Global Labour Journal

Marx, Automation and the Future of Work

Arif Kosar — 2024-05-31

The ever-increasing use of automation technologies in the manufacturing process has again raised concerns about the future of work. A considerable number of left-wing thinkers argue that, with the wave of automation, we see a dissolution of the foundations of a work-based capitalist society, and that a new society has emerged spontaneously. Marx’s studies have been referenced, more or less, in most of these analyses. Efforts to base this thesis that we are moving into a post-work society on Marx are highly speculative. In Marx’s analysis, automation and proletarianisation are two facets in the process of accumulation of capital that function together. A small number of workers and technology-intensive manufacturing in some sectors make labour-intensive production necessary in other sectors and countries. Today’s available data and trends also indicate that Marx’s analysis of automation in the context of accumulation of capital is still applicable.

Metabolic politics

Simon Schaupp — 2024-05-31

Work is at the centre of the social metabolism with nature. This means that industrial relations (IR) are always also environmental politics. This article reviews core contributions to IR literature, showing that they do not systematically address this role of nature and separate the politics of work from their ecological basis. Drawing on historical case studies of the processing of three core products of capitalist modernity (fossil fuels, meat and concrete), the article presents the heuristic of metabolic politics in which nonhuman nature is conceptualised as an autonomous force in IR rather than a mere context of it. This approach allows analysis to systematically take into account the effects of IR on nonhuman nature as well as nature’s own shaping of IR. Such an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the entanglement of IR with climate change and the broader ecological crisis.

Adaptation Strategies: Labour Education, Climate Crisis and the UK Trade Union Movement

Stuart Tannock — 2024-05-31

A growing number of climate activists and scholars argue that an effective climate movement needs the involvement of the trade union movement, to be able to push forward the radical social transformations required to address the global climate crisis. This article analyses the recent focus on climate adaptation in labour education and action by trade unions in the UK. Climate adaptation is inherently political, and this article analyses the agendas driving the turn to adaptation, the possibilities that adaptation strategies open up, and some of their risks and limitations. Climate adaptation strategies, the article argues, could represent an important step forward for developing effective labour education and action on the climate crisis, but only if these strategies enable unions to mobilize a focus on the root causes of the crisis, agitate for structural change, and attend to the global and not just local concerns of worker, social and climate justice.

“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”: Thai Farmworkers in Israel in the Wake of War

Matan Kaminer — 2024-05-31

There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidating control over broad stretches of frontier, as well as the ideological purpose of emblematising the Jewish people’s return to its land (Shafir, 1989; Neumann, 2011). However, pace the emergent orthodoxy in settler-colonial studies – which has recently been subjected to strident critiques, not least in the Palestinian/Israeli context – Israeli agriculture has not, for the most part, been characterised by an “eliminationist” attitude towards indigenous labour or by a serious commitment to exclusively employing the labour of settlers.[1] In fact, Israeli agriculture, like other low-wage sectors of the economy, has nearly always depended on Palestinian labour. When the First Intifada of 1987 to 1991 convinced Israeli policymakers that this dependency was dangerous, their response was to replace it not with the more expensive labour of Israeli citizens, but with the similarly cheap and skilled labour of migrant workers. The farm sector would quickly come to recruit the bulk of its workforce from Thailand, while continuing to employ thousands of Palestinians.

Far Right times in Argentina: Social and Labor Conflicts in the Beginnings of Milei’s government.

Clara Marticorena — 2024-05-31

Last November, the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei won the presidential elections in Argentina. His triumph has deepened the economic, social and political crisis which the country has been in for several years.

Editorial: Hamba kahle, Eddie Webster: A luta continua!

The Editors — 2024-05-31

Book Review Symposium 1

Michael Burawoy — 2024-05-31

Book Review Symposium 2

Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo — 2024-05-31

Professor Edward Webster, affectionately known as Eddie, breathed his last on 5 March 2024, twenty-four days before his eighty-second birthday. Eddie was healthy and had just participated in a run. The shocking untimely death has left a profound void. His impactful research work, integrating a consistent focus on work and labour, spanned decades, dating back to the early 1970s. Eddie went beyond just researching and publishing – activities in which he engaged extensively. He was an engaged intellectual, actively involved in the emancipatory working-class movement to change the world he researched. Writing with Lynford Dor, Webster defends the power resources approach which identifies the sources of workers' power and includes a focus on workers' resistance to exploitation in pursuit of their interests. Webster successfully challenges the “end of labour thesis” using evidence-based sectoral case studies from a selection of global South countries. He brought together contributions by other scholars in the edited book. The “end of labour thesis” can also be challenged from the standpoint of the labour theory of value. However, this is not part of the authors’ chosen approach, which suffices on its own merits.