scholarly journals How To Refuse Research from The Ruins of Its Own Production

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
Christian Ulrik Andersen ◽  
Geoff Cox
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Social Closeness ◽  
Queer Politics ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Labour Power

Writing in 1965, Mario Tronti’s claim was that the greatest power of the working class is refusal: the refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, and the refusal to bargain within a capitalist framework. One can see how this "strategy of refusal" has been utilised in all sorts of instances by social movements, but how does this play out now in the context of wider struggles over autonomy today – not just in terms of labour power and class struggles; but also intersectional feminism and queer politics; race and decolonialism, geopolitics, populism, environmental concerns; and the current pandemic? In what ways does a refusal of production manifest itself in contemporary artistic, political, social, cultural, or other movements? And, how might a refusal of certain forms of production come together with a politics of care and "social closeness" – also when thinking of how research itself might be refused?

Abdullah Quilliam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Legal Advisor ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

scholarly journals Riots, social movements and the “making of the working class”: forms of popular organization and urban protest in São Paulo (1945-1964)

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Marcos Virgílio da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Urban Protest ◽  
Rare Phenomena ◽  
Brazilian History

The present article investigates the expressions of popular demands and discontent within three forms of manifestation: riots, non-class-based “social movements”, and movements organized by the “working classes” or “workers”. By examining these different movements we expect to problematize the recurring literature surrounding these movements, which has often characterized them as being insufficient or incomplete, reactive and subordinate to higher authorities, thus being void of any transforming power. It is therefore hoped that this article may contribute to a debate that would seek to transcend the very frequently encountered viewpoint that popular protests have been sporadic, rare phenomena throughout Brazilian history.

An Ideology for Life?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dia Da Costa
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
And Performance

Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic creativity for neoliberal capitalism and Hindu nationalism, this chapter analyzes the historical, affective and political incitements and messy collaborations between ideological opposites. This middle-class troupe’s plays dedicated to working-class struggles confront the challenge and decimation of labor struggle through a life-long commitment to Marxian critique. Far from an ahistorical commitment, their ‘ideology for life’ responds to contemporary challenges, in part by memorializing the personal, subjective, and spatial deaths of ideal leaders and sites of worker struggle. Memorialization and nostalgia largely distances them from working-class lives, but it makes their politics and performance effective sites for contemporary constructions of progressive middle-classness in Delhi whilst generating an inadvertent embrace of creative economies discourse.

Contextualising Organised Labour in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the US

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Moody
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Union Leadership ◽  
The Us ◽  
Labour Power

AbstractWhile, as Marx argued, periods of expanded accumulation present the best conditions for increasing working-class living standards, the expansion that began in 1982 was based in large part on the rapidfallin the value of labour-power in the US. This recovery and rapid rise in the rate of surplus-value in the US was enabled by the collapse of union-resistance beginning in 1979 and the strategic choices made by union-leaders across the economy from that time on. The expansion was sustained in the 1980s by dramatic work-reorganisation, enabled by the embrace of labour-management cooperation-schemes by much of the trade-union leadership, and the restructuring of several major industries that undermined the industry-wide bargaining on which rising postwar incomes had been based. Productivity, boosted by lean production-methods, would continue to outstrip real wages up until the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 and resume again in the wake of a weak recovery in the US. The rapid geographic expansion of capital after 1990 provided new investment-possibilities, as did the explosion of financial instruments. What stands out, however, is that rising productivity, far from providing the basis for increases in working-class income, had become coupled with flat or declining real wages and a fall in the value of labour-power as the necessary condition to sustain almost any level of growth in the real economy. The link between productivity and wage-increases, central to Keynesian and institutional collective-bargaining theory, had been broken and Marx’s idea of the most favourable conditions stood on its head. The breaking of this link had, in the final analysis, been an outcome of class-struggle in which capital had the upper hand. All of this underlines the failed strategies and practices of most of the trade-union leadership in the US since 1979. New approaches to the workplace and broader forms of mobilisation will be needed. Signs of worker-resistance to the latest neoliberal clampdowns in Latin America, Europe, China, and even the US, however, may point to a renewed era of intensified class-struggle.

scholarly journals Workers-as-consumers: Rethinking the political economy of use-value and the reproduction of capital

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Mulcahy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
The Political ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Use Values ◽  
Continuous Reproduction ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Labour Power ◽  
Means Of Production

The relationship between the working class and consumer culture is undoubtedly contentious and often held as problematic in Marxist critical theory, owing to the exploitative nature of the mass production that facilitates consumption. Consequently, consumption sometimes appears as a distraction from the inequality perpetuated during the accumulation of capital, and thus as a social problem with normative undertones. As I reiterate in this article, however, workers are not simultaneously consumers because they have been inundated with consumer culture and advertising, but because they are separated from the means of production and must resort to exchange to reproduce their labour-power. As a result, they seek commodities as use-values, which is altogether different from a capitalist’s desire to realise exchange-value in the sale of commodities. This article is an attempt at examining the contradictions that arise in working-class interests in consumption, in order to illustrate why the act of consumption does not necessarily engender the continuous reproduction of capital, and thus of exploitation.

Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery R. Webber
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Political Development ◽  
The People ◽  
Analytical Imprecision ◽  
Urban Guerrillas ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Dual Power

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.

“Discovering Some New Race”: Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills” and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schocket
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
New Race ◽  
And Gender

Recent readings of Rebecca Harding Davis's landmark exploration of the emerging industrial working class have been concerned primarily with the connections between class formation and gender relations. By focusing attention instead on the text's indebtedness to various contemporaneous discourses of racial subjection (which crucially shape and delimit analyses of class and representations of labor during the late antebellum era), I argue that the transcendence, mobility, and salvation that the text allows its working-class characters are subtly but consistently aligned with an emerging racial conception of whiteness. Not only does this alignment link freedom with whiteness and exploitation with blackness, but through these disabling linkages it also establishes a literary precedent for representing (and Actively resolving) class struggles with racial language.

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