Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
For the past 40 years, privately funded interest groups and lawmakers have promoted the idea that US schools are failing and causing economic dysfunction. The story provides cover for the real culprits of inequality: wealth-hoarding bosses.
The housing crisis is a calamity that can no longer be ignored. AOC and Bernie Sanders’s newly reintroduced Green New Deal for Public Housing highlights the importance of deeply affordable and generously funded public housing as key to solving this crisis.
US sanctions are causing crippling shortages for many Iranians. But far from bringing the Islamic Republic to its knees, the sanctions are an opportunity for elites to remodel the economy — and find new ways of profiting from misery.
Israel’s supporters have repeatedly invoked the memory of Nazi genocide to legitimize mass murder of civilians in Gaza. Historian Enzo Traverso warns that the cynical misuse of Holocaust remembrance poses a grave danger to our global democratic culture.
Many observers of Haiti’s social disorder today maintain that the island country has always been dysfunctional. But the poverty and chaos in Haiti is of recent vintage, the product of disastrous decisions by political elites and heavy-handed US interference.
Analysts of financialization often present it as a sign of capitalist decline, yet the rise of finance has actually strengthened capitalist domination. The only way to challenge this power is by converting finance into a public utility.
The generic drug industry is pushing back against a government effort to lower the cost of lifesaving medications, even though the plan is built around letting them make more generic drugs.
Last month, the Justice Department charged tech giant Apple with serious antitrust violations related to the iPhone. It’s a relatively aggressive suit — but likely an inadequate response to Apple’s outsize power.
After splitting from Germany’s Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht is calling for the state to cut rejected asylum seekers’ benefits. She claims to speak for working-class Germans — but she’s combining anti-migrant lines with classic anti-welfare talking points.
In his book Political Parties, Robert Michels argued that mass movements have a natural tendency to develop undemocratic structures. Michels had some sharp insights into the nature of bureaucracy, but his “iron law of oligarchy” was seriously flawed.
The Indian farmers’ movement has posed the biggest challenge to Narendra Modi’s government since it came to power. With elections approaching, farmers are mobilizing once again to challenge rural impoverishment under a destructive neoliberal model.
Democratic Party elites have accepted the loss of vital working-class jobs and written off white workers as bigots. But a new book by Les Leopold shows how we can build a broad working-class movement to fight for the right to a good job.
Nearly 50,000 voters in Wisconsin’s Democratic presidential primary just cast ballots for nobody. In state after state, the voters Joe Biden needs are registering their fury about US support for Israel’s war on Gaza by voting “uncommitted.”
The Left’s long history of defeats has produced an equally long history of difficult emotions. Yet left-wing thinkers have often ignored the emotional experience of political defeat in service of an unrealistic ideal of the selfless revolutionary.
Filmmaker Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World follows a production assistant on a long day’s drive to screen injured Romanian workers for a workplace safety video — painting a bleak, darkly funny portrait of a hollowed-out world.
Ahead of June’s European elections, the French left is divided over Gaza. Rima Hassan, a Franco-Palestinian jurist and activist standing for France Insoumise, tells Jacobin why it’s shameful for left-wingers to fail to defend Palestinians’ rights.
The French writer Raymond Aron is often praised by liberals for his nuanced, nonideological thinking. In reality, he lived in the pocket of the CIA and gave an intellectual veneer to NATO’s imperialistic foreign policy.
A new PAC formed to unseat pro-Palestinian New York socialists is led by the same corporate interests opposed to progressive policies more generally. The battle over US policy toward Israel is also about economic policy at home.
After a brutal two-week siege of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Israeli forces withdrew from the medical compound on Monday. Eyewitnesses report that Israeli troops carried out a horrific massacre of civilians in the hospital and the surrounding area.
The Supreme Court will soon decide on a case that could invalidate a host of state laws that protect consumers from abusive banking practices — which were originally put in place to prevent the kind of predatory lending that led to the 2008 financial crisis.