Just back from a relaxing, exhausting, exhilarating two weeks in Morroco, with my family.
As a north African country Morocco reflects positive global currents of militant worker/social resistance in the national context of an entrenched colonial-era constitutional monarchy.
As is shown by the ITUC's Global Rights Index for 2014 (http://tinyurl.com/mena9k8) the over weaning powers of the current monarchy, despite putative governmental reform, allows national and multinational companies and corporations to act with impunity in their violation of workers' rights.
Even Danone, a company supposedly operating in part under an international framework agreement, and often reported upon positively by the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) feels free to operate in a wholly arbitrary, vindictive manner as evidenced by both the Index for 2014 and also the ITUC's sister survey on violations of trade union rights: http://survey.ituc-csi.org/Morocco.html?lang=en.
How best can we perceive of and analyse arguably contradictory currents of resistance on the one hand and autocratic state/corporate power on the other?
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We Make our own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight on Neo-Liberalism was released by Pluto Books on 20th August, and follows hot on the heels of their 2013 publication Marxism and Social Movements co-edited with Colin Barker and John Krinsky.
The introduction to the 2013 publication is here (http://tinyurl.com/m6ohm96) and is worth a browse as the latest book covers similar themes and pick ups where the prior ends as in essence both books focus on how best to generate a Marxist theory of social movements.
The essential reference point for each book is how best to understand, analyse and translate diverse movements within a coherent framework in order to gauge, for example, whether and how such movements are replicable in diverse contexts.
Both books are, I argue, essential reading for labour and trade union studies students who wish to gain some sense of the historical and contemporary relevance and interrelationship of workplace inspired/based protest/action and wider protest/action/movements for social justice and of oppositional politics.
I am yet to read reviews of the 2014 publication (I don't take much stock of book reviews but read them all the same) but I am generally cautious about the notion of that we are in or approaching a twilight of neo-liberalism.
I cannot fault in anyway the canvas of myriad, collective, global protest and action that Cox and Nilsen paint, however, the forecast of a decline in the factors which coalesce to inform and construct neo-liberal dogma and policy are, if anything, in the ascendancy as a result of austerity-era economic policy.
In this article published soon before the release of the new book there is a convincing argument made for the need to better understand and comprehend an increasingly sustained, integrated body of global protest emanating from the outcome of neo-liberal policy: http://tinyurl.com/q7mtmfh.
Even the article itself however appears to suggest that the rise in militant action is symptomatic of an increasingly aggressive form of state/corporate power pursued at local, regional and international level. I argue that one is largely reflective of the other, not in any significant sense combating or overcoming the other.
This is not to diminish in anyway the profound importance of such struggle (nor 2013 and 2014 publications - both well worth buying), particularly in the global south, more to caution against an assumption that the fight is nearing an end. I don't see enough evidence of this.
In Solidarity
Ian
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