Working-class Organizations Research Articles

Chess and Freedom1

Abstract The tension between the game of chess as strictly regulated by rules and the idea of freedom can be traced in three radidal examples separated by media and different periods of the twentieth century. The first emphatic employment of the concept of freedom is in the title of a chess journal issued by the Communist opposition of the central German working-class chess organization at the end of the Weimar Republic. In the journal Frei Schach! the radical subsection of “Red Sports Unity” asserts its claim for supremacy, demanding revolutionary goals in the class struggle. But this journalistic appeal to freedom was countered by the use of the same concept by the moderate alternative central chess organisation, and soon even by the National Socialists suppressing both working-class organisations. In the cultural scene after the second world war there was a distant, strangely depoliticized echo of freedom in chess. In the Austrian avantgarde dramatist Wolfgang Bauer`s version of Ibsen`s modernist revision of classical drama in the play Ghosts there is a farcical use of everyday objects as a replacement of chess elements. They function as a postmodern parody of the conventional structures of a conversation play. Compared to such highly idiosyncratic ludic transformation of chess games, today`s digitalized chess in which the computer is the final arbiter makes the game more accessible to the masses. The surface democratic appeal in which average players can turn into critics of the chess elite is accompanied by the complete subjection to digitalisation on a late capitalist agenda. However, this does not completely deprive the traditional game of chess of its promise of playful enjoyment for an increasing number of people on a global scale.

O movimento pendular da grande burguesia industrial brasileira

Between 1996 and 2016, the Brazilian industrial bourgeoisie carried out a pendulum movement of rapprochement and subsequent separation from working class organizations and their political perspectives. In the long term, however, the tendency is for the possibility of new “developmentalist” cycles to narrow and for neoliberalism to deepen in Brazil.

Communists and the 1933 Campaign That Ended Frontier Massacres in Australia

In August and September 1933, agitation by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) led trade unions and unemployed workers’ organisations to join a national campaign for Aboriginal rights for the first time in history. Police in the Northern Territory were publicly planning a “punitive expedition” to kill Yolngu people, in response to the spearing death of an officer. Public mobilisation stopped the expedition, effectively ending the practice of frontier massacres that had long characterised the colonisation of Australia. Existing histories have emphasised the leading role of missionaries and other middle and upper-class intellectuals, who led humanitarian organisations playing an increasingly influential role in Aboriginal affairs. While acknowledging the significance of these efforts, this article makes a new argument about the central role of communist agitation and the participation of working-class organisations in forcing a complete police retreat. Animating this initiative was a Marxist anti-imperialist politics that appealed to anti-war traditions within the workers’ movement.

Legal Boundaries, Organizational Fields, and Trade Union Politics: The Development of Railway Unions in the US and the UK

AbstractThroughout the nineteenth century, powerful railway unions in the USA and the UK cultivated an expansive system of voluntary sickness, death, unemployment, and superannuation benefits. By the early twentieth century, the movements had diverged: while the British Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants relinquished its commitment to voluntarism in favor of state healthcare and pensions, the American Railway Brotherhoods persisted along voluntarist lines, resisting social insurance in favor of exclusive schemes for their white male membership. What accounts for these diverging orientations? I highlight the importance of organizational forms as a lens for understanding comparative trade union strategy, emphasizing the role of law in designating legitimate forms of working-class association. I demonstrate that governing elites in both countries promoted voluntarism as a benign form of working-class organization throughout much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, I argue, early American and British trade unions adopted benefits in part because they enabled them to mimic the far more respected and legitimate friendly and fraternal mutual benefit societies. Toward the end of the century, the context had changed: while alternative organizational avenues were opened for trade unions in the UK, benefits presented an ongoing organizational lifeline for American unions. In defining and redefining the boundaries of legitimate forms of workers’ associations, legal decisions in both countries shaped not only trade union organizing strategies in the short run but also their positioning in broader social struggles.

Mutualism, class composition, and the reshaping of worker organisation in platform work and the gig economy

This article contributes an understanding of mutualism as a foundational element in emergent worker collectivism. We challenge mainstream institutionalist accounts in industrial relations, especially from the Global North, that downplay processes of bottom-up regeneration of working-class organisation. We discuss compositional accounts of class formation and examine previous understandings of mutualism, then apply our conceptual framework to evidence from international literature and our own research on platform work in Italy and the UK. Three important themes emerge in understanding worker self-organisation: the demographics of the workforce, including migration backgrounds and social ties beyond the workplace; the existence of social relations in the ethnic/political/local community; and the relevance of free spaces of resource sharing and recomposition in the absence of a fixed place of work. We conclude that an understanding of mutualism can help to grasp emergent solidarities among new groups of workers within and beyond both platform work and trade unions.

Disruption and Control: Contesting Mobilities through the Picket Line

By exploring the relationship between picket lines and drivers in 1970s Britain, this article considers how mobility and the spatial practices of trade unionsm shape labor geographies. Focusing on issues raised by work on logistics and blockades, it argues that too much emphasis has been placed on tactics of interruption. Drawing on Toscano's writings, I suggest that paying attention to the complex entanglement of disruption and control enables a more sophisticated account of workers’ agency. The article explores three key moments in the relationship between picketing and mobility: the 1972 miners’ strike, debates over picketing legislation in the mid-1970s, and the road haulage dispute in 1979. In doing so, it makes a number of contributions to labor geography. First, it foregrounds the picket line as a key site for understanding the spatialities of working-class organization. Second, it highlights how struggles for control are shaped by competing conceptions of rights and moral economies. Third, it develops thinking on the relationship between mobility and agency by exploring how workers’ power became entangled with the control of movement.

FIGHTING FOR HOUSING IN TIMES OF AUSTERITY: SQUATTING AS A CONTENTIOUS BRIDGE TO RADICAL HOUSING-POLICY ALTERNATIVES

This article examines the wave of housing squats by housing movements in Milan during the 2010s as a part of the anti-austerity protests following the financial crisis. The literature on the European housing squats emphasized their novelty in comparison to traditional working-class organizations and their autonomy from state power. I shift attention to the underresearched interdependences among squats and traditional trade/tenant unions and how they enabled squats to interfere with housing policy and the state. Using findings from two case studies, the analysis shows that these interdependences underpinned a resistance strategy suspended between noncontentious experiments of “welfare from below” and contentious politics. Within this framework, the squats became a lever for the housing movements to keep exerting an influence on policy action and to survive demobilization despite an adverse political climate, connecting pragmatic welfare gains in the present and radical aspirations of future societal change.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

On the current strike wave

Emerging from global economic shutdown in 2021, some of Britain’s largest employers embarked on radical restructuring of workers’ wages and conditions by exploiting the lack of protection for workers in UK legislation to impose ‘fire and rehire’ and wage cuts. As inflation and interest rates rose sharply, trade unions resisted attacks on their members’ living standards by organising the largest strike wave for over 30 years. The current strike wave has developed from defensive strikes against attacks on jobs and wages into a broad united front of organised labour across both private and public sectors. The political resistance of the organised working class poses the real question of who runs Britain.

The ‘War on Terror’ as Primitive Accumulation in Tunisia: US-Led Imperialism and the Post-2010-2011 Revolt/Security Conjuncture

: This article examines the rearticulation and reconfiguration of US-led imperialism vis-à-vis Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2010–2011 popular revolt. Challenging the prevalent economic-military binary in analyses of US-led imperialism in the region, it treats instead economic intervention in Tunisia as linked to and shaped by ‘security’ intervention, with the violence of the War on Terror laying the groundwork for a new wave of primitive accumulation. Employing conjunctural analysis, it considers how the 2015 attacks, largely targeting European tourists at a Sousse beach resort and the Bardo national museum, were mobilized to further Tunisia’s imbrications within imperialist security architecture through legal interventions, border violence, peripheral militarization, increased ‘security’ spending and neocolonial ‘expertise’, debt and racialized financialization. In doing so, the 2015 security conjuncture reinforced Tunisia’s peripheral status in the international system and enabled further surplus value drain, though not without resistance. The article concludes by reflecting on popular struggles and the current conjuncture, which is characterized not only by public health and economic crises, but also by the rise of a multipolar world order that, when combined with working class organization and mobilization, may provide an opening for Tunisia to delink from the imperialist core. Such a transformation would domore than any platitudes about human rights and ‘security sector reform’ to radically transform the nature of the Tunisian security state and the social relations it is designed to uphold.

Football Casuals, Fanzines, and Acid House: Working Class Subcultures, Emotional Communities, and Popular Individualism in 1980s and 1990s England.

This article illuminates the dynamics of two of the most significant yet neglected youth subcultures of the late twentieth century: football's casual culture and the acid house scene. Through the lens of two influential fanzines, Liverpool's The End and London's Boy's Own I make a series of arguments about the relationship between 'popular individualism', emotion, and working-class communities. I argue that while conceptualizing the fanzines as 'emotional communities' can yield important insights about the role of feelings such as nostalgia in bonding people together, gendered sensibilities and satirical frameworks need to be taken into account in order to fully understand the subcultural affinities that the fanzines engendered. The framework of 'popular individualism' on the other hand can help to illuminate the tensions between individualism and collective belonging at a number of levels which the article discusses. The article concludes by noting that the analysis of these neglected subcultures offers fruitful ways of reconceptualizing community and belonging in a period when traditional forms of working-class organization were in decline.

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Collective Identity, the State and Politics: Understanding Working-class Organisations in Today’s Argentina

Abstract An analysis of the current state and political horizons of working-class organisations in Argentina can be developed along two intersecting lines. In the first, we have trade unions representing workers in the formal sector, which accounts for about half of the country’s working population. In the second, we have social movements, based in both the urban and rural space, representing poor and informal workers. These two lines often run parallel to one another but also intersect and merge at different points following the cycles of capital accumulation and crisis typical of a peripheral country.

The Public Transport Crisis in South Africa: Through the Eyes of the Four Revolutions

Debates on the Fourth Industrial Revolution have tended not to focus on the direct relationship between all four technological revolutions and transportation – a crucial element of all technological surges. At the same time, scholarship on transportation has generally ignored the significance of transportation in all the revolutions. This article therefore seeks to strike a balance between these two extremes by showing that all the technological revolutions were also about transportation. In other words, the debates on the technological advances provide scholars, researchers, engineers, and working-class organisations with the space to foreground transport as an issue requiring special attention, especially in South Africa where the public transport system faces many challenges. Critically applying the prism of the four industrial revolutions, the article demonstrates that South Africa lags behind from a transport perspective, and still relies on the transportation of the Second Industrial Revolution when other countries are utilising technologies ofthe Fourth Industrial Revolution. Compounding matters is that even transport technologies invented in the 1800s are being stolen and vandalised, and the maintenance of the system is extremely poor. The article then submits that these transport problems may be solved by mobilisation and advocacy led by working-class and poor communities negatively affected by the crisis.

The Forcefield of Solidarity

For American workers, as Mike Davis once argued, defeat compounds defeat, creating an ever-growing legacy of workingclass organizations that either shatter or become compromised—racist, or corrupt, or ossified and bureaucratic, or in bed with their enemies, or tiny and weak. These organizations transmit their historical damage onto the subsequent generation; each cohort navigates a set of impossible choices and gives shape to the impossible choices facing the next one. Individual activists, militants, and organizers must confront these legacies, which play out not just within their organizations but within themselves. Yet on rare occasions, workers find an opening and the room to run, and summon the courage to pursue it. In the process, they may transform an existing organization, shoving it in a new direction, or they may shake it off like dead skin and create something new.

Challenges for lean construction adoption in the Brazilian industry: a study in construction companies, universities and class organizations

PurposeThis paper aims to evaluate the current level of knowledge about lean construction (LC) practices in construction companies, universities and class organizations in Brazil and identify the barriers to implementing LC in the Brazilian construction industry and prioritize them through comparison with global challenges.Design/methodology/approachThis multiple case study was carried out through a questionnaire answered by 56 construction companies, 15 universities and 10 professional associations. The questionnaire evaluation allowed the authors to determine the level of knowledge about the LC, its adoption and barriers to its adoption in the Brazilian industry. The results were statistically analyzed using the weighted average (MIS) of results using the Kruskal–Wallis test, which compares sample distribution among groups, and Cronbach’s alpha test to measure the questionnaire reliability.FindingsThis study points to universities as the main ones responsible for the low adoption of LC in Brazil and points to the need for an integrated action among construction companies, universities and class organizations to overcome the traditional project management culture and raise the level of knowledge about LC.Originality/valueThis study evaluated the current LC situation in an emerging country, Brazil, and compared it with the principal international challenges observed in studies of other developing countries – China, India, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Singapore – least developed countries – Bangladesh and Nigeria – and developed country – UK. These studies evaluated construction companies located in the listed countries. Based on that, 22 international challenges were established for the LC adoption. Additionally, this research also evaluated universities and working-class organizations in addition to construction companies. This addition can contribute to a better result understanding that can be explored by Brazil and other countries.

Reflections on the 50th anniversary of the freeing of the Pentonville dockers

This paper considers the background to the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and how the law attempted to weaken trade union structures, collective bargaining and the right to strike. The purpose was to diminish workers’ wage share and transfer wealth to the rich. The imprisonment of the dockers in 1972 under the act, released after the threat of a general strike, is dealt with. The paper considers this to be a turning point in the strength of the organised working class after resort again to a neoliberal industrial relations legal regime established under the Thatcher government from 1979 onwards has relentlessly driven down wage share, equality, security and the prosperity of the working class. A few positive thoughts are offered for the future.

Working-Class Institutions, Amazon and The Politics of Local Economic Development in Western Queens

In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of two locations for their second headquarters. While there had certainly been criticism and organizing against the proposed deal, given that it had the vocal support of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, most New Yorkers had assumed that the deal would be implemented. Then, rather surprisingly, on February 14th, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the deal and its decision not to come to LIC. This article uses the case of Amazon and other large scale developments in western Queens to discuss the conflictual and often messy politics of local economic development (LED) in working class communities. It argues that urban studies pays too little attention to how and why working class organizations participate in the politics of LED; and often thereby shape the enacted policies of LED.

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

Realism and Power in Mark Twain's

RETRACTED ARTICLE: The political-educational praxis of Luis Emilio Recabarren (1904–1924)

abstract We, the Editor and Publisher of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, have retracted the following article: Cristian Olivares Gatica, J. Fabián Cabaluz Ducasse & Diego Cabezas Bravo (2021). “The political-educational praxis of Luis Emilio Recabarren (1904–1924),” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2021.1941550. The Editor of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies and Taylor & Francis note that the policy of the journal is to consider only original material. It has become known that this article contains substantial overlap with the thesis “Luis Emilio Racabarren: Educator of the Chilean Working Class” by María Alicia Vetter (2013), which became the basis for Vetter’s 2020 monograph, The Educational Philosophy of Luis Emilio Recabarren: Pioneering Working-Class Education in Latin America (ISBN 9780367861193), and the book chapter “A Pedagogy for power: Antonio Gramsci and Luis Emilio Recabarren on the educational role of working-class organizations” in Antonio Gramsci: A pedagogy to change the world by María Alicia Vetter and John D. Holst (ISBN 978-3-319-40449-3). The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”. We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions.