Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 1960’s covert activities in Latin America

Sweatshops and monoposony power 

Thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Block "Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed  there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations." In the name of the communist ideal

Clause IV: the enduring controversy

Capital vs labour  in Indonesia, Germany, India, Turkey, Russia ...

The International Trade Union Confederation is releasing to the world the results of its annual Global Rights Index: Trade unionists were murdered in ten countries - Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Zimbabwe.  85% of countries have violated the right to strike.  80% of countries deny some or all workers collective bargaining. The number of countries which exclude workers from the right to establish or join a trade union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019. Workers had no or restricted access to justice in 72% of countries. The number of countries where workers are arrested and detained increased from 59 in 2018 to 64 in 2019. Out of 145 countries surveyed, 54 deny or constrain free speech and freedom of assembly. Authorities impeded the registration of unions in 59% of countries. Workers experienced violence in 52 countries.  Full report: ITUC Global Rights Index 2019

Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism’s history and presents a realistic vision for its future

The lives of African fruit pickers in Italy

The story of "The Tolpuddle Martyrs". A group of 19th century English farm labourers who formed one of the first trade unions and started a campaign to receive fair wages. Comrades

UK The business of this country is business. "I'm a trade unionist, not a terrorist" 

Coca-Cola as a serial human rights offender

Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant launched a  2001 protest against what they called “a strange Newspeak,”  or “NewLiberalSpeak” that included words like “globalization,” “governance,” “employability,” “underclass,” “communitarianism,” “multiculturalism” and “their so-called postmodern cousins.” Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that this discourse obscures “the terms ‘capitalism,’ ‘class,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘domination,’ and ‘inequality,’” as part of a “neoliberal revolution,” that intends to “remake the world by sweeping away the social and economic conquests of a century of social struggles. This is a society characterized by the deliberate dismantling of the social state and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal state, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the ʻshareholder-valueʼ conception of the firm, and their sociological effects: the generalization of precarious wage labour and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic activity.

Britain Michael Roberts reporting from a Labour Party conference Models of public ownership and   Why did Labour lose in 1983? "In a way, the myth that it was the 'hard Left' that cost Labour the election is an inverted form of Bennite optimism. It lays all the emphasis upon ideology, agency and leadership, albeit in a thin, polemical way that asks no searching questions of the Labour Right and Centre, long its dominant forces. But, then as now, agency and leadership turn out to depend on far bigger historical processes. And it's their obliviousness to those larger processes that leaves Corbyn's right-wing critics out in the cold, fantasising about re-staging the battles of the 1980s."

Britain " this account rather downplays the role of collectivities, especially trade unions, which probably did more to shape Britain’s distinctive labour relations, and certainly did more to sustain working-class incomes, than any state programme. More troubling to me, however, is the way Renwick’s teleological narrative approach limits the analytical power of the book. We are told a story of how this welfare state came about, but because there is neither a comparative framework nor any real analysis of the way social structures (not just people) shape both visions and outcomes, the distinctiveness of Britain’s choices never really emerges. The book does provide a good and readable account of the making of the Beveridgean welfare state. But without a sharper analytical focus, and especially some attention to Beveridge’s ideas about how to provide income security without disordering family life, the book not only ignores the welfare state’s disciplinary function but also rather

Morocco DOHA must reinstate 540 dismissed workers