first step to organizing publishers and booksellers, and fighting the exploitation that thrives in the hallowed culture industry.
From Podemos in Spain to Bernie Sanders’s bid for the nomination, recent left-populist campaigns inspired widespread hopes only to fall short. But overwhelming the fortresses of neoliberalism demands a long-term strategy — and mass mobilizations that last beyond the excitement of an election campaign.