When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921
When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921

Author: Robert Ovetz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 9004370331

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The United States looks today much like it did in the late 19th to early 20th century. Open class conflict is disappearing, strikes are becoming rare, unions are declining, corporate power is growing, and work is insecure and contingent. When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 explores one of the most tumultuous times in United States history. Self-organised workers recomposed their power by devising new strategies and tactics to disrupt the capitalist economy and extract concessions. Mine, railroad, steel, and iron workers pursued a strategy of tension that sometimes erupted into militant class conflict and general strikes in which workers took over and ran a number of cities. Turning common wisdom on its head, When Workers Shot Back argues that the escalation of working class conflict drives rather than reacts to the consolidation and reorganisation of capital and economic and political reform of the state. Studying the class composition of this period illustrates why workers escalated the intensity of their tactics, even using tactical violence, to extract concessions and reforms when all other efforts to do so were blocked, coopted or repressed.

Undoing Work, Rethinking Community
Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

Author: James A. Chamberlain

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1501714872

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This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.

Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science
Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science

Author: Clyde W. Barrow

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2024-03-14

Total Pages: 813

ISBN-13: 1800375913

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An indispensable and exemplary reference work, this Encyclopedia adeptly navigates the multidisciplinary field of critical political science, providing a comprehensive overview of the methods, approaches, concepts, scholars and journals that have come to influence the disciplineÕs development over the last six decades.

Capital's Terrorists
Capital's Terrorists

Author: Chad E. Pearson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-10-05

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1469671743

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Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. This book draws together the groups engaged in this kind of violence, reimagining the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances as employers' associations driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests. Though usually discussed separately, all of these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class challengers—former slaves, rustlers, homesteaders of modest means, populists, political radicals, and striking workers—as menacing villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. And perhaps most notably, spokespersons for these respective organizations justified their actions by insisting that they were committed to upholding "law and order." Ultimately, this book suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.

Class War
Class War

Author: Mark Steven

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1839760699

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A bold new history of the global class war A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter. Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict. Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism's regimes and its interstate system. In our age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and planetary unrest, Steven tells the stories of those whose actions will help guide future militants toward a revolutionary horizon.

Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890-1930
Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890-1930

Author: Matteo Millan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-28

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1000342395

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This book provides a comparative and transnational examination of the complex and multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilisation, from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. It retraces the formation of an extensive market for corporate policing, privately contracted security and yellow unionism, as well as processes of professionalisation in strikebreaking activities, labour espionage and surveillance. It reconstructs the diverse spectrum of right-wing patriotic leagues and vigilante corps which, in support or in competition with law enforcement agencies, sought to counter the dual dangers of industrial militancy and revolutionary situations. Although considerable research has been done on the rise of socialist parties and trade unions the repressive policies of their opponents have been generally left unexamined. This book fills this gap by reconstructing the methods and strategies used by state authorities and employers to counter outbreaks of labour militancy on a global scale. It adopts a long-term chronology that sheds light on the shocks and strains that marked industrial societies during their turbulent transition into mass politics from the bitter social conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, and the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s. Offering a new angle of vision to examine the violent transition to mass politics in industrial societies, this is of great interest to scholars of policing, unionism and striking in the modern era.

Digital Platforms and Algorithmic Subjectivities
Digital Platforms and Algorithmic Subjectivities

Author: Emiliana Armano

Publisher: University of Westminster Press

Published: 2022-11-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1914386086

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Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, relationships and preferences are deployed – and black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities. It details technological structures and lived experience of algorithms and the operation of platforms in areas such as crypto-finance, production, surveillance, welfare, activism in pandemic times. Finally, it asks if platform cooperativism, collaborative design and neomutualism offer new visions. Even as problems with labour and in society mount, subjectivities and counter subjectivities here produced appear as conscious participants of change and not so much the servants of algorithmic control and dominant platforms.

The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy
The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy

Author: Immanuel Ness

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-10-31

Total Pages: 627

ISBN-13: 1000726622

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Research on the growth of the precarious economy is of signifi cant interest as the economy increasingly becomes dependent on gig work. However, as platform and automated service work has grown, there remains a chasm in understanding the key aspects of digital labour. This handbook presents comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and historical accounts of the political economy of informal work from the late 20th century to the present. It examines the rich and varied analysis and critique of the informalisation of work, focusing on its most signifi cant theories, intellectual traditions, and authors. It highlights the political, social, cultural, and developmental impact of the deterioration of employment in the Global North and Global South, as well as the extreme threat posed to the planet by the growth of contingent work, poverty, and enduring and increasing inequalities produced and reproduced by the reformation of capitalism in the contemporary age of neoliberal capitalism. The period from the 1980s to the present is marked by the expanded extraction of surplus value from workers through the creation of non-standard jobs and the restructuring of work. A central component of the restructuring of work is the extension of gig employment through the development of algorithmic platforms which direct labourers to perform discrete tasks. This is a definitive collection, representing the primary reference work, contributing to our understanding of the subject. The book is written and presented in a clear manner, accessible to scholars and researchers of international political economy, labour economics, and sociology who are eager for new research examining this phenomenon, as well as specialists in the field of labour relations. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Funded by the University of Amsterdam.