[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [historicalmaterialism] Deadline today: Call for Abstracts: Rethinking Working Class Self-Organization Beyond Unions, Parties, NGOs, and the State

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Tue Aug 2 17:31:28 CEST 2016 

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Date: Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 9:43 PM
Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [historicalmaterialism] Deadline today:
Call for Abstracts: Rethinking Working Class Self-Organization Beyond
Unions, Parties, NGOs, and the State
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*From:* "Historical Materialism News news at historicalmaterialism.org
[historicalmaterialism]" <historicalmaterialism-noreply at yahoogroups.com>
*Date:* 1 augustus 2016 13:20:57 CEST
*To:* historicalmaterialism at yahoogroups.com
*Subject:* *[historicalmaterialism] Deadline today: Call for Abstracts:
Rethinking Working Class Self-Organization Beyond Unions, Parties, NGOs,
and the State*
*Reply-To:* historicalmaterialism-owner at yahoogroups.com



Call for Abstracts: Rethinking Working Class Self-Organization Beyond
Unions, Parties, NGOs, and the State


IMMANUEL NESS, Brooklyn College CUNY, USA, manny.ness at gmail.com
ROBERT OVETZ, SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY, USA, rfovetz at riseup.net

The Journal of Labor & Society, in it’s 21st year, is issuing a call for
the special issue “Workers Beyond Unions, Parties, NGOs, and the State?” to
rethink how workers organize and struggle. Co-edited by Robert Ovetz,
Ph.D., a political science lecturer San Jose State University, and Gifford
Hartman, an independent San Francisco, USA based scholar, the issue seeks
submissions from scholars, organizers, and activists critically reexamining
the multiplicity of forms of class struggle outside of and inside unions,
parties, NGOs, and the state happening around the world.

The rapidly declining power and influence of unions are source of great
concern. Their coninuous decline have presented both a threat and an
opportunity. As the number of contingent workers explodes and union density
worldwide remains stagnant or declines, the effort of workers to
self-organize continues to grow. The absence or weakness of unions does not
mean the absence of class struggle. Freed of the contract, workers are
engaging in short, sharp disruptive direct action and strikes to shift the
balance of power on the shopfloor and in the community. But these actions
are often ad hoc, locally focused and unsustainable. Despite these
limitations, workers are finding new ways to self-organize on the shopfloor
and circulate their efforts throughout the social factory. The composition
of capital’s power over the past 40 years has been a continual effort to
respond to the dynamic recomposition of working class struggle.

This issue would explore what working class recomposition looks like by
examing case studies of efforts to devise new tactics and strategies of
self-organization. Ideally, this issue will include critical analyses of a
diversity of self-organized workers struggles from several critical
regions. Among the struggles that could be potentially covered would be the
following:


   - Brazilian Landless Workers Movement’s efforts to seize land and build
   a parallel social system
   - Spainish workers blocking evictions and foreclosures
   - Mexican workers seizure of an entire neighborhood to reorganization of
   it into an autonomous community
   - Bolivian miners, coca growers, and street sellers in El Alto who
   formed community councils that shut down the entire country in the early
   2000s and propelled the MAS into power
   - Latin American women struggling over the Bolsa Família social wage in
   Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela
   - Industrial workers and miners in India, China, and South Africa who
   bypass established unions to self-organize their own wildcat strikes
   - Kurdish workers self-organized local governance and militias in
   Rojava, Syria during the civil war
   - Wildcat strikes in Egypt during the Arab Spring
   - Union backed service workers in the US who have been organizing to
   disrupt production, protest contingency, and raise wages without seeking to
   collectively bargain
   - Wildcat strikes by logistics workers (eg, truckers, longshore,
   warehouse, etc.) and public employees
   - European anti-austerity movements



Why This Issue is Important

The focus of this issue of the Journal of Labor & Society will be on worker
organizing beyond unions, parties and NGOs that channel and constrain
organizing over the “contract” and into the state through advocacy,
elections and reform. These examples above are rich with several vital
lessons for worker self-organization we wish to see explored in this issue.
First, workers are contesting the organizational dominance of unions by
bypassing and challenging the traditional model of unions limited to
bargaining over wages, hours, grievances, working conditions, and labor
law. Second, these struggles are also transcending parties, NGOs, and the
state at a time of growing widespread resistance to the imposition of
neo-liberal policy by labor, social democratic and left leaning parties
backed by NGOs, unions, and ruling elites in Europe and Latin America. Such
institutions divert conflict by harnessing workers to the state and
capitalism thus diluting the power of self-organized workers. (S. Marcos,
R. Zibechi, M. Glaberman, G. Esteva, and G. Rawick)

Drawing on the autonomous marxist, anarchist, and syndicalist critiques of
unions and the self-organization of workers (V. Burgmann, S. Lynd, H.
Cleaver, and P. Linebaugh) this issue would explore how workers are
devising new forms of organizing to confront capital at work and throughout
the social factory (S. Federici, S. James, M. Dalla Costa, and M. Tronti)
signaling a turning point in what it means to organize a “union.”

The debate over whether unions should follow the “service” or “member
organizing” model or through parties, NGOs or the state is moot. Workers
are transforming their organizing into a global uprising that continues to
disrupt the global accumulation and circulation of capital by transforming
the struggle over work into a struggle to circulate class power into all
spheres of life. As capital seeks to colonize all aspects of life so has
working class struggle expanded to meet this threat. The question this
issue seeks to explore is what is the form of the currently emerging
recomposition of working class power?

Publication Plans

   - After the solicitation of abstracts we will invite full manuscripts
   for publication in the June 2017 issue of the Journal of Labor & Society.
   - Abstracts (maximum 500 words, attached as .pdf or .docx files) due by
   August 1, 2016
   - Invitation to submit full manuscript will be sent August 21, 2016
   - Manuscripts (5,000-7,500) due February 21, 2017
   - Special issue of the Journal of Labor & Society will be published in
   June 2017
   -

Published in
http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/deadline-today-call-for-abstracts-rethinking-working-class-self-organization-beyond-unions-parties-ngos-and-the-state

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