Can Global Capitalism Endure? A review of William Robinson’s latest book.

For some time, William I. Robinson has been one of the most adept observers of, and commentators on, global structural change. In his latest book Can Global Capitalism Endure? (Clarity Press, 2022), he analyses the current crisis of overaccumulation as a result of the tendence of the falling rate of profit. Most dangerously, in capital’s ever more desperate search for profitable investment opportunities, global economic crisis is spilling over into geo-political confrontation. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the book’s key contributions.

Cementing neo-colonial relations: the EU – Mercosur ‘free’ trade deal.

'EU and Mercosur leaders ignore the voice of the people to push forward with toxic deal’ declared the Stop EU – Mercosur campaign alliance, a coalition of more than 450 organisations from Latin America and Europe, including trade unions, farmers organisations, social movements, animal activists and environmentalists. The alliance held a two-day meeting in Brussels on 17 and 18 July in parallel to the summit of EU leaders and leaders from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), at which a conclusion of the highly controversial EU – Mercosur ‘free’ trade agreement was also discussed.

 

Around 80 representatives of Stop EU – Mercosur members from Latin America and Europe gathered in Brussels to discuss the problems with the proposed treaty, explore alternatives as well as co-ordinate their strategies to stop that treaty from being concluded, ratified and implemented. In this blog post, I will summarise my observations.

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.

 

Fighting today’s battles with yesterday’s strategies? On the romanticism of the picket line!

Since 2018, UCU has been in almost permanent industrial action over cuts to pensions, pay and working conditions including more than 60 days of strike by now. Currently action is paused to provide room for 'meaningful negotiations', but we are yet in another ballot to extend the dispute for a further six months including a potential marking and assessment boycott in the summer. Key to any action has been the sanctity of the picket line. All-out strikes are supposed to be all-out strikes. However, is this still the right strategy at this point in time? In this blog post, I use the moment of pause in industrial action to reflect on our approach. I will argue that we need to rethink our strategy drastically and emphasise impact on our employer over purity of action. The way the neo-liberal University works has changed, and we need to adjust our tactics accordingly.

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.  

COP 27 – Surviving the Apocalypse: From ‘me’ to ‘we’.

Ultimately, it comes down to political will, when confronting the climate crisis. Instead of indulging in Elon Musk’s fantasies about life on Mars, we need to focus on solutions in the here and now on earth, argued Alan Simpson in his final TED talk on how to confront the climate crisis. What is required is a visionary space for nature and the necessary political will to enact it. Money is not the issue.