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.  

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.

 

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.

 

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 21^st 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.

 

Organizing Amazon and the platform economy (trans)nationally

In this guest post Sarrah Kassem outlines key arguments of her recent book Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization, in which she dives into two of Amazon’s platforms: its e-commerce platform of Amazon.com and its digital labor platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). These two platforms essentially organize workers in different ways. While the former pays workers a traditional time wage and concentrates workers within a single location, the latter pays workers, who labor from behind their screens, through gig wages. MTurk workers join therefore other workers in the gig economy. By taking a closer look at these two Amazon platforms, their (digital) shopfloor and relations of alienation and exploitation, we can then grasp the different ways by which workers form solidarity (trans)nationally and the diverse ways by which they come to organize themselves, traditionally and alternatively

 

Conceptualising struggles over water grabbing!

Capital has identified water as an important opportunity for profitable investment. Whether it is the privatisation of public water infrastructure, the expansion of the bottled water industry, the construction of dams for energy generation or the free expropriation of water for mineral extractivism or large-scale agriculture, private capital has poured into water in large quantities. And yet, water is also an area where resistance to capitalist exploitation has been most successful as reflected in a wave of re-municipalizations of water services across the world (Kishimoto,  Lobina and Petitjean 2015). How can we make sense of these struggles against water commodification? In our recent article Water Grabbing, Capitalist Accumulation and Resistance in the Global Labour Journal, we develop a conceptual-methodological approach to this question.

 

Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis - new book review

Just over four years ago, Adam D. Morton and I published our book Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (CUP, 2018). In this book, we assess the forces of social struggle shaping the past and present of the global political economy from the perspective of historical materialism. We unravel the internal relations between global capitalism, global war and global crisis, an endeavour which has become even more important now considering ongoing capitalist crisis and the heightened geo-political conflict reflected in the war in Ukraine. 

In this guest post, Pedro Nunes reflects on some of the key contributions of this book as well as further necessary work beyond it.  

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.

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). 

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.

 

Nothing to Lose but our Chains: reflecting on workers’ key role in resisting capitalist exploitation.

There is widespread pessimism about workers’ potential to take successful industrial action in the UK today. Structural transformation from manufacturing into services and increasing precarisation would make resistance almost impossible. Not so writes Jane Hardy in her fascinating new book Nothing to lose but our chains: Work & Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2021). Workers continue to organise and challenge capitalist exploitation. There are no 'no go' areas for trade unions. In this post, I will review the key contributions and major claims made by Hardy.

 

Labour Conflicts in the Global South

Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, we have experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action throughout the Global South, 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 a new special issue of the journal Globalizations, dedicated to unravelling the underlying dynamics of these moments of contestation.

An emerging global working class? Critical reflections on Ronaldo Munck’s Rethinking Global Labour.

In Rethinking Global Labour (Agenda Publishing, 2018), Ronaldo Munck has produced an important contribution to ongoing analyses of the potential role of global labour in shaping the global political economy and resisting capitalist exploitation. In this review, while appreciating Munck’s empirical insights, I will nonetheless be rather critical of the underlying conceptual assumptions, which ultimately limit the impact of his findings.

The cartographies of Baltic labour resistance

The conjuncture between the thirtieth anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR is an apt occasion to revisit the trajectories of change in the post-Soviet space. In their article ‘Baltic Labour in the Crucible of Capitalist Exploitation: Reassessing “Post-Communist” Transformation’, recently published in the Economic and Labour Relations Review, Andreas Bieler and Jokubas Salyga assess ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic countries from the perspective of labour. The authors argue that the uneven and combined unfolding of 'post-communist' transformation has subjected Baltic labour to doubly constituted exploitation processes. First, workers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have suffered from the extreme neo-liberal restructuring of economic and employment relations at home. Second, migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in general, trying to escape exploitation at home, have faced another set of exploitative dynamics in host countries in Western Europe such as the UK. Nevertheless, workers have continued to challenge exploitation in Central and Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, and have been active in extending networks of transnational solidarity across the continent.

Capitalism and its response to crises: Who pays?

The global economy is yet again under severe pressure. While it was the global financial market crisis, which shook the global economy to its core in 2007/2008, it is now the coronavirus, which has increasingly undermined capitalist accumulation. With countries forced to implement strong control measures, closing their borders and asking people to stay at home, the global economy based on production in global value chains is more and more under pressure. Job losses in the airlines industry are likely to be only the first signs of rising unemployment with the whole travel industry under immediate pressure. As in 2007/2008, governments are committed to investing large amounts of money in order to keep the economy afloat for the benefit of everyone, as they argue. Nevertheless, what can we learn from the experience of more than ten years ago?

Photo by Sergio Santos

Globalization and Labour in the 21st century: Reflections on Verity Burgmann.

Verity Burgmann has produced an excellent, broad coverage of different instances of resistance by labour movements from around the world in her book Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2016). It includes accounts of occupied factories in Argentina, opposition to privatisation of oil facilities in Iraq, as well as anti-austerity struggles in Greece amongst many others. It covers private industries as well as public sectors and explores the potential of new social media for resistance. In this blog post, I will provide some critical reflections on this major account of labour movements' potential role in the 21^st century.  

Talking about Resistance – inside Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Photo by gaby_bra

From 3 to 10 December, I visited Sao Paulo/Brazil for several lectures and also had the opportunity to speak to representatives of the local metalworkers’ trade union as well as the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF) of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), outside the city. In this blog post, I will reflect on comrades’ perceptions about how the rise of the right in Brazil around Bolsonaro can be contested and what the future may hold for radical social movements. 

The Climate Struggle – a Struggle for Social Power!

Photo by Karlis Dambrans

Humanity is currently faced with a number of deep and challenging crises: economic, social, political, over food – and, of course, over climate change, which is threatening the very existence of millions of people. These crises have many of the same root causes, going to the core of our economic system. Both the economic crisis and the climate crisis are thus embedded parts of the capitalist economy. A system which is geared toward making profits rather than producing use values; dependent on economic growth (capitalism without growth is capitalism in crisis); a system exploiting workers and over-exploiting natural resources – one that is also about to destroy planet earth as a place to live for future generations.

In this guest post, Asbjørn Wahl reflects on how this multiplicity of crises does not only represent a threat, but also an opportunity. It can contribute to strengthening the mobilisation of social forces needed to break the current trend – in favour of a democratic and planned development of society.