Workers and the World: some reflections on the book by Lorenzo Feltrin.

On their own, Lorenzo Feltrin is clear, workplace struggles and community-centred organising are too week to challenge capitalist exploitation and ecological destruction. However, how can they be brought together? This is the central question Feltrin pursues in his fascinating book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2026). In this conceptually and empirically impressive analysis, Feltrin explores four case studies, Grangemouth/UK and Porto Marghera/Italy in the Global North, Kerkennah/Tunisia and Quintero-Puchuncavi/Chile in the Global South. In this blog post, I will highlight some of Feltrin’s key contributions and raise a couple of critical points for further thought.  

The People’s Emergency Briefing – A missed opportunity!

Across the UK, the People’s Emergency Briefing is currently being screened to large audiences. It is intended as a wake-up call just in time to turn things around before the full climate catastrophe becomes irreversible. This summer’s drought if anything demonstrates the urgency. The goggle box style presentation format may not be to the taste of everyone, but the warning of current and future disasters hits home well. These developments have been known for some time, but the film achieves its goal of ensuring that wider sections of society are confronted with the looming reality. In the end, however, the documentary is a complete let-down when it comes to potential solutions and ways forward. In this post, I want to highlight four key shortcomings.

 

Switzerland Votes Down a Xenophobic Initiative — Thanks to the Unions!

On 14 June 2026, Swiss voters went to the polls on a xenophobic popular initiative bearing the title “No to a Switzerland with 10 million! (Sustainability Initiative)”. In this guest post, Roland Erne argues that 55 per cent of voters rejected the constitutional initiative put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), partly thanks to a trade-union campaign spanning several decades.

 

Germany – The Genocidal State!

In an online seminar on 5 March 2026, the Palestinian academic Abdaljawad Omar reflected on several universal insights, which have come to light as a result of the ongoing Genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. His second universal insight focused on a truth, which has always been there, but has only now come to light for everybody to see. Israel's brutality against the Palestinian people has, of course, always been there at least since the Nakba in 1948. It is now that it is openly permitted to act like a monster, attacking indiscriminately schools, hospitals, universities and locations of worship. However, it is not only permitted by the international order to carry out these heinous acts considered by organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to constitute genocide. Israel is actually supported by Western countries. The liberal order committed to universal human rights has always only been partial. What many observers always knew can no longer be denied. While the liberal order pretends, the authoritarian order underneath the liberal mask does not. In view of the ongoing genocide, pretending is no longer possible. The mask has been removed and while the language remains the same, is still the language of the mask, everybody can now see through it. What does this imply for Germany and its continuing support of Israel?

 

Divisions in the Core of Global Capitalism? Italian Labour and ‘Free Trade’

The global labour movement has been divided over ‘free trade’. Many unions in the Global North, especially in export-oriented sectors, supported such agreements to secure markets and jobs, while unions in the Global South opposed them having experienced job losses and deindustrialisation. In my new article, ‘Divisions in the Core of Global Capitalism? Italian Labour and “Free Trade”’, published in the journal New Political Economy, I demonstrate that a split has opened up in the core of global capitalism. Against the background of drastic deindustrialisation, Italian trade unions have moved to an explicit anti – ‘free trade’ position, while especially the export sector German and Scandinavian trade unions continue their support. 

 

Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis

Over the last two decades, the European Union (EU) has faced a series of intertwined crises, including the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the EU and the IMF on several member states; the increase of flows of refugees triggered by war and famines and the humanitarian disaster caused by Fortress Europe; Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism. In turn, new crises have emerged and further intensified the previous ones: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the impending climate catastrophe. To capture the multiple, interrelated, and self-reinforcing characters of the crises affecting global capitalism and European integration, the term ‘polycrisis’ – originally coined by the French complex theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – has become increasingly popular, both among scholars and European elites alike (Tooze, 2022). As we argue in our recently published co-edited volume, Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis (Edward Elgar, 2025), Critical Political Economy (CPE) is well placed to contribute to this debate. In this blog post, we will outline the purpose underpinning this volume and present some of the key findings.

Social and Environmental Upgrading through Global Value Chains? A review of the book by Selwyn and Bernhold.

In Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold provide a powerful critique of the mainstream global value chain (GVC) literature in its various versions. In particular, they criticise their emphasis on the possibilities of social and environmental upgrading through an expansion of GVCs. Instead, they convincingly argue that capitalist value chains (CVCs) intensify the exploitation of workers and the environment alike.  In this review, I will highlight some key contributions of the volume while raising a couple of conceptual and empirical concerns.

 

Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry

Polycrisis has become a widely used concept. Politicians, public intellectuals and academics alike are drawing on it when describing our current global situation. In my article ‘Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry’, recently published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, I explore how we can distinguish between fundamental crises on one hand, and crises, which are simply the concrete manifestations of those deeper, structural crises on the other. In this blog post, I summarise the main conceptual and empirical findings of the article.

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism: Review of William I. Robinson’s latest book.

In his latest book Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (CUP, 2025), William I. Robinson provides a masterful analysis of the current crisis engulfing global capitalism. Robinson is clearly one of the best contemporary Marxist thinkers when it comes to investigating the current dynamics tearing capitalism apart. In this blog post, I will highlight some of his major contributions while also point to some of the blind spots in his analysis.

 

EU Court Upholds Minimum Wage Directive in Victory for Social Europe

‘The Court of Justice of the European Union has delivered a landmark verdict on the EU Minimum Wage Directive that I would characterise as “Social Europe 2, Liberal Europe 1”.’ In this guest post, Roland Erne argues that this ruling represents another example of an unintended yet politically motivated “spillover” of policymaking powers to the EU level—one that ironically stems from employers’ own strategic miscalculations during the financial crisis.

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Review of Kevin B. Anderson’s latest book.

In his recent book The Late Marx’s Revo-lutionary Roads (Verso, 2025), Kevin B. Anderson reveals Marx as a flexible, inquisitive thinker, who is constantly striving to analyse new avenues of revolutionary possi-bilities, unafraid to revise earlier held, firm believes. He thus builds on his previous work Marx at the Margins, in which he had established Marx’s rejection of a unilinear understanding of historical development. In this blog post, I will highlight some of the key contributions of Anderson’s latest volume.

 

On the storm to come: Right-wing extremism moving centre-stage in British politics.

‘We Want Our Country Back’ – On Saturday, 6 September, the third Saturday in a row, English nationalists draped in union jack and St George flags protested noisily outside the Best Western Hotel in Long Eaton, where many asylum seekers have been housed. Shouts of ‘Stop the Boats’ were combined with anti-trans, anti-Palestine and anti-left slogans, intermixed with direct personal attacks on migrant supporting counter-protesters, taking up position on the other side of the road in front of the hotel itself. In this blog post, I will discuss why these developments mark a dangerous turn in British politics.

 

Politicising Commodification: book review of Erne et al

In their major monograph Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Roland Erne, Sabina Stan, Darragh Golden, Imre Szabó and Vincenzo Maccarrone provide a masterful study of the main policy drive underpinning the European political economy since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In this blog post, I will outline the main theoretical and empirical contributions as well as provide some critical reflections.

 

Confronting the Far Right – Contesting the Reform Party!

In recent local elections on 1 May, the Reform Party of Nigel Farage made huge electoral gains winning hundreds of council seats and overall control of 10 councils. It also won the mayoralty in Greater Lincolnshire as well as an additional MP in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election (BBC, 2 May 2025). In response, the Labour Party government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer published an immigration white paper, toughening conditions on migration. In his ‘island of strangers’ speech (Gov.uk, 12 May 2025), Starmer near-echoed the Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell of 1968 (Guardian, 13 May 2025). The travel of direction is clear. To regain voters, the Labour Party tries to outdo Reform on their anti-migration territory. The country as a whole is shifted to the right as a result.

Nevertheless, how should we confront the rise of the Reform Party from a progressive position?

Facilitating genocide – the UK’s role in the Middle East

In December 2024, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK parliament invited contributions to an enquiry about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this guest post, Andreas Wittel publishes his response to that enquiry, highlighting the UK’s deep complicity in the ongoing genocide by Israel of the Palestinian people.

 

The EU Minimum Wage Directive: To Be or Not to Be?

The year began dramatically for Social Europe. On 14 January, Nicholas Emiliou, one of the European Union’s Advocates General, advised the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to annul the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive (AMWD). His opinion supported an action for annulment brought by the Kingdom of Denmark against the European Parliament and the Council, arguing that the AMWD would undermine the rights of national social partners and breach the principle of conferral of powers. In this guest post, Roland Erne discusses these developments.

The Betrayal of Ukraine

When the betrayal came, it was swift and brutal. Donald Trump, having barely started his second presidency, phoned up Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, on Wednesday 12 February and paved the way towards negotiations to end the war without consulting Ukraine itself (BBC, 13 February 2025). When only a week later, high-ranking delegations of both countries including Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met in Riyadh/Saudi Arabia for extensive discussions, no Ukrainian representative was at the table (BBC, 18 February 2025). At the same time, ‘White House officials told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US’ (The Guardian, 20 February 2025). This was presented as a way to pay back all the assistance the US had provided over the course of the war.

The public humiliation of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting in the White House was the final confirmation that the US had dropped its support for Ukraine. Denounced by many European leaders and commentators for what it is, a betrayal, this was not, however, the first betrayal of Ukraine. The country has been betrayed by the West on several occasions before, leaving it now in a perilous situation. In this blog post, I will discuss previous moments of betrayal taking a much longer historical perspective.

The Holocaust, Gaza and lessons from history: Genocide runs deep in German society!

Germany prides itself for the way the country has owned up to past atrocities of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 and here in particular the Holocaust, in which six million Jews but also Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and disabled people were murdered. The Holocaust represents ultimate evil, and its teaching became mandatory from the 1970s, 1980s onwards. In this blog post, I will reflect on Germany’s and the Germans’ attempts to atone for the Holocaust in particular in relation to the country’s support for Israel, drawing also on my own experiences in the German school system.

 

What political economy approach for the 21st century?

In my latest open access article Confronting Multiple Global Crises: a political economy approach for the 21^st century, published in the journal Globalizations, I discuss the essential features of a political economy approach, which facilitates the conceptualisation of the internal relations between the current, multiple global crises including a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology.

 

Beyond Intersectional Political Economy

Adam D. Morton's and my latest article, entitled ‘The Dialectical Matrix of Class, Gender, Race’ published in Environment and Planning F, goes beyond intersectional studies on the themes of class, gender, and race to assert Marxist dialectics in the analysis of capitalist, patriarchal, and racial forms of oppression. Understanding the ways in which these forms are internally related is of utmost importance, considering heightened global tensions within the polycrisis reflected in the conditions characteristic of genocide in Gaza; or the wider global femicide; or the intensifying crisis of global capitalism.