Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Robert Ovetz and Shawn Hattingh NIBS Talk
Talk Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphltUOLdHk
Book available here
A major new study looking at the catalysing role of workers' inquiries in the rebirth of a global labour movement from below. Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers' struggle is being reborn from below by workers themselves. 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 platform, trucking, cleaning, logistics, mining, auto factories, 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. Robert Ovetz is a Lecturer in Political Science at San Jose State University (US). He is the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Brill, 2018 and Haymarket, 2019) and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Labor and Society. Shawn Hattingh is based in Cape Town, South Africa. He works as a research and education officer at the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG). Hattingh has written numerous articles for South African and international activist websites and publications, covering issues such as the capitalist crisis, new forms of worker organizing, and anarchism. He has also been involved in a number of activist organizations in South Africa. For more information on ILRIG visit: www.ilrigsa.org.za
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