Monday 11 March 2024
The New Age of Catastrophe: Reviewing Alex Callinicos’ latest book.
With The New Age of Catastrophe
(Polity Press, 2023) Alex Callinicos has published another impressive book of
great historical and thematic breadth and depth. In this blog post, I will
briefly review this volume, outline its merits but also identify a couple of
especially conceptual shortcomings.
Wednesday 14 February 2024
Kai Wiedenhöfer, 3. März 1966 - 9. Januar 2024!
Fotografie war Kais Leben. Es begann damit, dass er die Portraits aller Schülerinnen
und Schüler für die Abschlusszeitung unseres Abiturjahrganges 1986 am
Ludwig-Uhland Gymnasium in Kirchheim unter Teck aufnahm. Ab da gab es kein Zurück
mehr.
Wednesday 6 December 2023
Contesting Musk: Swedish Tesla strike becomes a global conflict
What began as a local strike by 130 mechanics for a
collective labour agreement (CLA) in the Swedish Tesla service workshops is
escalating into a global conflict, argues Roland Erne in this guest post.
According to the Swedish arbitrator for labour disputes, Tesla boss Elon Musk
forbade his local managers to make any concessions to the trade unions, even
though CLAs have been a central component in Swedish labour relations for
decades. Clearly, Elon Musk feels infinitely powerful and thinks he can bring
even Europe's strongest labour unions to their knees.
Monday 4 December 2023
Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value: a review of the book by Carchedi and Roberts.
Guglielmo
Carchedi and Michael Roberts are seasoned commentators on the changing fortunes
of capitalism. In their latest, joint book Capitalism in the
Twenty-first Century through the Prism of Value (Pluto Press,
2023), they bring these insights together and assess them through Marx’s theory
of value and here especially the tendency of the falling rate of profit. In
this blog post, I will discuss their main contributions as well as provide some
critical reflections.
Friday 24 November 2023
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
21st 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.
Monday 9 October 2023
Waging war on staff: The narrative of a defeat.
When
the end of the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) was announced on 6
September, it was finally clear that the University and College Union (UCU) had
lost the struggle of the Four Fights over Pay, Workload, Pay Gaps and
Casualisation. Despite 15 days of strike action across the academic year
2022/2023 as well as the MAB lasting from 20 April to 6 September, employers
represented by the Universities and Colleges Employers
Association (UCEA) had not budged. Despite widespread
disruption to graduations in the summer with many students either not
graduating or graduating with ‘derived’, i.e. ‘guestimated’ marks, employers refused
steadfast to negotiate especially over pay. A derisory below inflation proposal
was presented as the best possible offer the sector could afford. Having lost
large amounts of salary during the struggle, staff had to return to work and
mark scripts, for which they had already had pay deducted due to the MAB. In
this post, I will explore the causes of the defeat and reflect on the implications
for the sector.
Saturday 30 September 2023
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)