Thursday, 5 June 2014
Analysing exploitation and resistance: the centrality of class struggle.
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Resisting austerity in Greece: The Thessaloniki water referendum.
In this
guest post, written on request, Jan Willem Goudriaan, Deputy General Secretary
of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), updates the
experience with the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) on the Human Right to
Water. Based on a discussion of the struggles over water privatisation in
Thessaloniki/Greece, he assesses how the ECI has been linked with local
struggles and demands for an alternative Europe (for the earlier post see European Citizens’
Initiative on Water and the alternative to Austerity Europe).
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
The perpetuum mobile of privatisation
Privatisation is a truly fantastic thing. Privatising public services
would result in four benign consequences, we are told: (1) the production of
services becomes more efficient and, therefore, cheaper; (2) the quality of the
services is improved; (3) the cost of services for the consumer is reduced; and
(4) companies providing these services can still make a profit. And this all as
a result of private services being subject to the competitive pressures of the
free market. Like a perpetuum mobile, a hypothetical machine which continues to function once activated,
privatization would have an inevitable and continuing positive impact once
implemented. In this post, I will critically evaluate these claims
against the background of my research on the Italian water movement against
privatisation (see Road
to Victory and La
lotta continua) and discuss why it is that this discourse continues to
enjoy such widespread acceptance, although it is empirically so obviously
wrong.
Sunday, 4 May 2014
Fighting against water privatisation in Italy: La lotta continua!
Thursday, 1 May 2014
Fighting against water privatisation in Italy: Road to Victory!
Against the background of the global and Eurozone financial crises as
well as austerity sweeping across Europe, the pressure on privatising public
services is immense. The story of the Italian water movement, a broad alliance
of social movements and trade unions, which successfully mobilized for a
referendum against the privatization of water in June 2011, is a story of hope
for alliances involved in resisting privatization elsewhere. From 25 March to 8
April, I conducted a series of interviews with members of this movement. In
this post, I will report on the emergence and ultimate success of this movement
in the referendum.
Thursday, 24 April 2014
Marxism, Social Movements and resistance to capitalist exploitation!
In the Theses On Feuerbach, Marx famously wrote that ‘the philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx
1845). In their edited volume Marxism and Social
Movements, Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky and Alf Gunvald
Nilsen have lived up to this demand in that the
contributions are directly informed by, and related to, concrete struggles. The
collection of essays succeeds at not only assisting us in understanding, in
interpreting the role of social movements in current struggles. It also helps
us to reflect on strategies of resistance in order to improve them.
Sunday, 13 April 2014
Trade Union Solidarity and Free Trade: The case of COSATU.
Do trade
unions matter in the Twenty-First Century? How are they responding to ongoing
processes of neoliberal restructuring? In particular, what obstacles do they
face in developing transnational solidarity against the rise of free trade?
What is clear is that national labour movements in different parts of the world
have, at times, responded differently to the deepening of trade liberalisation
in recent years. This is because the immediate impact they face differs
depending on their place within the structure of the global economy. In his new
academic article ‘The Congress of South African
Trade Unions and Free Trade: Obstacles to Transnational Solidarity’, which is part of a special
issue on Free Trade
and Transnational Labour, Stephen
Hurt explores these questions through a study of how the biggest trade
union federation in South Africa – the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
– has reacted to both multilateral and bilateral trade liberalisation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)