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Showing posts with the label unions

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”?  Even the review does tell us almost nothing about how much Malcolm Harris incorporates ‘the world’ in his book. “ Malcolm Harris’s new book shows how Californian capitalism has thrived by exploiting an unequal world.” Which world? the world from Mexico to China and from Congo to India? Not a world about how the title relates to this world. The review informs us that the book is about California and capitalism. Nick Burns: “Most glaring is the mismatch between the book’s stated purpose and its actual content.  For most of its 700 frustrating pages,  Palo Alto  refuses to be the very thing it insists that it is: a history of capitalism. A “fitting bookend to Harris’s opening, equally earnest assertion that Palo Alto is “haunted” not only by the spectre of communism but also by supernatural forces – hardly suits the sober realism that the book’s subject demands.”

A Union for Starbucks’ Workers?

“ Currently none of Starbucks' 8,000 US cafes is unionised, meaning the world's biggest coffee house chain is under no obligation to negotiate with staff over pay and conditions. But the baristas hope to change that at five cafes in Buffalo, setting a precedent that could disrupt the firm's business practices much more widely.” One Starbucks at a time Related

New Forms of Industrial Action

"New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public ser
"With the adoption of these labor reforms, France is passing through the first chapters of a familiar story across the west. Changes sold to the public as a means of reducing unemployment have, in fact, resulted in a wave of layoffs." Macron's attack on workers
I like this to-the-point piece. It hits the nail on the head of what is fundamental: capital, class and the state. " Parties on the left can carry on believing that capitalism can be tamed at a transnational level, even though all the available evidence is that this is not going to happen. They can seek to use the power of the state for progressive ends, even though this will be strongly resisted. Or they can sit and watch as the predators munch their way through their prey. Even for the predators, this would be a disastrous outcome." Think that governments can no longer control capitalism? You've been duped.
Note the loose use of the term "Islamism" in the article . "Were I 20 today, would I be attracted to Islamism or desire to become a soldier of Islamic State.? " Today’s angry young Islamists are not interested in the fight against austerity, the defence of the NHS or even in the struggle against racism. They are obsessed, rather, in showing solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and Chechnya and Syria. In an age in which anti-imperialist movements have faded and belief in alternatives to capitalism dissolved, radical  Islam  provides the illusion of being part of a global movement for change."
The article implies that France, unlike Spain and Germany, has not carried out enough market reforms thus the clash will happen when  Macron will try to slash here and cut there. The Socialist Parti in France has been timid in implementing "neo-liberalism": "the public sectorbis still big, the unions are powerful, the social benefits are too good ..."  Despite of what has happened, the leading business and mainstream media defend the continuation of the "neo-liberal" project. For them the "centre" has to hold. In the case of France, Macron is their best candidate to save the Centre and implement the reforms the ruling class has been pushing for. " Social unrest is France's biggest risk "
"[T]he  aspiration of fractions of the Islamic bourgeoisie to strengthen their positions in the power structure, or rather to modify the place they occupy within the confessional political system, in order to better share the hegemony and not to change the system . . . This solution is not actually a solution; it will lead only to a worsening of the crisis of the system." — Mehdi Amel Hezbollah and the Workers
The Financial Times:  "Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries." Richad Seymour: "This is, of course, the way that social class is talked about in the US, but it isn't a helpful way to proceed. Apart from overlooked the glut of uneducated managers, supervisors, CEOs and owners, and forgetting the deliberate expansion of higher education to skill up workers, the trope allows on e to say that the working class are a bunch of thickos. Trump's support came from diverse social classes. Education wasn't that big a predictor of the outcome either: college graduates were *overrepresented* in Trump's support (in part because they are overrepresented in the electorate). The big thing that happened with the working class in this election is that most of them didn't vote."  Richard Rorty, a philosopher and social