The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.

Monday 11 March 2024

The New Age of Catastrophe: Reviewing Alex Callinicos’ latest book.

With The New Age of Catastrophe
(Polity Press, 2023) Alex Callinicos has published another impressive book of great historical and thematic breadth and depth. In this blog post, I will briefly review this volume, outline its merits but also identify a couple of especially conceptual shortcomings.

Wednesday 14 February 2024

Kai Wiedenhöfer, 3. März 1966 - 9. Januar 2024!


Fotografie war Kais Leben. Es begann damit, dass er die Portraits aller Schülerinnen und Schüler für die Abschlusszeitung unseres Abiturjahrganges 1986 am Ludwig-Uhland Gymnasium in Kirchheim unter Teck aufnahm. Ab da gab es kein Zurück mehr.

Wednesday 6 December 2023

Contesting Musk: Swedish Tesla strike becomes a global conflict

What began as a local strike by 130 mechanics for a collective labour agreement (CLA) in the Swedish Tesla service workshops is escalating into a global conflict, argues Roland Erne in this guest post. According to the Swedish arbitrator for labour disputes, Tesla boss Elon Musk forbade his local managers to make any concessions to the trade unions, even though CLAs have been a central component in Swedish labour relations for decades. Clearly, Elon Musk feels infinitely powerful and thinks he can bring even Europe's strongest labour unions to their knees. 


Monday 4 December 2023

Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value: a review of the book by Carchedi and Roberts.

Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts are seasoned commentators on the changing fortunes of capitalism. In their latest, joint book Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value (Pluto Press, 2023), they bring these insights together and assess them through Marx’s theory of value and here especially the tendency of the falling rate of profit. In this blog post, I will discuss their main contributions as well as provide some critical reflections. 

Friday 24 November 2023

Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21st century?

Against a back-ground of global economic crisis and heightened geo-political confron-tations, the inter-national labour movement has remained as important as ever for the defence of working people and wider society. And yet international organised labour is also in crisis. In my article ‘
Confronting exploitation: What labour movement for the 21st century’, published in the journal International Union Rights, I argue that we need to go beyond a narrow focus on trade unions as the privileged agent of workers’ interests and understand ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’ more broadly for successful resistance against capitalist exploitation.

 

Monday 9 October 2023

Waging war on staff: The narrative of a defeat.

When the end of the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) was announced on 6 September, it was finally clear that the University and College Union (UCU) had lost the struggle of the Four Fights over Pay, Workload, Pay Gaps and Casualisation. Despite 15 days of strike action across the academic year 2022/2023 as well as the MAB lasting from 20 April to 6 September, employers represented by the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) had not budged. Despite widespread disruption to graduations in the summer with many students either not graduating or graduating with ‘derived’, i.e. ‘guestimated’ marks, employers refused steadfast to negotiate especially over pay. A derisory below inflation proposal was presented as the best possible offer the sector could afford. Having lost large amounts of salary during the struggle, staff had to return to work and mark scripts, for which they had already had pay deducted due to the MAB. In this post, I will explore the causes of the defeat and reflect on the implications for the sector.

 

Saturday 30 September 2023

Can Global Capitalism Endure? A review of William Robinson’s latest book.

For some time, William I. Robinson has been one of the most adept observers of, and commentators on, global structural change. In his latest book Can Global Capitalism Endure? (Clarity Press, 2022), he analyses the current crisis of overaccumulation as a result of the tendence of the falling rate of profit. Most dangerously, in capital’s ever more desperate search for profitable investment opportunities, global economic crisis is spilling over into geo-political confrontation. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the book’s key contributions.