Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The power of organized labor won the Occupational Safety and Health Administration 49 years ago today. That victory has saved thousands of lives in workplaces across the country — but we need to think even bigger than regulatory reforms now.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has donated $100 million to food banks during the current crisis, but he won’t even pay his own workers sick pay. Instead of charity, we need rights we can rely on — and as Unite leader Len McCluskey argues, the best way to win them is to organize with our coworkers.
Illinois cannot act to provide relief for its renters struggling under the coronavirus pandemic because of a 1997 rent control ban pushed by the Right. But this could change if its governor, J. B. Pritzker, used his emergency powers to lift that ban and aid the millions of Illinoisans who can’t pay the rent.
People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But Mike Davis argues that a rapid reopening of the economy would only result in unspeakable tragedy for millions.
In recent years, firms like Google and Facebook have used the Global South as a test bed for new and unregulated forms of data collection. Faced with coronavirus, the same mechanisms are being rolled out across the world — with for-profit data collection becoming increasingly central to states’ management of their welfare systems.
As tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis, the richest Americans saw their wealth rise by hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s not a coincidence.
The idea of human rights was once intimately tied to egalitarianism and socialist politics. By the 1990s, it was used to justify neoliberalism.
Railworkers have been decisive in the resistance to Emmanuel Macron’s dismantling of the French welfare state. These workers’ strength owes to their ability to bring traffic to a standstill — but also to a culture of solidarity built across decades of militant workplace activism.
The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that as long as they’re making profits, capitalists don’t care if we live or die. But unions, at their best, fight for everyone.
The COVID-19 crisis has hit Australian universities hard, with a largely casualized workforce already at risk of job losses. As rank-and-file union members prepare to fight back, they’re forced to confront a neoliberal rot that set in decades ago.
Mitch McConnell’s suggestion that states should go bankrupt instead of asking for federal assistance was the bloviating of an austerity-minded reactionary. What we need instead is a universal welfare state that refuses to let workers in any state suffer the vagaries of the market.
Donald Trump richly deserves to be condemned for his response to COVID-19. But the catastrophic failures of public policy didn’t start with Trump: this bipartisan disaster has been decades in the making.
People are losing everything — their jobs, their homes, their health care, their savings. Democratic socialists must articulate the pain and uncertainty ordinary people are experiencing during this crisis or the Right will fill the void.
After the bank bailouts in 2008, the next stage in the government’s response was to cut spending on public services and lump even greater responsibilities onto private households. The end result was a huge rise in informal and unpaid labor carried out by women — and faced with the current shutdown, the losers from the last crisis are being punished even further.
The dysfunctions of modern capitalism have left us perilously exposed to a public health catastrophe. We must build on the solidarity engendered by this crisis to fight for a different world.
Legendary singer-songwriter John Prine loved people and hated cruelty. It is a simple but beautiful motivation for music, and the world is poorer for his no longer being in it.
Amazon is one of the most important companies in the American and global economies. If enough out-of-work socialists and other fed-up workers got jobs at the company and organized, they could build real working-class power in the 21st century economy.
The crisis of capitalism is currently opening wide. But it didn’t come out of nowhere.
With its economic resources and geopolitical strength, India should be in a better position to face COVID-19 than most countries in the Global South. But its people are paying the price for incompetent policymaking and years of neglect under Narendra Modi.
The crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for us to think again about Marx’s idea of human freedom. As David Harvey writes in Jacobin, emergency steps to get through the crisis also show us how we could build a different society that’s not beholden to capital.