Fighting for a Free Palestine: What we can do in the UK!

With the genocide in Gaza still ongoing and Israel plunging the whole Middle East into war, solidarity with the Palestinian people is more important than ever. The University and College Union (UCU) joined other trade unions and organisations in the UK to call for a Workplace Day of Action on 10 October ‘Ceasefire Now – Stop Arming Israel’. To mark this day, UCU at the University of Nottingham hosted an online talk by Angie Mindel, the secretary of Nottingham Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and treasurer of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) as well as a retired member of the National Education Union. This guest post is the written version of her talk discussing not only Israeli atrocities, but also what we in the UK can do in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Zero-Hour Contracts Keep Us Precarious

Zero-hour contracts are often toted as a win-win, one where the worker and employer can both benefit and “decide” how much they work. In reality, Niamh Illiff writes in this guest post, this flexibility is a myth – one that benefits employers, not workers. These contracts gift employers with all the power, deciding how many hours to offer while workers are left in a constant state of uncertainty, never knowing how much they’ll earn from week to week. The employer - worker power dynamic is not ‘equalised’ under zero-hour contracts, but exacerbated, representing a heightened form of exploitation leaving workers vulnerable, with little control over their employment practise or financial stability.

 

Fanning the Flames of War: Further reflections on Ukraine.

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Two and a half years on, the war rages on unabated. Instead of focusing on negotiating a ceasefire and ultimately peace agreement, Ukraine requests permission to use Western long-range missiles to attack locations on Russian territory, supposedly as a way of bringing about an end to the war. The USA and UK have not given their permission yet (BBC, 14 September 2024), but a further round of escalation is clearly on the horizon. The left in Europe has struggled to find a coherent position on the war and the divisions between different positions are deepening. In this blog post, I will further reflect on what is at stake in the Ukraine war from a left perspective.

 

Exiting the Factor: Review of Alexander Gallas’ book on strikes and class formation beyond the industrial sector.

In his major, two-volume publication Exiting the Factory: Strikes and Class Formation beyond the Industrial Sector (Bristol University Press, 2024), Alexander Gallas asks ‘what are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or in how far do they contribute to working class formation?’ (Vol.1, P.12). He successfully demonstrates that collective action in non-industrial sectors too results in class consciousness. Work may change in certain parts of the world towards non-industrial sectors, but workers will always struggle collectively to defend themselves against capitalist exploitation. In this review, I will highlight some of the key achievements of Gallas’ publication.

 

Organizing Insurgency: Workers Movements in the Global South - Review of book by Immanuel Ness!

How can working class gains obtained in struggle from employers be secured more permanently? How can capitalism be challenged successfully on a road towards a socialist future? In his book Organizing Insurgency: Workers Movements inthe Global South (Pluto Press, 2021), Immanuel Ness is clear in his answer. Workers require a more permanent organization, including a strong trade union and political party: “If workers form a strong revolutionary organizational force, that resistance will be sustained and far more successful” (p. 62). In other words, working class power is reflected in strong organization. According to Ness, “[c]lass struggle is inevitable, but working-class power requires the strength of organization of a union and political party to advance and consolidate its interests” (p. 100). In this review, I will highlight several key contributions of the volume, but also make some critical observations.

 

The New Cold War – Reviewing Gilbert Achcar’s latest book

In his latest book The New Cold War (The Westbourne Press, 2023) Gilbert Achcar provides a fascinating account of the triangular relationships between the USA, Russia and China from the early 1990s onwards. Two chapters published at the end of the 1990s are complemented with up-to-date assessments of current conflicts between the US and NATO with Russia over Ukraine and US – Chinese rivalries in the South China Sea. In this blog post, I will assess Achcar’s many insights, but also add a notion of caution re the theoretical framework underpinning his book.

 

A Vital Frontier - Review of Andrea Muehlebach's book on Water Insurgencies in Europe

In her new book A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe (Duke University Press, 2023) Andrea Muehlebach explores the struggles over water at the financial frontier. In this remarkable book she is able to combine in her analysis the highest and most abstract level of profit-making, i.e. financialization, while at the same time working from the bottom up, assessing the implications this has got on people’s everyday lives as well as revealing the continuing struggles against this predatory model of exploitation and expropriation. As she points out, ‘I am as an ethnographer most committed to historically grounded, contextually specific, often also nonlinear and surprising social struggles. I am thus more interested in attending to the granularities and specific genealogies of political protest’ (P.23). It is this granularity which especially sets her book apart from other recent publications in the area of water struggles. The reader can almost feel the atmosphere of heated debate, strong determination as well as utter frustration by those, who find themselves at the wrong end of the water industry.