Worker Militancy Research Articles

Nationalism as a Response to Worker Militancy

Nationalism is widely understood as a product of the nineteenth century, the doctrinal seeds for which were planted by the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution. It is an extension of tribalism to the nation and is understandable in terms of human evolution. It could be serviceable to first tribes and then nations as a means for acquiring social cohesion and domestic peace by convincingly identifying a foreign menace. But what explains the varying intensity of this strategy? This article claims that strengthening of nationalism’s expression has been substantially due to the threat to elites posed by the rise of powerful worker movements which gained increasing militancy during nineteenth century industrialization. Nationalism served to deflect attention from a system that workers found unjust to foreign forces as the cause of their malaise. In this expression, nationalism served as an ideology enabling the more powerful to assuage worker discontent and continue gaining at the expense of the weaker.  

Movement for Black Lives at Work? Racial Justice Spillover, Labor Organization, and New Worker Militancy

ABSTRACT Emerging from a confluence of events – including Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) – racial consciousness has intensified in recent years. In the wake of a long declining labor movement, there has also been a surprising upsurge in labor militancy. Are these two currents systematically related? Situating our analysis in the sociological literature on social movement spillover, we ask if there is evidence of racial justice spillover into and stimulating workplace militancy. Employing all known strikes and worker protests during 2021 and 2022, we find: (a) racial justice demands did, indeed, appear as part of workplace militancy during this period; (b) racial justice demands were voiced in both worker protests and strikes launched most heavily by unions but also by alt-labor/SMOs and by unorganized workers; (c) weekly time-series regression models indicate that BLM demonstrations stimulated the frequency of workplace protests and strikes with racial justice demands which, in turn, stimulated wider worker militancy over other issues; and (d) interdependency analysis of worker actions reveals that unionized worker protests served as a key catalyst driving other forms of worker militancy with racial justice demands. We discuss the implications of our findings for social movement spillover theory and for moving racial justice and labor movements forward.

For an Anarchist Decolonial Agenda: New Perspectives on Anarchism, Marronage, and Indigeneity from Brazil/Pindorama

AbstractThis paper proposes new perspectives on anarchism, indigeneity, and Afro‐descendent struggles, by discussing the case of Brazilian anarchists’ commitment to luta afroindígena. They mean by this term the intersection of indigenous and Afro‐descendant resistances for the recognition of land, against the violence of states, agribusiness, and extractivism. I argue that this case offers key insights to radical geographies, and to the broader field of decolonial scholarship, to challenge cultural and racial essentialisms by connecting different militant traditions. I also argue that, taking inspiration from indigenous thought and socio‐territorial practices of broader Latin American social movements, these cases enhance decolonial bids for “decolonising methodologies” by showing the importance of starting from practices before theory. My arguments are based on documentary work on past and present relations between anarchism and decoloniality in Latin America/Abya Yala, on personal militant work in Brazil/Pindorama, and on a sample of qualitative interviews with activists.

Toward a Vulgar Transgender Marxism

A reading of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a class both of “vulgar” Marxism and vulgar transgender writing. The novel is a learning text for the reader in both transmasculine life and militant working-class life. It takes the form of an autofiction, given that both militant workers and trans people need their life stories (auto) to be something other than confessional (fiction) as a matter of survival. The essay concludes by calling for a vulgar Marxist studies that attends to both the form and content of common, everyday, earthy, “vulgar” proletarian life.

ФОРМУВАННЯ НАВИЧОК БОЙОВОЇ РОБОТИ НА СУЧАСНИХ ЗРАЗКАХ ОЗБРОЄННЯ ІЗ ЗАЛУЧЕННЯМ ТРЕНАЖЕРІВ

Some aspects of preparation of servicemen, that touches the battle arranging of crews of military equipment are considered in this summarizing article, receipt by them proof skills of the effective use of regular armament in composition subsections. The analysis of process of forming of skills of servicemen is resulted on employments from the combat training. Possibility of distribution of method of making of battle skills is examined for providing of sufficient level of the combat training, that foresees bringing in of modern multivectorial equipment which has ability to reproduce on facilities of monitoring of the varied multiplicative situations and providing of possibility to seize by it with the use of the attracted standards of military equipment adequate to the battle situation. For an example the process of preparation of activity of specialists of operator type is select, namely: one who aims a gun of cannons of tanks, one-operators who aims a gun of fighting machines of infantry, self-propelled-artillery (gun-artillery) complexes one who aims a gun of the anti-tank guided complexes; operators of the radiolocations stations and communication, facilities and automated control systems by the fire of the attracted military equipment networks. The questions of specific of functions which are executed by a man-operator in the process of battle application of armament and military technical come into question. As a result of evaluation of the special preparation of operators of Anti-aircraft self-moving gun-2S6 on an existent educational-material base the row of conclusions which are able to influence on the process of optimization of process of preparation of one who aims a gun is done. Keywords: reproduce maximal approach to militant condition of the personally staff, algorithm of the militant work of crew of military vehicle, indexes of the instruct, operate type of activity, training and modeling device, probably estimation of battle work, modern special training and education and methodical base military training of the military specialist, comparatively estimation of the level of instruct of personally crew, level of methodical master commander of platoon and battery.

Allan Pinkerton: Informed Scot or Scottish Informer?

Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) has a conflicted legacy. To some, the founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (PNDA) pioneered law and order on the American frontier, upheld principles of racial equality, and prepared the way for better public police forces including the FBI. To others, Pinkerton betrayed the values of his Scottish youth: he had been a champion of militant workers in Scotland, and participated in revolutionary uprisings in Wales and England, yet was instrumental in crushing organised labour in the United States. In truth, Pinkerton never played a part in Wales’ Newport uprising, and took with him, when he crossed the Atlantic in 1842, knowhow about repression that he had acquired on his native soil. He may have learned about informers because he was one of their victims, or he may have promoted labour espionage in Pennsylvania in the 1870s because he had been himself an informer before he emigrated. The Scottish authorities’ deliberate abstinence from record-keeping and the serial, defensive destruction of PNDA records mean it is impossible to prove or disprove the informer hypothesis, but the role of the informer in Scottish political culture does help to explain Pinkerton’s behaviour and apparent hypocrisy.

BENJAMIN SACHS INTERVIEWED BY MARTHA MINOW

BENJAMIN SACHS INTERVIEWED BY MARTHA MINOW

Public order and the fear of the ‘outsider’: porosity of labour politics in late colonial India

ABSTRACT The article discusses a militant worker strike at the Bata shoe factory in Calcutta in the year 1938. The strike owed to the communist mobilisation of the workers in the city and demanded various rights from the factory management including non-interference in their lives outside the factory. The discussion will show that the late colonial labour politics in Calcutta was dynamic and sought political solidarities with the broader anti-colonial mobilisation in the city. As a result, the factory management and the colonial administration could not sustain workers’ harassment based on an ‘insider-outsider dichotomy’ that attempted to segregate workers’ issues inside the factory from the larger politics outside it.

The Social Services of Spain after the neoliberal period: Longitudinal analysis from the perspective of Social Work (2012–2018)

Abstract The article presents a longitudinal analysis of the Social Services in Spain during the period characterised by neoliberal policies (2012–2018), as well as the situation and reactions of the professional social workers. The quantitative results of three surveys promoted by the General Council of Social Work from Spain on data from 2012, 2013 and 2018 were compared. The sample allows extrapolating the results to all the social workers in Spain. There is a loss of effectiveness and a worsening of the quality of care of the social services. However, social workers do not attribute the deterioration of the system to the increased demand, but to the cuts, privatisation and outsourcing of resources. The professional discourse is critical: it departs from the narrative of punitive neoliberalism and denounces the violation of citizens’ rights. Professional practice reveals the ethical–political commitment in the system and the public militancy of social workers in Spain.

Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918

Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918

“Estou aqui fazendo um filme”

O documentário Osvaldão (2014) retrata a trajetória de Osvaldo Orlando da Costa, um dos mais conhecidos personagens da Guerrilha do Araguaia (1972”“1974). O longa tem sua produção vinculada à Fundação Maurício Grabois, ligada ao Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B), ao qual pertenciam os militantes que atuaram no Araguaia. Negro e comunista, Osvaldão perdeu a vida na Amazônia oriental brasileira, onde efetuou um trabalho militante durante cerca de oito anos. No artigo, busca-se problematizar as representações que o filme constrói em relação à história de vida do guerrilheiro e como as relações raciais foram retratadas. Procurou-se compreender as escolhas feitas pelos realizadores quanto aos enquadramentos dados à trajetória do biografado, a partir de disputas pela memória vigentes no Brasil naqueles anos iniciais da década de 2010. Notadamente, os embates sobre a memória da ditadura e a sub-representação dos negros nas narrativas que versam sobre a história nacional.

Crossed Wires in the Motor City: A Genealogy and Analysis of the 1967 Riots and the 1968 Strike Wave in Detroit

Abstract In the years 1967 and 1968 the city of Detroit was the site of two waves of rebellion. The riot of 1967 was one of the largest and most costly urban rebellions in U.S. history. And in the ashes of the ‘67 insurrection a wave of strikes began shutting down the sprawling factories of the auto industry. These strikes were organized by militant Black workers who later founded the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization that characterized itself as the “ideological inheritor” of the riot. This article situates the League within the global moment of 1968, discusses the relationship of work stoppages to circulation struggles, and examines how the participants’ experience in riots, both on the streets of Detroit and in the prisons around the state, informed the praxis and politics of the League.

Recordando a compositora e musicóloga Graciela Paraskevaídis aos 80 anos de seu nascimento

Este artigo tem como objetivo recordar, refletir e dar visibilidade à obra musical, literária, investigativa e militante da compositora e musicóloga Graciela Paraskevaídis (1940-2017) em torno a temáticas como a música dos séculos XX e XXI, a música latino-americana e as questões de gênero neste ambiente. Usando como recorte a sua atuação como compositora e como integrante de comissões organizadoras de eventos como os Cursos Latino-americanos de Música Contemporânea – além de editora dos sites latinoamerica-musica.net e gp-magma.net – pretende-se desenhar um perfil coerente e linear desta que foi uma das mais importantes pensadoras da construção de uma música de vanguarda na América Latina sem, no entanto, deixar de lado questões ligadas ao pós-colonialismo e à dependência econômica e cultural do chamado Primeiro Mundo.

The Myth of Section 7(a): Worker Militancy, Progressive Labor Legislation, and the Coal Miners

In this article, the authors look at the supposed causal role of progressive labor legislation on union organizing. As an extension of the Wagner Act debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the authors argue—contrary to the accepted wisdom of virtually all established scholarship—that “progressive” labor legislation is not generally the impetus for worker organization, a necessary prerequisite without which mass unionization would be impossible. Rather, this legislation is often consciously cooptive, with the explicit goal of diffusing worker militancy, denuding and undermining radical leadership while simultaneously placating popular discontent. The theoretical and methodological shortcomings of the former position are analyzed in the context of the passage of Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The authors argue that if the unionization of coal miners—the supposed primary beneficiaries of the stimulus attributed to the legislation—occurred prior to the passage of the NIRA, Section 7(a) could not have acted as a catalyst to unionization in the coalfields. The authors show, using archival and secondary accounts, that nearly all the nation’s coal miners were organized before the passage of the NIRA. In light of this empirical data, the authors propose an alternative model of union growth that rejects the methodological individualist assumptions that tacitly undergird the existing literature.

Intercultural translation and the ecology of legal knowledges in the experience of Cherán, Mexico: elements for a new critical and militant legal practice

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the possibility of rethinking militant legal practices from the perspective of an ecology of legal knowledges. Based on experience of more than six years of militant work with the Purepecha community of Cherán, Mexico, I show how a legal practice was constructed to defend subaltern and social movement sectors from hegemonic groups. In doing so, I argue it also shifted critical potential to the very core of the production of legal practices itself. Drawing from empirical data from several interventions in two distinct fields, the judicial and the legislative, I discuss the site of a militant legal practice established from the logics of a horizontal epistemology, different from what I call the practices of the ‘Lawyer King,’ and reflect on its potentials and limitations.

A Tale of Two Deltas: Labour Politics in Jiangsu and Guangdong

AbstractThis article examines the sources of variation in Chinese workplace governance between otherwise similar parts of the country. Jiangsu's portion of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Guangdong's portion of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) are both booming export hubs with large numbers of migrant workers. Yet, in the former region, authorities manage conflict with orthodoxy and coaxing; in the latter, with experimentation and coercion. Using interviews and government yearbooks, the article conceives of the YRD and PRD as ‘regional fields’ within the broader ‘field’ of Chinese labour politics. Greater worker militancy and organization is pushing the PRD field off‐balance, yielding more innovative but brutal policies. Although it has become common to explain governance in China from an elite perspective, grassroots contention is thus key. Bottom‐up pressures generate top‐down policy. This, the author contends, is true even under Xi Jinping.

From the Professoriat to the Precariat

Social class lies at the core of much that Marx said about the “laws of history.” Class conflict was to be the means whereby capitalism would be overthrown, superseded by a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and, subsequently, by a communist society in which alienation and exploitation would be replaced by emancipation and the full flowering of human potential as both individuals and a species. The capitalist system, however, has proven remarkably resilient and resourceful. The welfare state ameliorated extreme economic distress, popular culture sapped revolutionary energy, and “identity politics” fragmented political radicalism. Meanwhile, the definition of social class itself became problematic. A reorganized labor market produced divisions between the traditional working class and precarious workers and, in colleges and universities, the old “professoriat” was joined by a new “precariat” that now does over two-thirds of the teaching. This trend is part of the “corporatizing” of higher education and the “neoliberal” restructuring of work in late capitalism. Intellectuals, once the theoretical “vanguard of the proletariat,” are now practical leaders too. Educational worker militancy has implications for the academy and class tensions throughout society. It raises the question: Was Marx wrong, or has he just not yet been proven right?

Militando a Francisco. Territorio, compromisos y orientación institucional del activismo político y religioso en la Argentina contemporánea

Objetivos: comprender las características del activismo de grupos que se ubican en la intersección entre la política y la religión en Argentina en la segunda década del siglo XXI.
 Metodología: estudio cualitativo basado en la etnografía, la entrevista y el análisis de documentos. Los datos fueron construidos a partir del análisis de los textos registrados en diarios de campo, fotografías y la transcripción de los textos de las entrevistas. Para el análisis se recurrió a matrices por tipo de registro (diarios de campo, entrevistas, publicaciones y folletos) para luego trabajar con matrices integradoras.
 Resultados: se evidenciaron tres características principales que definen las militancias político-religiosas en Argentina: la centralidad del territorio como espacio de desarrollo del trabajo militante, el compromiso militante como una actividad integral que se desarrolla en toda la vida y la orientación del trabajo ilitante hacia las instituciones –Estado e Iglesia– como un espacio más de despliegue del proyecto político-religioso.
 Conclusiones: se concluye la composición circular de la identidad en la acción colectiva en diálogo con las instituciones clásicas (el partido, la Iglesia y el Estado), la notoria intensidad en el hacer que remarca la militancia como subjetividad pública y la importancia de las coyunturas para la reformulación de las definiciones comunitarias, a partir de las potencialidades y los límites que imponen los pasos hacia instancias de resistencia.

La memoria como búsqueda activa: la transmisión intergeneracional de la experiencia militante en el filme documental Seré millones

El presente trabajo se propone analizar el filme documental Seré millones (Neri, Krichmar y Simoncini, 2014) como dispositivo de transmisión de memoria. En él, se recupera la historia de Oscar Serrano y Ángel Abus, militantes del Ejército Revolucionario delPueblo (erp), que llevaron a cabo el asalto más grande de la historia argentina al ex Banco Nacional de Desarrollo (Banade), durante la dictadura del general Alejandro Agustín Lanusse (1971-1973). En primer lugar, se estudia el vínculo entre realidad y representación en el cine documental, a partir de los aportes de Bill Nichols y Jacques Rancière. Luego, se hace un somero recorrido por los distintos momentos del cine documental argentino en las últimas décadas, con el objetivo de dar luz sobre las particularidades del contexto sociocultural en el cual se produjo la película, signado por la estatización de las políticas de memoria y por el fortalecimiento del cine documental en el país. Finalmente, se indaga por la representación del pasado que la memoria propone como obra de arte militante: qué memoria(s) recupera, a través de qué recursos estéticos lo hace y con qué objetivos. Se observa cómo el filme no pretende evaluar críticamente la experiencia revolucionariasetentista, sino transmitir dicha experiencia a las jóvenes generaciones que se están cuestionando el pasado reciente desde su posición presente. En este sentido, se argumenta que el documental puede ser pensado como un trabajo de anamnésis en los términosde Paul Ricoeur, porque el recuerdo es el resultado de una reconstrucción laboriosa que produce una movilización tanto intelectual como afectiva en los sujetos y, a la vez, crea un lazo entre generaciones. Por último, se examina la relación de la película con el cine militante argentino de las décadas de los sesenta y setenta, al problematizar el vínculo entre la intencionalidad de los realizadores y la recepción por parte de los espectadores.

Dominación masculina y feminismo en los movimientos sociales

Comparando cuatro movilizaciones “sin” (parado/as y sin-papeles) de Francia, se interrogan las interacciones entre el feminismo y los procesos de profundizacion democratica de los anos 1990-2000. Mediante los datos extraidos de varias centenas de observaciones participantes y alrededor de cien entrevistas en profundidad realizadas desde 1998 hasta 2016, este articulo pone de manifiesto que la practica democratizante de los movimientos sociales “progresistas” no esta exenta de (re)producir –mediante la division del trabajo militante– relaciones de dominacion entre agentes; ni de producir oportunidades para la resistencia. Este trabajo desvela que: (1) la dominación masculina estructura cada lucha mixta estudiada; (2) mediante la organizacion del trabajo militante, ciertos hombres toman posicion y ubican al resto de participantes en modos dominados –activos o pasivos– de participacion; (3) no obstante, el hecho de que el feminismo sea relegado –o rechazado– como movimiento politico no impide que se desplieguen practicas feministas. El articulo profundiza en la explicacion de esta tercera idea aludiendo a que en estos casos se trata de un “feminismo practico” que alterna la denuncia directa de la dominacion masculina, y un enfrentamiento mas indirecto mediante la organizacion del trabajo militante.