The Future of the Left – Where next for Britain’s labour movement?

‘The Conservatives are not invincible – splits over the forthcoming EU referendum and their small majority in parliament are only two signs of their weakness. Together, the Left can stem the tide of austerity’, these were the words of the TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady. In front of a full lecture theatre with 300 people, she delivered the first Ken Coates memorial lecture, organised by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) and the local University and College Union (UCU) association. In this post, I will draw out some of her key points.

Chinese labour in the global economy – What do we know?

From October 2011 to September 2014, we worked on the project Chinese labour in the global economy, supported by an ESRC research grant (RES-062-23-2777, £275k). Throughout this period, Chun-Yi Lee carried out a number of field research trips to China in order to interview workers, labour academics and representatives of informal labour NGOs. We organised a related panel at the World Congress of the International Sociological Association in Yokohama/Japan in July 2014 and held an international workshop at Nottingham University in September 2014. In this post, we provide an overview of the main findings of the project.

The ‘wonderful freedom’ of neo-liberalism!

We are living in truly wonderful times. Finally, we can choose freely our personal lifestyles without having to fear being excluded from general society. Gender, different ethnic backgrounds, different identities no longer matter in our neo-liberal society. Everybody has the opportunity through the quality of his/her work to achieve their full potential and creative capacity. We can be homosexual or heterosexual, this does no longer matter in the public sphere. Same sex marriages are increasingly a standard possibility, same sex couples can have children together. Life is full of choices, which schools do we send our children to, state, religious or private, whatever choice we make, it is possible. In which hospital do I want to be treated? Everything is about consumer choice. Are we not living in truly wonderful times? And yet, while the possibility of these different lifestyles is clearly a positive step forward, at closer sight more sinister dynamics come to the fore.

Crucible of Resistance: Class struggle over ways out of the crisis.

Many commentators make Greece and other peripheral EU members responsible for the sovereign debt crisis. People in these countries would have lived above their means and it was only right that they should tighten their belts now, the argument goes. Having postponed the necessary restructuring for too long, austerity would be the only solution to enforce liberalization and deregulation from the outside. In their impressive book Crucible of Resistance: Greece, the Eurozone and the World EconomicCrisis (Pluto Press, 2013), Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos challenge these understandings and reveal the class dynamics underlying the crisis. In this blog post, I will provide a critical review of this book including also a discussion of potential ways out of the crisis. I will argue, in contrast to Laskos and Tsakalotos, that successful resistance may well start at the Greek, national level rather than the European level.  

Why socialism can be nothing else than ‘real’: Lessons from ‘really existing socialism’ – Part II.

In Part I of this essay, we have seen some of the oppositions used in thinking about socialist economies (static vs. dynamic, closed vs. open economies, plan vs. market coordination). In this second part, I will deal with some of the premises on which thinking about the social consequences of socialist economies is based. I will look more particularly at the role of consumerist desires and informal networks of relations as a way to challenge how we think about both socialism and capitalism today.