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.

 

Business as usual: on re-establishing ‘order’ in British politics.

There is a sense of excitement in the current reporting on developments in British politics. The Labour Party is leading in opinion polls vis-à-vis the Conservative government (politics.co.uk, 22 December 2021), a big back bench rebellion against the Prime Minister Boris Johnson over Covid measures adds to the tensions (The Guardian, 14 December 2021), and then a massive swing in a byelection results in a new Liberal MP (The Guardian, 17 December 2021). Earlier, the media reported positively on Labour Party Keir Starmer’s re-shuffling of his shadow cabinet, who has ‘chosen shadow ministers for their perceived ability’ (Peston, 29 November 2021). Apparent disagreements between Starmer and the deputy party leader Angela Rayner provide further excitement (Kuenssberg, 29 November 2021). The message is clear, we are back to business as usual. 

Staff working conditions are student learning conditions – more than just a slogan!

Yet again, staff at universities across the UK are out on strike to defend their working conditions and pensions. Unsurprisingly, university management tries to pit students against staff. Students, however, are not falling for this. They realise that drastic cuts to staff pay and working conditions is mirrored in a deterioration in student learning conditions especially since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis.

 

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.

 

Our History is the Future: On Indigenous peoples' central role in overcoming capitalism!

In the autumn of 2016, a large alliance of Indigenous peoples and their non-Indigenous supporters blocked the path of yet another oil pipeline in North America, the Dakota Access Pipeline. At Standing Rock, people opposed the fossil fuel industry and protected water as the essential source of life. It is this moment of contestation, which is at the heart of Nick Estes' book Our History is the Future (Verso, 2019). In this blog post, I will outline several of Estes' key contributions.

 

Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender?

A sweep through key arguments about the abstracting logic of capital will yield a common emphasis, which is a stress on the “indifference” of capital to those it exploits. For sure this is evident in some of Marx’s own writings. Witness points in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts on how capital stands in an indifferent relationship to labour, with the latter existing as ‘liberated capital’. Or, equally, Marx’s more sophisticated point in Grundrisse that ‘since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance’ then ‘the labour which confronts it likewise subjectively has the same totality and abstraction in itself’.

 

More widely, though, this emphasis crops up in the writings of others, such as Moishe Postone, William Clare Roberts, or Martha Giménez. At first blush it may seem reasonable to contend at an abstract level that capitalism is “indifferent” to the social identities of the people it exploits. But does adhering to this form of abstraction result in a flawed theory of labour and social mediation under capitalism? As Doreen Massey reminds us, is there an abstracting logic here that fails to recognise that the world is not simply the product of the requirements of capital? Adam D. Morton and I pursue these questions (and more) in our latest article in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space through an engagement with debates in Marxist Feminist social reproduction theory.