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

by Robert Ovetz (Editor)

Rumors of the death of the global labor 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, organizational forms and objectives. These workers' inquiries, from call center workers to platform, trucking, cleaning, logistics, mining, auto factories, teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energizing unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organizations.

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.

Genres: Politics, Labor

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2020

Reviews

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly lots of great work went into the creation of this anthology. Many of the essays in here suffered from the tendency in sociology to resort to listing facts without drawing theoretical lessons - although perhaps this is only a weakness from my own perspective as someone mainly interested in the theory of workers' inquiry. With that said, many of the essays were also of exceptional quality in my view. Those to which I find myself returning are Ovetz, Hattingh and McKinley, and Monaco's chapters.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of 'workers' inquiries', although I do doubt whether this term can apply to a number of these texts that are barely more than standard academic studies. The introduction seems to have a confused understanding of the term 'militant co-research', and the term 'workers' inquiry from above' seems to be trying and failing to argue that some of these pieces of research are something that they are not. Although the premise of the book is good and important in my opinion, and the articles within it nonetheless remain interesting, it fail to live up to this premise of using workers' inquiry to gain an understanding of global class composition. That being said, there are a number of more impressive texts in this collection, such as that written by Anna Curcio on women logistics workers in Italy, and that by Notes from Below on class composition in the UK.

[Phillipa Fleur · Rating 5 out of 5]

We need more books like this.