COP 27 – Surviving the Apocalypse: From ‘me’ to ‘we’.

Ultimately, it comes down to political will, when confronting the climate crisis. Instead of indulging in Elon Musk’s fantasies about life on Mars, we need to focus on solutions in the here and now on earth, argued Alan Simpson in his final TED talk on how to confront the climate crisis. What is required is a visionary space for nature and the necessary political will to enact it. Money is not the issue.

 

COP 27 – Greening Everything: Putting back more than we take out.

If we want to confront the climate crisis successfully, greening everything and here especially our cities is key, argued Alan Simpson in the fifth talk of his COP 27 series. Rather than paving over everything in our cities, which is often the cause of flooding, we need to enlarge our green spaces. 

Watch out Benjamin Zephaniah! International Relations Theory poetry.

With a view to engaging students through different teaching methods, Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton launched a poetry competition in 2011 on their core MA module "Theories and Concepts in International Relations". After all, Roland Bleiker has himself emphasised the role of the poetic image in challenging dominant modes of thinking and practice within International Relations. With that aim in mind and the permission by the author, I am happy to publish this winning poem by Zubeda Mir that may surely rival the social criticism of Benjamin Zephaniah!

COP 27 – ‘The 15-minute city’: connectivity as driver of carbon reduction.

We do have the necessary alternatives. What is missing are politicians with the necessary radical vision to put these alternatives into practice, declared Alan Simpson at the opening of his fourth talk on how to confront the climate crisis. At the heart of this talk was the question of how can we rethink transport and mobility to overcome our addiction to cars? Ultimately, improved local transport combined in a joined-up system with local energy generation and food production is the way forward.

COP 27 – Energy: Back to the Future, local democracy, public ownership and social inclusion.

In his third talk on the Climate Crisis, Alan Simpson tackled the issue of energy production and distribution in a shift away from fossil fuel and towards green energy. Importantly, this is not simply a technological question of new inventions. This is about how to organize socially the production and distribution of energy differently, challenging directly the private ownership of the big energy companies.

 

COP 27 – Feeding the Future

In his second talk on the Climate Crisis, Alan Simpson focused on how to ensure sufficient, sustainable production of food for the future. The global food production system, based on ‘free’ trade and tightly controlled by a few large transnational corporations, results in one-third of what we produce being wasted. At the same time, offloading our surpluses in developing countries destroys the local food production there. In short, the problem is not growing enough food, the problem is how to ensure that food is produced sustainably and locally reaching everybody.

 

Neoliberal strikes for the neoliberal university!

UCU has yet again called for industrial action of academics and Administrative, Professional & Managerial (APM) staff over drastic – and unjustified – cuts to pensions, eroded pay and deteriorating working conditions. Indeed, considering the more general cost of living crisis across the UK at the moment, the situation for action has become even more pressing now than it was a year ago. On last year’s experience, however, it is also clear that striking in the traditional way of everyone out does no longer work. At Nottingham University, management sat out easily 18 days of strike. Considering that learning objectives had not been damaged and students could not, therefore, reclaim some of their tuition fees, management was very relaxed. Only the marking boycott in May 2021 brought them suddenly to the negotiating table resulting in a local agreement (see UCU Nottingham University 2022). In this guest post, Faiz Sheikh outlines what an alternative approach to industrial action in the neoliberal university could look like, potentially overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional approach.

COP 27 – Avoiding the Apocalypse

There is currently no pathway in place to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, but it is still possible, maintained Alan Simpson at the opening of the first lecture of six on the global climate crisis, a series of TED Talks at Nottingham University. Nevertheless, if we do want to hit this target, everything has to change, including our way of thinking. The Radical is the only Reasonable! In this blog post, I provide a brief summary of the key points of this first lecture.

 

Rise UP, Notts! Organizing for Social Justice

On 3 September, about 100 local activists met in Nottingham/UK to discuss how to best organize in view of increasing injustices and global challenges. In nine panels and two plenaries, discussions ranged from how to meet the refugee crisis, the possibilities of trade unions in the 21^st century to the challenges of climate change and the crises in education and the National Health Service (NHS). The panel Outside Westminster also presented solutions, be it the charity Sharewear, a clothing scheme which offers free-of-charge clothing choices to people in economic difficulty, be it the Preston Model and its focus on local sourcing. In this blog post, I will make five observations in relation to current struggles over social justice.

Analyzing, Strategizing and Taking action: The European Summer University of Social Movements in Mönchengladbach.

From 17 to 21 August 2022, over 600 activists from more than 20 countries in Europe and beyond gathered in Mönchengladbach/Germany for the 2022 European Summer University of Social Movements, organized by Attac and other allied social movements. In dozens of Forums, workshops, excursions, exhibitions and film screenings participants analyzed the current crises in Europe and the wider world, strategized about how best to respond to these challenges and engaged in concrete actions of resistance culminating in a protest march in the coal mining area around Lützerath. In this blog post, I will provide some reflections on the summer university.   

Why public ownership is key: private water and the problems of sewage pollution and leaks.

Britain’s private water companies are yet again in the news. After reports on high and regular discharge of raw sewage into the country’s rivers (The Guardian, 31 March 2022), it is their high levels of water leakage, which make the headlines in the current drought. While 14 billion litres are the daily demand in England and Wales, another 3 billion litres are lost due to leaks (BBC, 12 August 2022). In this blog post, I will argue that the type of ownership is fundamental when thinking about how to tackle these problems.

Labour Conflicts in the Global South!

Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, the Global South has experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action, including in countries such as China, Brazil, India and South Africa, which had been hailed as the new growth engines of the global political economy as part of the so-called BRICS. In this blog post, I will introduce my recently published co-edited volume (together with Jörg Nowak) Labour Conflicts in the Global South (Routledge, 2022). 

Public Water Services in times of emergency: the case of the Covid19 outbreak.

The Covid19 outbreak has underlined once again the importance of basic services for human life, including water services. At the same time, it re-opened the debate on the role of the state in managing such services. How did public water operators react to the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic? The book Public Water and Covid-19: Dark Clouds and Silver Linings (Transnational Institute, 2021), edited by David McDonald, Susan Spronk and Daniel Chavez, provides some answer(s) to this question. In this guest post, Gemma Gasseau provides a critical review of the book’s key contributions.

Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe – first reviews

My book Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe (Zed Books, 2021) was published one year ago. From the successful referendum against water privatization in Italy, via the European Citizens’ Initiative on ‘Water and Sanitation are a Human Right’, to the struggles against water privatization in Greece and water charges in Ireland, I demonstrate why water has been a fruitful arena for resistance against neoliberal restructuring.

Since the publication, several reviews have been published, all available on the internet. This blog post brings them together.

Put Out More Flags! The Platinum Jubilee and the long arm of history.

70 years on the throne are truly remarkable. Unsurprisingly, people up and down the country poured into the streets to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II over four days from 2 to 5 June. Houses were decorated with Union Jacks and red-white-blue bunting, thousands of street parties organised across the country. While many of my left-wing British friends fled in horror either abroad or to some hidden place in the countryside to escape it all, I happily stayed back and joined in. After all, what can possibly be wrong with neighbourhoods coming together and celebrating jointly? This was not the moment to engage in critical discussions about unelected Heads of State or the virtues of Republics, I thought. It should not take long, however, before the darker undersides revealed themselves.

 

The Critique of Commodification: Moving towards a use-value society?

In his new book The Critique of Commodification – Contours of a Postcapitalist Society (OUP, 2021) Christoph Hermann critical investigates the concept of commodification and relates the associated dynamics to current political economy developments. Importantly, he demonstrates how production for profit instead of human needs results in enormously harmful consequences for humanity and nature alike. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the key contributions of this highly important book.

 

The Limits to Commercial Capitalism

In his latest book A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2020), Jairus Banaji provides a masterful overview of historical trading relationships in Europe. At the same time, this book also reveals once more the limits of an understanding of capitalism, focused on market exchange relations. In this blog post, I will provide a critical review drawing out the weaknesses of such an approach.

Capitalist expansion, the war in Ukraine and three decades of missed opportunities in Europe

There had been huge hopes for a peaceful, prosperous future in a united Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Three decades later, the war in Ukraine has brought these hopes to an end. In this post, I will argue that the seeds for the current crisis were sown right at the beginning of the post – Cold War period in the 1990s, when capitalist social relations of production were imposed on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) backed up by NATO military power.

 

Workers solidarity in the EU multilevel system: When and where can it occur?

Trade unions have the task to organise collectively and establish relations of solidarity amongst working people. And yet, they have often found it difficult to extend this solidarity across borders within the European Union (EU). In this blog post, I will argue that while the capitalist dynamics of Uneven and Combined Development (U&CD) make transnational solidarity often difficult, it is not impossible either. Especially if we expand our understanding of labour movements beyond trade unions and also include social movements such as environmental groups in our definition, then labour movements have on a number of occasions demonstrated their ability to defend the interest of society against capitalist exploitation. Most notably, I will refer to the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Water and Sanitation are a Human Right’ as well as the resistance against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Engaging the Imperial Mode of Living

In their powerful book The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (Verso, 2021), Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen demonstrate how our life in the capitalist centres and its dominant forms of production, distribution and consumption can only be maintained, because the related social and ecological costs are externalised to other parts of the world. Published originally in German in 2017, this volume is now also available to the English reading audience. In this blog post, I will draw out some of the authors’ crucial findings.