New book summaries
Once again we find ourselves in moments of economic crisis. As we battle through inflation and rounds of devaluation, thousands of workers around the world have lost their livelihoods. Yet amidst this all, we have seen workers across the globe go on strike and protest. A manifestation of these [...]
The history of autogestión demonstrates how academic discourses and pieces of political ideologies circulate and are rearticulated with incredible and unpredictable momentum around the world. Scholarship (even excellent, well-meaning, and even politically committed scholarship) reorganizes this coeval churning of continual mutual influence to obscure some connections and exaggerate others. Prestige scholarship systematically ignores and erases how activism, popular culture, and scholarship from the Global South influence and are appropriated by European and North American scholars. Autogestión, a term I argue was coined by North African revolutionaries, becomes displaced and expropriated to Yugoslavia. In other words, scholarship is very often a process of accumulation by dispossession.
In our new book, we theorise the political economy of marketization in Europe, based on hundreds of interviews with policymakers, businesses, trade unionists, administrators, and more, from various countries and industries. Our central argument is that attempts to extend and intensify principles of market competition in 21st century Europe have tended to shift the balance of power in workplaces away from labour and towards capital, while also shielding market governance from democratic oversight.
Both under apartheid and since, delivery and dispossession have gone hand in hand, the one enabling the other. The trick is not to map them onto mutually distinct historical epochs but to understand how the two concepts work together in novel ways in each period.
Studying clothing stores allows us to examine the basic bread-and-butter issues that pop up across low-wage industries, as well as the bodily demands of organizational fit that are especially salient to brand-based service work.
Even if the workdays and environments of these Gorillas delivery drivers on their bikes look quite different from traditional factories, gig economy platforms might be the paradigmatic factories of contemporary capitalism.
From maritime empires to modern logistics, capitalism has been forged on the seas.
On Sept 16, 2020, Kanye West opened up a conversation about the exploitive nature of record contracts. While Kanye is an imperfect messenger, he is the latest in a long line of recording artists who demonstrate the harmful effects of these contracts. My favorite example is the metaphor of recording [...]
Laleh Khalili's latest book, published earlier this year, is Sinews of War and Trade. In it, she connects the themes of war making in the Middle East found in her earlier work with an examination of the contested role of capital, labor and the state in the region—via the maritime logistics industry. Breathtaking in ambition, her analysis draws on a wide range of materials to provide a long-view historical perspective on the economic and political development of the Arabian peninsula through the unequal playing field of global maritime trade.
I wrote Critical Reflections on Economy and Politics in India: A Class Theory Perspective (published by Brill in 2020) as an attempt to ‘apply’ to the Indian context, some of the general ideas about class presented in my Marxist class theory for a skeptical world (published in 2017). Many scholars argue [...]
