Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a series of emergency measures to reorient our economies toward the public health care response. The crisis offers a glimpse of how production could be made to serve social needs — but only if we defeat those who want a return to capitalist normality.
The Australian “JobKeeper” scheme will subsidize the wages of many throughout the course of this pandemic, but more than 2 million workers are set to be left out entirely. What’s more, the scheme undermines collective bargaining agreements, giving more power to employers in a shift that threatens to far outlive this crisis.
The COVID-19 quarantine has exposed the importance of parks, sidewalks, and other public spaces to our collective well-being. To stitch the world back together once the pandemic recedes, we should enact a massive green stimulus that builds out our public infrastructure in beautiful, imaginative, low-carbon ways.
The Bernie Sanders campaign secured wide-ranging support from both young people and immigrants. Though our actual power is still incredibly weak, the socialist movement is also well-positioned to build a broad working-class coalition going forward.
Bernie Sanders made the slogan “fight for that person you don’t even know” central to his 2020 campaign. Now that Sanders’s campaign is finished, we shouldn’t abandon that broad ethic of solidarity.
Jared Kushner has gotten yet another nepotistic gig leading the Trump administration’s coronavirus “shadow task force.” The problem is, he doesn’t know anything about COVID-19, just like he doesn’t know anything about immigration reform or Middle East peace.
In the wake of the end of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, many pundits are asking: Should Bernie have campaigned like Elizabeth Warren? The answer is no, since she lost very badly.
We don’t need melodramatic hyperbole from New Leftists telling us to campaign for Joe Biden. We need to build a democratic-socialist movement that is the only real hope for the planet’s future.
As tech firms team up with governments to fight the coronavirus pandemic, we’re being asked to accept a trade-off between our digital privacy and our health. It’s a false choice: we can achieve the public health benefits of data without accepting abusive and illicit surveillance.
The coronavirus is plunging the global economy into an unprecedented recession. We need to wipe away the debt bondage of Global South countries and launch a Global Green New Deal that will allow workers around the world to prosper.
Go ahead and laugh: newly declassified sections of a Justice Department report suggest that the Russiagate conspiracy theory may itself have been part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign.
Socialists say they either want to “realign” the Democratic Party or break with it entirely. But those aren’t political strategies — they are outcomes of political struggle. We need a way to develop working-class politics without condemning ourselves to third-party marginality.
Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don’t serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs — one that can provide food for all.
People in Kashmir have been suffering a militarized lockdown since August, when India put an end to the region’s semiautonomous status. In a pandemic, that lockdown is set to continue, extending the disciplinary powers of India’s armed forces in a region where tensions are already at boiling point.
Precarity has been rising for decades but now, in a pandemic, job insecurity meets physical vulnerability in new and terrifying ways.
Coronavirus is ravaging the globe right now. It’s a perfect time for the Israeli state to figure out how to expand its already vast surveillance powers.
The United Electrical workers’ union and the Democratic Socialists of America are teaming up to help nonunion workers organize during the coronavirus crisis. The goal: find workers who are already spoiling for a fight and help them win it.
One in six New York City police officers is out sick. Those who are still working have refused to perform emergency duties, like assisting overstressed mortuary workers, while continuing to make unnecessary arrests. It’s time to send New York cops home.
As COVID-19 rips through American prisons, incarcerated people have braved violent repression to demand a humane response to their suffering. In an interview with Jacobin, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson explains the current wave of prisoner protest — and what it could signal about the future of American politics.
David Sirota, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, argues that a key mistake of the campaign was Sanders’s refusal to more forcefully articulate the contrasts between his record and Joe Biden’s.