Debating the Global Working Class

Dialectics

DEBATING THE GLOBAL WORKING CLASS

Conference of Socialist Economists

CSE South, Capital & Class

Co-hosted by the Global Economy and Business research Unit, Business School, University of Hertfordshire

 

Seminar: Debating the Global Working Class

Friday 17th October

University of Hertfordshire,

de Havilland site, Room N003

14.00-17.30

 

Marcel van der Linden (University of Amsterdam)

‘The Global Working Class: Decline or Revival’.

Jenny Chan (University of Oxford)

‘Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and China’s New Working Class’

Everybody is welcome to attend the seminar at 14.00. If you would like to join us for lunch beforehand at 13.00 you are welcome, but please register with Jane Hardy (j.a.hardy@herts.ac.uk). Please see websites for details of travel and location http://www.herts.ac.uk/contact-us/where-to-find-us/de-havilland-maps-and-directions

 

About the speakers:

Marcel Marius van der Linden

The Global Working Class: Decline or Revival

Abstract

The number of wage-earners worldwide has grown significantly in the last three centuries, and its regional distribution has constantly shifted. The class awareness and collective action accompanying the development of this world working class has and is taking on many different forms in the course of time. The presentation will discuss the new challenges that have arisen. It is argued that the building of a new kind of trade unionism will be a difficult process, interspersed with failed experiments and moments of deep crisis. Pressure from below (through competitive networks, alternative action models, etc.) will be a highly important factor in deciding the outcome of this process.

Biographical note

Marcel is director of research at the International Institute for Social History and holds a professorship dedicated to the history social movements at the University of Amsterdam. Marcel is most recognized in his field for his approach of a “global labour history”, which he has developed since the 1990s. Global labour history is seen by many scholars of labour studies as a new paradigm that wants to overcome both traditional labour history and the “new labour history” developed in the 1960s by scholars like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson.

Jenny Chan

Dying for an iPhone? Apple, Foxconn, and China’s New Working Class

Abstract

Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China’s leading exporter, the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group, the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that accentuate global pressures. If suicide is understood as one extreme form of labour protest chosen by some to expose injustice, many more workers are choosing other courses. In globally connected production, Chinese workers are engaging in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.

Biographical note

Jenny is Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford. Her recent articles have appeared in Current Sociology, Modern China, Global Labour Journal, The Asia-Pacific Journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Labor Notes, New Internationalist, New Technology, and Work and Employment. She is writing her first book provisionally entitled Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and a New Generation of Chinese Workers (co-authored with PUN Ngai and Mark SELDEN).

 

About the CSE South Group:

The Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) http://www.cseweb.org.uk/ is an international, democratic membership organisation committed to developing a materialist critique of capitalism, unconstrained by conventional academic divisions between subjects. CSE has organised and supported conferences and seminars and publishes the Sage journal Capital & Class http://cnc.sagepub.com/ three times a year.

The CSE South Group is a network of researchers and activists founded by Capital & Class Editorial Board member Phoebe Moore and CSE participants Martin Upchurch and Chris Hesketh. Members hold workshops where people present work and hold discussions on topics that concern the CSE and our journal.

 

About the Global Economy and Research Unit, Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire

The Global Economy and Business Research Unit (GEBRU) focuses on issues that face economies, businesses and communities in the context of globalisation. The group undertakes both empirical and policy work, as well as engaging in the theoretical and methodological debates that underpin them. Members of the group are actively engaged with a range of stakeholders which include businesses, trade unions and NGOs. The approach of the group is interdisciplinary drawing on economics, political economy, geography and international business.

The unit’s research themes include the restructuring emerging markets in economies such as Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, Zambia and Bangladesh. GEBRU also focuses on migration and labour market mobility, and in particular the dynamics of European East-West migration and the intervention of stakeholders such as states and trade unions. A number of projects are ongoing in relation to foreign direct investment and outsourcing business services. Projects include new divisions of labour within Europe and the role of China in global value chains. The Editorship of the journal Competition and Change lies within GEBRU.

 

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cse-south-capital-class-seminar-17-10-debating-the-global-working-class

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Outburo

OUTUBRO

We would like to introduce you to the new edition of Outubro, a Marxist journal published since 1998 in Brazil.

www.revistaoutubro.com.br

https://www.facebook.com/revistaoutubro

From this edition on, Outubro will be published exclusively online with fully free access. Articles and book reviews continue to be published in Portuguese, and Abstracts in Portuguese and English. We believe that in this new format our journal will gain agility, ensure its periodicity, maintain its quality and increase its audience.

Despite the difficulties faced by Marxist journals in Brazil, October has kept over more than 16 years of existence, its financial, political and intellectual independence. It was the first Brazilian Marxist journal to publish its previous editions on the internet and the first to be indexed in several international databases.

 

Edition 21 (1/2014)

Content

Articles

 

Material world: the myth of the immaterial economy

Ursula Huws

 

Proletariat

Marcel van der Linden

 

The working class: a contemporary approach under the light of historical materialism

Marcelo Badaró Mattos

 

The Prerevolutionary strike movement in Russia (1912-1916)

Kevin Murphy

 

Labor movement, industrial belts and people’s power: experience and class consciousness during the Popular Unity in Chile

Mariano Vega Jara

 

Slum´s evictions in the city of Rio de Janeiro: a nowadays history

Romulo Costa Mattos

 

Revolutionary party and its degeneration: Gramsci, critic of Michels

Renato César Ferreira Fernandes

 

Fetishism and phantasmagoria of capitalist modernity: Walter Benjamin reader of Marx

Fabio Mascaro Querido

 

Marxism, politics and religion of “a convinced and confessed Marxist”: Michael Löwy reader of Jose Carlos Mariategui

Deni Ireneu Alfaro Rublo

 

Book Reviews

 

RIDENTI, Marcelo. Brasilidade revolucionária: um século de cultura e política. São Paulo: Unesp. 2010, by Daniela Vieira dos Santos

 

SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. Pode o subalterno falar? Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2010, by Camila Massaro de Góes

 

HOBSBAWM, Eric. Como mudar o mundo: Marx e o marxismo, 1840-2011. De São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011, by Rodrigo Duarte Fernandes dos Passos e Diana Patricia Ferreira de Santana

 

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/new-edition-of-ouubro-journal

 

**END**

 

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Work and Compulsion

Work

WORK AND COMPULSION

Call for Papers

Work and Compulsion: Coerced Labour in Domestic, Service, Agricultural, Factory and Sex Work, ca. 1850-2000s

The International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH), Austria, announces the 50th Linz Conference, 25-28 Sept. 2014.

Preparatory group:

Prof. em. Dirk Hoerder (Salzburg, Austria)
Prof. Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
Dr. Magaly Rodríguez García (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Dr. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (Wageningen University)
For the ITH: Univ.-Doz. Dr. Berthold Unfried (Institute of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna), Mag. Eva Himmelstoss

Objectives

The conference focuses on the exploitation of human labour in the range of forced labour and debt bondage, which contrary to chattel slavery, have received little scholarly attention. In spite of the gradual abolition of slavery (understood as the legal ownership of humans) in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, other forms of coerced labour persisted in most regions of the world. Indeed, while most nations increasingly condemned the maintenance of slavery and slave trade, they tolerated labour relationships that involved violent control, economic exploitation through the appropriation of labour power, restriction of workers’ freedom of movement and fraudulent debt obligations. Hence the conference deals with historical situations of coerced labour worldwide.

The aims of this conference are five-fold:

 1.  To write a global and comparative history of the political-institutional and gender structures, the economics of and working conditions within coerced labour, as well as the evolution of forced labour (internal or cross-border) migration of male and female workers and the role played by intermediaries. In short, the whole praxis of coerced labour in colonized segments of the world, core countries, post-imperial states, new industrial economies and other low-income countries.
 2.  To problematize (the increasing) forced labour and labour mobility in colonial territories, in Africa and Asia in particular, and to relate them to developments in intra-European labour regulation and regimentation and to the expansion of North Atlantic capital across the world.
 3.  To deal with the twentieth-century forms of coerced labour, whether through confinement to labour camps or debt bondage of individual production and service workers to creditors (for the costs of the voyage) or to individual employers (for the duration of their stay).
 4.  To question whether the application of the forced-labour model to systemic employer-employee relations under constraining circumstances is justified, or whether the ILO’s differentiation between forced labour and sub-standard or exploitative working conditions can/should be maintained. These issues are related to the naming and conceptualization of “force”, “coercion” and “consent”, as well as to the utility of the notions of “human trafficking” and “modern-day slavery”.
 5.  To explore the experiences and aspects of human agency or resistance by forced/bonded workers, organizing initiatives and the silence or activity of non-state actors such as trade unions and NGOs.

Programme structure and themes

Keynotes:

 1.  Agency of men and women under coercion.
 2.  A historical overview of the definitions of “slavery”, “forced labour”, “trafficking” and “modern slavery”, and their evolution within the realm of international governmental and non-governmental organisations.

Section I – Coerced labour in the colonial and non-colonial world (ca. 1850-1940):
Working conditions, employee-employer relationships and migration patterns (who was transported in which direction) within systems of indentured labour, debt bondage, peonage, servitude, compulsory labour and so on. Examples are the twentieth-century credit-ticket migrations from Southern China; the British (and other) empire-imposed indentured labour involving long-distance migration in the macro-regions of the Indian Ocean and the Plantation Belt from the 1830s to the 1930s; European forced-labour regimes imposed on men, women and children within particular colonies; forced labour migration from the colonies to Europe during the First World War (the so-called “colonial auxiliaries”); and forms of involuntary (child) servitude in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States.

Section II – Politically imposed labour on home territories: The labour relations, working conditions and agency of workers sent to concentration camps, remote labour colonies or industrial camps under Fascism or Stalinism, in Japan during the Second World War, as prisoners or under peonage in the (southern) United States, in communist China, in Cuba, or as persecuted minorities like the Roma as well as, in the present, use of forced labour from political and other prisoners from dictatorial or authoritarian regimes by Western companies, require further study.

Section III – Coerced labour since the end of the Second World War: The phenomenon of coerced labour – often called “modern slavery” since the last decades – concerns questions of global divisions of labour, economic, gender and racial inequality. While numbers and definitions are contested by academic, UN and ILO experts, official and unofficial data range from 17 to 27 million women, men and children worldwide. This section aims to include papers with empirical information on the extent to which debt, power relationships and poverty lead to the virtual “enslavement” of people through systematic recruitment by means of intimidation or threat of violence, aggressive control by labour intermediaries such as “coyotes”, “snakes” or procurers, and/or brutal enforcement of debt collection after arrival. The experiences and resistance strategies of the workers concerned will be fundamental to better understand the degree of labour constraints and/or the consent to so-called “3D jobs” (dirty, dangerous and demeaning).

Concluding discussion:
General debate on the accuracy of the current definitions used by state and non-state actors, the impact that new research can have on policies and the development or adjustment of analytical methods that can further the knowledge of coerced labour from past and present.

Call for Papers

Proposed papers need to address the conference topics mentioned above in section I, II or III and should include:

 *   An abstract (max. 300 words)
 *   The targeted thematic section
 *   A biographical note (max. 200 words)
 *   Full address and email-address

Sessions will be reserved for ongoing research on the level of doctoral dissertations and of postdoctoral research (depending on high-quality abstracts being submitted).
A special effort will be made to include paper presenters from all regions of the world and both senior and beginning researchers. The conference language will be English.

The organizers will not be able to reimburse costs for travel or hotel accommodation. However, we will establish a limited fund to which scholars with insufficient means of their own may write a motivated application for (partial) reimbursement of travel costs. Grants will be contingent on sufficient funding.

The conference fee includes accommodation (in shared double rooms provided by the ITH) and meals. Participants taking responsibility for their own accommodation will pay a reduced fee.

Proposals to be sent to Magaly Rodríguez García: mrodrigu@vub.ac.be

Time schedule:

Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 November 2013
Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2013
Deadline for full papers: 1 August 2014

A publication of selected conference papers is planned; final manuscripts due 1 April 2015.

 

First published in: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-work-and-compulsion-coerced-labour-in-domestic-service-agricultural-factory-and-sex-work-ca.-1850-2000s

 

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Beyond Marx

Karl Marx

BEYOND MARX

Confronting Labour-History and the Concept of Labour with the Global Labour-Relations of the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Karl Heinz Roth in collaboration with Max Henninger

Capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx anticipated, and the working class has, until now, hardly lived up to his hopes.
The Marxian concept of class rests on exclusion. Only the ‘pure’ doubly-free wage-workers are able to create value; from a strategic perspective, all other parts of the world’s working populations are secondary. But global labour history suggests that slaves and other unfree workers are an essential component of the capitalist economy.
What might a critique of the political economy of labour look like that critically reviews the experiences of the past five hundred years while moving beyond Eurocentrism? In this volume twenty-two authors offer their thoughts on this question, both from a historical and theoretical perspective.

Contributors include: Riccardo Bellofiore, Sergio Bologna, C. George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Niklas Frykman, Ferruccio Gambino, Detlef Hartmann, Max Henninger, Thomas Kuczynski, Marcel van der Linden, Peter Linebaugh, Ahlrich Meyer, Maria Mies, Jean-Louis Prat, Marcus Rediker, Karl Heinz Roth, Devi Sacchetto, Subir Sinha, Massimiliano Tomba, Carlo Vercellone, Peter Way, Steve Wright.

http://www.brill.com/beyond-marx

 

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/new-from-the-hm-book-series-beyond-marx

 

**END**

 

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

New Perspectives on Global Labour History

Labour

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL LABOUR HISTORY

International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts

Special Issue: “NEW PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL LABOUR HISTORY”

Guest Editor of the Special Issue: Christian G. De Vito

Call for Articles

 

This call for articles for a special issue of the journal Workers of the World  (http://www.workeroftheworldjournal.net/) on New Perspectives on Global labour history is open to PhD-, young- and senior researchers from all over the world.

The originals may be submitted in Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese. However, the article in its final form will be published in English, so – once approved for publication – the author is responsible for its translation within two months.

 

On Global Labour History

First conceived at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) at the end of the 1980s as a response to the crisis of labour and social history, Global labour history (GLH) is by now a truly global “area of interest” involving scholars from a broad range of countries all over the world. Debate is open within its ever extending borders on all key-issues in contemporary historiography. However, three fundamental features have marked Global labour history since its inception:

1.    In Global labour history, the field of labour history is stretched beyond institutional and top-down histories. Labour relations and conditions, individual and collective identities and conflicts of all kind of (male and female) workers are taken into account.

2.    In Global labour history, the chronology of labour history is expanded beyond the divide of the First Industrial Revolution, at least so far as to include the origins of merchant capitalism.

3.    Global labour history covers the whole world and refuses any Eurocentric perspective as well as any approach that takes the nation-state as its exclusive point of reference.

Because of this, on the one hand, traditional categories in labour history are questioned, such as proletarianization, peripheral labour, etc., while all forms of labour relations involved in the process of commodification of labour are explored, e.g. slavery, wage labour, serfdom, indentured labour, etc.

On the other hand, new methodologies are used in order to address interconnections exchanges and fluxes between different places and across the global and local levels. Among others: histoire croisée, microhistory, history of the everyday life, the concepts of translocality and teleconnections, the practices of “following the traces” and following the production and consumption chains.

 

For more detailed information on Global labour history, you might want to see:

·       Marcel van der Linden, Jan Lucassen, Prolegomena for a Global Labour History, IISH, Amsterdam, 1999 (See also: http://www.iisg.nl/publications/prolegom.pdf)

·       Jan Lucassen (ed.), Global Labour History. A State of the Art, Peter Lang, Bern, 2006.

·       Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World. Essays Toward a Global Labour History, Brill, Leiden, 2008.

·       Christian G. De Vito (ed.), Global Labour History. La storia del lavoro al tempo della “globalizzazione”, Ombre Corte, Verona, 2012.

 

On the  Special Issue on Global Labour History

The special issue of the journal Workers of the World seeks to explore the potentialities of Global labour history further, both applying new methodological approaches to themes that have been already investigated and proceeding along new thematic and methodological directions.

In the selection of articles, therefore, priority will be given to contributions presenting one or more among the following features:

a.    A particular focus on methods and concepts that stress connections, exchanges, fluxes and jeux d’échelles between places and between the local and global (or micro and macro) scales.

This approach will transcend nationally-based and Eurocentric perspectives and also mere trans-national comparisons. The consequences – advantages and disadvantages – of this methodological shift on the analysis of concepts and issues will be explicitly addressed.

 

b.    A particular focus on long-term approach.

Various periods (e.g. early modern and modern; medieval and early modern; ancient, medieval and early modern) will be integrated and the consequences produced by the long-term perspective in the observation of specific phenomena, in the use of concepts and sources, etc. will be explicitly addressed.

 

c.     A particular focus on the historicization of the concept of “work” (and related terms).

What did “work” mean within specific historical contexts? And what was the (individual and/or collective) perception of work by workers, non-workers and employers?

 

d.    A particular focus on one or more among the following issues:

·      The relationship between “free” and “unfree” labour, with further focus on intermediate forms of labour relations and on the use of the categories of “free” and “unfree” labour as such.

·      The relationship between workers, non-workers, household and communities.

·      The social world of the (individual and organized) employers, in relationship to the social world of the (individual and organized) workers.

·      The relationship between gender and work.

·      The relationship between labour and politics, in the double sense of the relationships between work and political regime and political and union organizations and political regime.

·      The relationship between the everyday experience of work and the organization of socio-political conflicts.

 

Rather than addressing the methodological and theoretical issues in Global labour history in an abstract way, articles will present the results of empirical research on work and social conflicts and then, building on these, they will address the meaning of “doing” Global labour history, the advantages and disadvantages of taking such a perspective and the differences with other approaches.

 

Calendar

·      Article submission by the author: 1st September – 10th December 2012

·      Selection of the articles by the editor: 10th December 2012 – 1st January 2013

·      Peer-review process: 1st January – 15th February 2013

·      Notification of acceptance by the reviewers: 15th February 2013

·      Definitive article submission by the author: 15th February – 15th April 2013

·      Final revision by the editor: 15th April – 15th May 2013

·      Publication on line: 15th May 2013

Please note: No articles sent by the authors after the above mentioned deadlines will be accepted.

 

Submission of Articles

All articles should be sent to this email address: christian.devito@gmail.com (Christian G. De Vito) with cc to workersoftheworld2012@yahoo.co.uk.

The originals may be submitted in Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese. However, the article in its final form will be published in English, so – once approved for publication – the author is responsible for its translation within two months.

Articles should be no longer than 5,000 words (including spaces and footnotes) in Times new roman, 12, line space 1,5.

Rules for submission of contributions can be found at the following link:

http://www.workeroftheworldjournal.net/index.php/autor-guidelines/english-version

 

Selection and Peer-review of the Articles

Articles are first selected by the editor of the special issue on the basis of the requirements indicated in this call for articles.

A total of twenty articles are anonymously submitted to the referees. Each article is submitted to two referees.

On the basis of the feedbacks provided by the referees, the editor further selects the ten

articles that will be published.

For any further information, please contact the editor of the special issue at: christian.devito@gmail.com.

 

First published at: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/call-for-articles-workers-of-the-world-special-issue-new-perspectives-on-global-labour-history

 

**END**

 

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

 

In the Same Boat?

Shipbuilding

IN THE SAME BOAT?

 In the Same Boat? Shipbuilding and ship repair workers: a global labour history (1950-2010)

The project intends to study shipbuilding labour around the world from World War II until the present from a global history perspective. We will track the relocation of production and analyse its consequences to workforces in Europe, North and South America, and in East Asia from the 1980s onwards.

See also the call for papers.

The project is coordinated by Elise van Nederveen Meerkerken, Marcel van der Linden, and Raquel Varela.

http://www.iisg.nl/research/global-shipbuilding.php/

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Strikes and Social Conflicts in the Twentieth Century

A World To Win

STRIKES AND SOCIAL CONFLICTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

International Conference
Lisbon, 17, 18, 19 March, 2011

The twentieth century has been confirmed as the century when the capital-labour conflict was most severe. The International Conference on Strikes and Social Conflicts in the Twentieth Century will host submissions on the strikes and social conflicts in the twentieth century and works on the theoretical discussion on the role of unions and political organizations. We also invite researchers to submit papers on methodology and the historiography of labour.

We welcome submissions on labour conflicts that occurred in factories, universities or public services, on rural and urban conflicts and also on conflicts that developed into civil wars or revolutions. National and international comparisons are also welcome.

After the Russian revolution the relative strengths of capital and labour were never again the same, with a period of revolution and counter-revolution that ended with World War II. Protagonist of the victory over fascism, the labour movement found itself neglected in the core countries under the impact of economic growth in the 1950s and the 1960s. But May 1968 quickly reversed the situation, with a following boom of labour studies during the 1970s. Nevertheless once the crisis of the 1970s was over, capital has regained the initiative, with the deterioration of labour laws, the crisis of trade unions and the subsequent despise in the academy for the study of social conflicts. The recent crisis, however, shows that workers, the ones who create value, are not obsolete. The social movements regain, in the last decade, a central role in the world.

The intensification of social conflicts in the last decade promoted a comeback to the academia of the studies on labour and the social movements. This conference aims to be part of this process: to retrieve, promote and disseminate the history of social conflicts during the twentieth century.

The Scientific Committee
Álvaro Bianchi (AEL)
Raquel Varela (IHC)
Sjaak van der Velden (IISH)
Serge Wolikow (MSH)
Xavier Domènech (CEDIF)

Conference Languages
Conference languages are Portuguese, English, French and Spanish (simultaneous translation Portuguese/English).

Preliminary Program

The Conference will have sessions in the mornings and afternoons. There will be conferences of invited speakers, among other, Marcel van der Linden, Fernando Rosas, Serge Wolikow, Beverly Silver, Kevin Murphy, Ricardo Antunes, Álvaro Bianchi, Dave Lyddon, Xavier Doménech.

During the conference there will be an excursion guided by Professor Fernando Rosas (Lisbon of the Revolutions); a debate about cinema and labour movement and a debate about Crisis and Social Change.

Contact information:

Instituto de História Contemporânea/ Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Av. de Berna, 26 C, 1069-061 Lisboa, Portugal. E-Mail: ihc@fcsh.unl.pt

—END—

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Workers of the World

Work No More

WORKERS OF THE WORLD

Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History

Marcel van der Linden

· November 2010
· ISBN 978 90 04 18479 4
· Paperback (viii, 469 pp.)
· List price EUR 45.- / US$ 60.-
· Studies in Global Social History; 1

http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=210&pid=44450

The studies offered in this volume contribute to a Global Labor History freed from Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism. Using literature from diverse regions, epochs and disciplines, the book provides arguments and conceptual tools for a different interpretation of history – a labor history which integrates the history of slavery and indentured labor, and which pays serious attention to diverging yet interconnected developments in different parts of the world. The following questions are central: What is the nature of the world working class, on which Global Labor History focuses? How can we define and demarcate that class, and which factors determine its composition? Which forms of collective action did this working class develop in the course of time, and what is the logic in that development? What can we learn from adjacent disciplines? Which insights from anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists are useful in the development of Global Labor History?

Readership: Social historians, labor historians, historians of slavery, historians of colonialism, historical sociologists

Marcel van der Linden (1952) is Research Director of the International Institute of Social History and Professor of social movement history at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on labor and working-class history and on the history of ideas.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Strikes and Social Conflict in the Twentieth Century

 

Strike

STRIKES AND SOCIAL CONFLICT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

 

 

A message from Sjaak van der Velden: svv@iisg.nl

Call for Papers
International Conference
Strikes and Social Conflicts in the Twentieth Century
Lisbon, 17, 18, 19 March, 2011

The Institute of Contemporary History (New University of Lisbon), the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), The Archive Edgard Leuenroth (Unicamp/Brasil), the Centre for the Study of Spain under Franco and Democracy (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (France) start the call for papers for the International Conference on Strikes and Social Conflicts in the Twentieth Century that will take place in Lisbon between 17 and 19 March 2011.
The twentieth century has been confirmed as the century when the capital-labour conflict was most severe. The International Conference on Strikes and Social Conflicts in the Twentieth Century will host submissions on the strikes and social conflicts in the twentieth century and works on the theoretical discussion on the role of unions and political organizations. We also invite researchers to submit papers on methodology and the historiography of labour.

We welcome submissions on labour conflicts that occurred in factories, universities or public services, on rural and urban conflicts and also on conflicts that developed into civil wars or revolutions. National and international comparisons are also welcome.

After the Russian revolution the relative strengths of capital and labour were never again the same, with a period of revolution and counter-revolution that ended with World War II. Protagonist of the victory over fascism, the labour movement found itself neglected in the core countries under the impact of economic growth in the 1950s and the 1960s. But May 1968 quickly reversed the situation, with a following boom of labour studies during the 1970s. Nevertheless once the crisis of the 1970s was over, capital has regained the initiative, with the deterioration of labour laws, the crisis of trade unions and the subsequent despise in the academy for the study of social conflicts. The recent crisis, however, shows that workers, the ones who create value, are not obsolete. The social movements regain, in the last decade, a central role in the world.

The intensification of social conflicts in the last decade promoted a comeback to the academia of the studies on labour and the social movements. This conference aims to be part of this process: to retrieve, promote and disseminate the history of social conflicts during the twentieth century.

The Scientific Committee:
Alvaro Bianchi (AEL)
Raquel Varela (IHC)
Sjaak van der Velden (IISH)
Serge Wolikow (MSH)
Xavier Domïnech (CEDIF)

Calendar:
Papers submission:   January 2010 – 30th June 2010
Notification of acceptance:  July 30th, 2010
Papers:  December 15th, 2010
Conference: March, 17-19, 2011

Important: The deadline for delivery of completed papers/articles is 15th December 2010. For reasons of translation no papers will be accepted after this date. The paper should be no longer than 4000 words (including spaces) in times new roman, 12, line space 1,5. For Registration Form see below.

Conference Languages: Conference languages are Portuguese, English, French and Spanish (simultaneous translation Portuguese/English).

Preliminary Program: The Conference will have sessions in the mornings and afternoons. There will be conferences of invited speakers, among other, Marcel van der Linden, Fernando Rosas, Serge Wolikow, Beverly Silver, Kevin Murphy, Ricardo Antunes, Alvaro Bianchi, Dave Lyddon, Xavier Domïnech. During the conference there will be an excursion guided by Prof. Fernando Rosas (Lisbon of the Revolutions); a debate about cinema and labour movement and a debate about Crisis and Social Change.

Thusday-17/03/11 Friday-18/03/11

Saturday-19/03/11
9:00 – 11:00 Opening Conference Sessions
Excursion: Lisbon of the revolutions (guide by Prof. Fernando Rosas)
11:15 – 13:15 Sessions  Sessions Sessions
13:15 � 14:30  Lunch Lunch Lunch
14:30 � 16:30 Sessions Sessions Sessions
16:45 � 18:45 Sessions Sessions Sessions
19:30 Debate: Movies and Working class in the twentieth century.
Debate: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”. Crisis and Social Change.
21:00

Dinner (Uai)

Dinner (Portug�lia)

Dinner (Casa do Alentejo)

Conference Fees
Fees including dinners and excursion Lisbon of the Revolutions: 80 euros
Fees without dinners and excursion: free
Entrance free

Presidents/Research directors of the Institutes
Fernando Rosas (IHC)
Fernando Teixeira da Silva (AEL)
Marcel van der Linden (IISH)
Pere Y Solanes (CEDIF)
Serge Wolikow (MSH)

Registration form/Papers Submission
International Conference
Strikes and Social Conflicts around the World in the Twentieth Century
Lisbon, 17, 18, 19 March, 2011

For Registration/Papers Submission fill out this registration form and send it to ihc@fcsh.unl.pt

First Name:  Family Name:

Position: Professor/ Associate Professor/ Assistant Professor/ Lecturer/ Ph.D Candidate/ Postgraduate/ Independent Researcher etc..

University/Organization/Job:
Detailed Post Address (Important!):
City: 

Country:

Postcode:
Telephone: Mobile (Important): Email (Important):

Paper Title: Abstract (max 200 words)

Contact information:
Instituto de Hist�ria Contempor�nea/ Faculdade de Ci�ncias Sociais e Humanas (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Av. de Berna, 26 C
1069-061 Lisboa, Portugal
E-Mail: ihc@fcsh.unl.pt

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk