Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives – Robert Ovetz

Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers' struggle is being reborn from below.

Author
Submitted by rfovetz on November 25, 2022

By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers' inquiries, from call centre workers to teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organisations.
In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers' movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.

Comments

Related content

When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 explores one of the most tumultuous times in United States history. Self-organized workers recomposed their power by devising new strategies and tactics to disrupt the capitalist economy and extract concessions. Mine, railroad, steel, and iron workers pursued a strategy of tension that sometimes erupted into militant class conflict and general strikes in which…
masthead plus text of manifesto issued during their protest against MOMA
Debut issue of the journal of the New York "situationist street gang" Black Mask, published November 1966. Includes a write up of their action…
Robert Kurz (1943 – 2012) is ongetwijfeld één van de belangrijkste auteurs van de kritische waardetheorie, de ‘waardekritiek’ of (beter/vollediger) de ‘waardeafsplitsingskritiek’, een ondertussen internationale stroming die de grondslagen wil leggen voor een nieuwe radicale kritiek van het kapitalisme. In onderstaand artikel heeft Robert Kurz het over de noodzaak en moeilijkheid om de bestaande begrippen en…