On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance

Colleagues,

Organic movements which form as a reaction to power and authority are a distinct tradition of organised societies. The very term 'resistance' is a live, dynamic feature of popular culture and the political imagination. In an impressive new book by Howard Caygill we have one of the few attempts to interpret the philosophical and practical roots of the tradition of resistance.

I particularly welcome this book as it provides a means by which current forms of protest and resistance can be best analysed - not least because protest and resistance are as much a necessary feature of the early 21st century as they have ever been historically.

The book has a great historical sweep and draws in the theory and activism of the usual suspects (Ghandi, Satre, Fanon et al) whilst ensuring that it provides a suitable nod towards the increasing relevance of technology and social media to constuct and portray a means of resistance..

At £20 this book is well worth buying and although isn't always easily digestible (Caygill is a philosopher by trade and pursues the book from this discipline) it delivers a means by which we can better interpret, analyse and understand the nature and purpose of contemporary protest and liberation movements as forms and patterns of resistance. Put simply, any activist worth their salt should have the capacity to analyse from where they come, and the ability to project how to get to where they want to be - this book helps.

There are some excellent reviews out there - themselves worth reading as a form of introduction e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/07/resistance-philosophy-defiance-howard-caygill-review

In Solidarity

Ian

RIP John 'Bill' Hughes

Colleagues,

As an ex-Ruskin student and now proud member of staff I have an inveterate snobbery about the place and position of Ruskin College in the history and tradition of the British labour movement. The tired old phrase I often drag out (I will have to find a new one) is that it would be difficult to write a definitive history of either the British labour movement and/or trade union education without an inclusion of the role of Ruskin.

With the sad news of the death of former principal John 'Bill' Hughes on 1st November this history and tradition is exemplified in his personal story. Bill Hughes retired as Principal just as I was starting at Ruskin in 1989 and he made way for Stephen Yeo. Despite his retirement Bill's legacy loomed large still not least because of his role in contributing to trade union collective bargaining strategy via the establishment of the Trade Union Research Unit (TURU). His own personal contribution to the day-to-work of trade unions was impressive, as was his contribution to the work of Labour governments in devising and implementing policy on labour and economic matters.

Bill's daughter Katherine went on to work at Ruskin and has penned this short statement which appears on the College web site. I just felt it important to add a personal note of recognition to someone who played a vital role in building and maintaining Ruskin's reputation as a College of and for trade unionism.

John Hughes, former Principal of the College, died peacefully in Headington aged 86 on Friday November 1st 2013.


John’s funeral will be on Thursday 14th November at 1.45pm at St Andrew’s, Old Headington. The coffin will process from Rockery Cottage and people are welcome follow.


John joined the College staff in 1958, under Bill Hughes, as Tutor in Economic, Politics and Industrial Relations and as resident tutor at Ruskin Hall. Prior to that he had worked for the WEA and Sheffield and Hull Universities designing and teaching educational programmes for miners and steelworkers, many of whom became Ruskin students.


John became Vice-Principal in 1970 and in 1979, Principal. He retired in 1989 to continue his trade union work in other ways.


John's time at Ruskin spanned important times in the Labour Movement and left wing and civil rights politics. His contributions were manifold. In 1966 he established, with Roy Moore, Denis Gregory and Sue Hastings, the Trade Union Research Unit, which produced dozens of research papers, trade union pay claims and political arguments for all the major trade unions ranging from the NUM, TGWU, NUT, the National Union of Seamen and many more. In 1974 he and Roy Moore wrote for The Miners, A special Case (Penguin 1974) which played a key role in the Miners' Strike of that year. He wrote widely too about European Labour issues, often with Ken Coates.


He worked closely with trade union leaders at the Oxford car plants helping to improve pay and conditions there. Thereto he worked with Labour Ministers in the Wilson Government and sat on the Prices Commission.


John's other and related passion was Adult Education. He believed that everyone was intelligent and condemned all too often to a limited educational experience and dreary employment with inadequate pay and poor conditions. Ruskin's role should be to give the best possible educational experience to people who would use it to advance the conditions of their fellow men and women. He established the tutorial system at Ruskin and ensured that students had access to the key Labour Movement minds of the day.


John was an approachable and modest person with the common touch. He had no snobbery or desire for self-aggrandisement, turning down many Professorships to stay at his beloved College. He liked nothing better than to sit down with students or shop stewards and talk politics and tactics chat and argue with students in corridors, and join the contingents on demonstrations.

John's wife, Vi, became Literature tutor in 1961 retiring in 1982. His daughter, Katherine, was a Tutor from 1986-2007.


John was very much a family man and leaves daughers Katherine, Stella, Nicola and Kirsty, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
 
Katherine Hughes 4th November 2013

In Memory & Solidarity

Ian

The Future of Organised Labour: MA ILTUS @ Ruskin College



Colleagues,

 

I am now recruiting the next cohort of the MA in international labour and trade union studies (ILTUS) at Ruskin College, Oxford. If you follow this blog you'll know that I report on my work, and that of other teachers and students, regularly. I am proud to say that Ruskin still plays a major role in the delivery of trade union education, and the MA ILTUS is the only programme of its type in the UK.

 

I have compiled this short promotional video having interviewed graduating students of the 2010-12 cohort who attended their graduation ceremony in August, and current students who were attending a residential workshop in September to prepare for their second year of part-time study in 2014-15. These are trade union activists and officials from the UK and overseas and offer a snapshot of their view on what they have gained from the MA and/or why they enrolled.

 

I would be very grateful if you would signpost interested colleagues to this clip. My contact details appear at the end and interested trade unionists are invited to attend a comprehensive open day on Saturday 15th Nov and in 2014: 8th Feb, 22nd March and 7th June. This is a great way to meet current students and discuss their MA experience informally over lunch, read examples of the outstanding research completed by past students and see samples of the books, journals etc., read by students as part of their MA study. Thanks! Ian

 

A Great Day for our Labour Movement

Colleagues, Yesterday at Ruskin College students of the BA in international labour and trade union studies (ILTUS) graduated. This was an important historical moment in Ruskin's history of providing labour movement education as these women and men comprised the first two cohorts from 2006 and 2007 to commence what was then a new venture for Ruskin in providing higher education opportunities for activists and officials. As our sisters and brothers graduated today I was reminded of the quote by Cesar Chavez: Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity? Although I feel that the BA ILTUS (magnificently led by my colleague Tracy Walsh) does strive to get the very best out of students, and does so with a profound sense of the role of trade unions infocusing on issues of humanity and the pursuit of social justice, actually, as trade union teachers our trade union students strive to ensure that they get the best out of us also. The pics are: The Class of 2006! Me and Joan Allen. I've known Joan for years as she moved from being a UNISON activist to a rep for UNITE. A first class trade unionist, and one who I tricked into enrolling on the BA knowing that she could do it - and here she is graduating! Me, Andy Wells and Tracy. Andy produced an outstanding dissertation on community unionism and I am proud to say that I supervised his dissertation. Me and Simon Taylor, another student who produced an outstanding dissertation that I supervised on social enterprise and the response of UNISON. Me and Bill Ryan. Bill was one of the first students I ever taught way back in 1993 when I first started TU teaching for the WEA. Me and Russ Grieg. I knew Russ when he started his pathway to Ruskin via a diploma course in labour studies at Ruskin. Russ was one of the UNITE representatives at Northern Rock who helped negotiate the first big bailout following the economic crisis - what a story! Sorry that all this text is packed together, the blog website doesn't appear to be functioning as normal today, but I was desparate to post the pics.

Notoriously Militant: Invitation to a Book Launch

Colleagues,

Notoriously Militant is the title of a new book which explores the rise of organised labour at the Ford plant in Dagenham. This title could equally be applied to its author, Sheila Cohen, trade union activist and academic who has contributed much to the analysis of the roots of the crisis of British trade unionism and has helped to project a way forward - her last book Ramparts of Resistance should be essential reading for any trade unionist with a concern about the future of trade unionism in the UK.

Sheila has very kindly agreed to speak at Ruskin College (16th Nov at 7pm) as part of her book launch activity. Please come along and bring a guest. The talk will form part of the residential workshop of students of the MA in international labour and trade union studies (ILTUS) that I run at Ruskin.

The blurb for the book provides this overview:

In 1946, after a series of stormy strikes and a mass occupation at Ford's plant in Dagenham, Essex, thousands of workers came together in a new branch of the Transport and General Workers Union. Later, in the early 1980s, a band of dedicated workplace activists brought branch 1/1107 to explosive life with support for working-class causes from equal opportunities to the stunningly effective boycott of parts for South Africa.

Notoriously Militant, which takes as its title a tabloid journalist's verdict on the branch, covers the history of Ford's Dagenham plant - and its roots in Henry Ford's early US activities - from 20th-century shop-floor struggles to the 21st-century fight against plant closure. Based on original research and oral history, Notoriously Militant offers a primer for activists and analysts on the confrontation between worker militancy and the rigours of "Fordism".

This book is a lively popular history looking at -

Working-class history as made daily by so-called "ordinary" workers
Crucial questions of direct democracy and membership participation which can offer highly relevant lessons for today's activists and strategists
Links between basic workplace struggles and - potentially - revolutionary conflict
The pressures towards "co-operation" between union and management - and the consequences
The interweaving of gender and ethnicity issues with the class-based structures of a major industrial workplace.

More than a history of structures - a lively popular history!
To buy a copy go here: http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/acatalog/NOTORIOUSLY-MILITANT.html

To buy Ramparts of Resistance go here: http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745315294&

See you on 16th Nov!

In Solidarity

Ian

20/10 Day of Action on Blacklisting

Colleagues,

The news this week that construction firms will compensate blacklisted trade unionists was met with a mixture of scepticism and accomplishment. There is some noteable querying of how and whether firms will measure the degree of harm done as a result of blacklisting, and similarly whether they will incur any additional liabilities as a result of awarding compensation. There is however, some sense of achievement on the release of the news, not least amongst those groups who have led this fight and left the firms and Parliament with no room to view this struggle as one that will be droppped.

The primary campaign organisation here is the Blacklist Support Group and here's the group's comment on the compensation annoucement: http://www.hazards.org/blacklistblog

Hot on the heels of the compensation annoucement comes a call from the TUC for a day of action on blacklisting: http://www.tuc.org.uk//workplace-issues/employment-rights/health-and-safety/own-pay-clean-tuc-day-action-blacklisting

All unions have signed up to this and it includes a lobby of Parliament and a call for a full public inquiry to investigate, for example, collusion between the police and UK intelligence agencies on the gathering of 'information' on trade unionsts and the disclosure of this to firms directly to dubious outfits like the Consulting Association who then sold this information on on a commercial basis.

There are profound civil liberties and human rights issues here, and the Coalition should commit itself to allow an inquiry to unearth the detail and legislate against its reoccurence. Given the complex, close associations between construction firms, property developers and the Conservative Party however, it is highly likely that they will dismiss the call for an inquiry -which in turn makes the demand even more urgent.

Do what you can to support the day of action and keep following/supporting the work of the Blacklisting Support Group.

In Solidarity

Ian

New Forms of Worker Organisation

Colleagues,

I am very pleased to annouce a visit to Ruskin College next year by Manny Ness as part of a UK tour to launch his latest book, New Forms of Worker Organisations.

Manny's output is of central relevant to the labour and trade union studies students at Ruskin as his work has focused on an exploration of how best labour movements respond to the changing needs of workers and the rapid changes across the US labour market drawing in, for example, mass waves of documented and undocumented migrants.

This new book takes a step back and explores new labour movements and organisations - particularly rooted in syndicalist approaches to worker mobilisation - and asks whether these approaches are indicative of a positive turning point in labour's response to a neo-liberal globalisation.

There is a great accompanying website for the launch of the book and I'd encourage you to review the contents and ultimately get a copy: http://www.workerorganization.org/what-theyre-saying/

As a taster here a couple of review comments:

Immanuel Ness has added another book to his excellent series for understanding the survival strategies of the politically most profound, yet most deprived section of the citizens, during the last almost five centuries. I expect this book to stimulate the fresh debate on what de-politicization of the working class amounts to. Besides, after reading the chapters in this work, the question that haunts the liberal minds is why is this unprecedented intolerance of capitalism occurring at a mature stage of its development? Autonomist restoration is born of the spectacle of irrationality. Its impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos; it protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end. These essays are most likely to throw challenges to the conventional economics of collective bargaining.
Debdas Banerjee, Professor of Economist, Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, India and author, Labour, Globalization and the State.

By organizing a strike or going out on the street to protest with demands against the bastions of capital, labor activists rarely think about the historical significance of what they are doing. This collection of vivid chapters of major labor struggles reveals the essential nature of the labor movement in the last quarter century. Here in Russia, this book will be very useful as we need to learn the international experience of workers’ struggles.
Vadim Bolshakov, trade unionist and labor movement activist since 1989.  From 2005 to 2009, Bolshakov was coordinator of the Committee of Solidarity Actions in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

In Solidarity

Ian