Low Pay at the University of Nottingham – the students’ perspective.

In the morning of 14 November, the Living Wage/Anti-casualisation campaign at Nottingham University held a big ‘clean-in’ protest in the courtyard of the main University building (Nottingham Post, 14 November 2017). The broad alliance of campus trade unions, student societies, Students’ Union officers and Nottingham Citizens called ‘on the new Vice Chancellor, Shearer West, to “do the right thing” and commit the university to paying all its staff, including cleaners and other low paid workers, the Living Wage’ (Andrea Oates, Ceasefire, 15 November 2017). In this blog post, I will present several of the speeches by students, supporting the campaign.

Out of the Wreckage – George Monbiot on a new politics in an age of crisis.

At a launch of his new book Out of the Wreckage, jointly organised by the Five Leaves Bookshop and the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at Nottingham University, George Monbiot reflected on the possibilities for a new politics in an age of crisis. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the points he made during his presentation.

Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting Neoliberal Europe.

Despite increasing inequality and social deprivation in Europe since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007-8, right-wing parties, such as the French Front National and the German Alternative for Deutschland, have benefited the most in recent elections. Does the electoral failure of the Left indicate that there is no progressive resistance against austerity and neo-liberal restructuring in Europe? Not so say the authors of Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting (the Critical Political Economy of) Neoliberal Europe. In this blog post Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton provide a critical review of the book and some pointers as to wider debates that it may inform.

Modes of Production and Forms of Exploitation: Understanding Capitalism.

In his remarkable collection of essays Theory As History (Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), Jairus Banaji makes two significant claims about how to conceptualise capitalism and our historical understanding of it. First, capitalism as a mode of production cannot be reduced to the specific form of exploitation around wage labour; and second, understood more broadly, capitalism also needs to include the period of ‘commercial capitalism’, pioneered by Islam in the Mediterranean area as early as the eighth century AD. In this blogpost, I will critically engage with these claims.

Corbyn and the winds of change – politics of the new centre ground

While US President Trump has lent his ears to climate change deniers, huge storms of unknown ferocity have caused widespread havoc in the Caribbean and parts of the USA. In this guest post, Alan Simpson calls for a new economic model that reconnects people to planet and weather to climate. What is required, he argues, is a fundamental rethink of markets, ecosystems, inclusion, security, interdependency and accountability.

Resisting water privatisation in Greece and Portugal

In response to the Eurozone crisis, austerity and restructuring has been imposed on the European Union’s (EU) peripheral member states in order to receive financial bailout loans. And yet, workers have not simply accepted these restructuring pressures. They have organised and fought back against austerity and enforced privatisation. In the article ‘Commodification and “the commons”: The politics of privatising public water in Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone Crisis’, published in the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) and freely available at Nottingham eprints, Jamie Jordan and I comparatively assess the struggles against enforced water privatisation in Greece and Portugal set against the background of the structuring conditions surrounding the Eurozone crisis.

Norwegian elections 2017: Another right-wing victory - and a serious Labour defeat.

For many decades post-1945 Norway was governed by the social democratic Labour Party. It was credited with the establishment of the so-called Nordic model, characterised by an expansive welfare state, comparatively high living standards and low inequality within society. And yet, not only did an alliance led by the Labour Party lose general elections in 2013, now four years later it failed to defeat a right-wing government. The Norwegian Labour Party has to prepare itself for a prolonged period in opposition. In this guest post Asbjørn Wahl analyses the underlying dynamics of the recent elections and assesses the opportunities and problems for social democracy in Norway and beyond.