Friday 31 January 2014

"Bread and freedom" conference on labour and movements today

The organisers of this conference are very open to participation from trade unionists, other activists and research students:

‘Bread, Freedom and Social Justice’: Organised Workers and Mass Mobilizations in the Arab World, Europe and Latin America
10 July 2014 - 11 July 2014
CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT - SG1&2
Convenors: Sian Lazar and Anne Alexander (University of Cambridge)

The wave of protest against neo-liberalism which swept through Latin America in the early years of the 21st Century, the Arab Revolutions of 2011, the anti-austerity and Occupy movements in Europe and North America are connected by a common thread: the demand for economic justice. This international conference will provide the first opportunity for scholars, journalists and activists from Argentina, the UK, the US, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Tunisia and beyond to compare the challenges faced by the Latin American movements with the experience of mobilizations for similar demands in the Arab world and Europe since 2011. We will focus especially on the interactions between organised workers and the unemployed, youth and students who have played a key role in many of the street mobilizations of the past two years as they build alliances, make demands of the state, and attempt to define political and social alternatives to neo-liberalism and austerity.

Workers' strikes and protests played a critical role in propelling the mass movements in Latin America into state power, destabilised dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, and continue to challenge austerity governments across Europe. Yet the role of workers as a collective social actor is significantly underestimated in narratives of the Latin American 'Turn to the Left' and the 'Arab Spring' alike. In an age which commentators have branded an era of social media revolutions, this conference will also provide a space for critical perspectives on the relationship between digital communication and organisational praxis.

We invite papers on the following themes: 

I.    Structural changes in the composition of the working class; and the impact of these on labour-based mobilization and other kinds of mobilizations for economic justice.

II.    Organisational praxis of the struggle for economic justice; potential for cross-fertilization between labour-based movements and those of other social actors, the role of the trade union bureaucracy, also the contributions that trade unionists may make towards sustainability of oppositional protest; the use of social media as a tool for activism; the experience of the Occupy movements

III.    Economic justice and the question of state power;  Can mass mobilizations win the redistribution of  wealth by propelling more progressive regimes into power? Are these mobilizations capable of generating alternative institutions of state power? Can the current struggles for economic justice win their demands without confronting the state directly?

We hope to promote significant comparative and interdisciplinary discussions on the above themes, and invite abstracts of no more than 300 words, to be submitted by 14 March 2014 by email to breadandfreedom2014@gmail.com. Successful applicants will be informed by 24 April 2014.

Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and  the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

"Catastrophism" review

Catherine Friedrich has written an interesting review of Catastrophism by Irish / Bay area activist Jim Davis, Canadian socialist David McNally, Bay area anti-capitalist Eddie Yuen and Against the Grain host Sasha Lilley, online here.

Farewell, Pete Seeger

Singing "We shall overcome" at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. An extraordinary life.

Monday 20 January 2014

"Understanding European movements" gets accelerated paperback release

Understanding European Movements now in paperback; inspection copies available

Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox (eds.),
Understanding European movements: new social movements, global justice struggles, anti-austerity protest
Routledge 2013, 268 pp.

Paperback: £24.95, ISBN 978-1-13-802546-2
Hardback: £80.00, ISBN 978-0-415-63879-1
E-books and inspection copies also available: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138025462/


Due to the high levels of interest, Routledge have given Understanding European Movements an accelerated paperback release, just 6 months after the hardback edition. This has happened faster than reviews could be published (to date only one review is available, in German): the book has sold widely on word of mouth alone and the importance of its subject matter.

European social movements have been central to European history, politics, society and culture, and have had a global reach and impact. Today, six years into a new cycle of movements which have shaken Europe from Iceland to Greece and from Spain to the Ukraine, the need for an adequate understanding of social movements in Europe
is greater than ever. The drive-by commentary of pundits with no real grasp of movements, journalistic anecdotes geared to the attention span of the mainstream news cycle, and the spurious wisdom of commentators who cannot even speak the languages of the movements they are discussing, are no substitute for real, engaged scholarship.

Understanding European movements draws on the the ethnographic and historical research of a new generation of scholars participating in the Council for European Studies' network on social movements to offer a comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of the key dimensions of European movements over the past forty years. The book's editors
are co-founders of the open-access social movements journal Interface and well known in the field. Cristina Flesher Fominaya is also an editor of the journal Social Movement Studies and author of Social movements and globalization: how protests, occupations and uprisings are changing the world (Palgrave) while Laurence Cox is co-editor of Marxism and social movements (Brill) and director of the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

Understanding European movements is a richly-textured book, with chapters exploring the global justice / alterglobalisation movement, anti-nuclear power activism, social centres / squatting, peasant organisation, anti-roads protest, EuroMayDay and climate justice, Indignados and anti-austerity protest and cases from Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Iceland and transnational organising. The book explores the European tradition of social movement theorising, the historical continuities and breaks between different waves of movements in Europe, the construction of social movements on a European scale and the analysis of contemporary anti-austerity movements.

One peer reviewer commented that the book "will fill a big gap in the academic literature on recent and contemporary movements, and on the application of European social movement theory"; another wrote "I'd love to have a book that: introduced students to the Global Justice Movement and the 'anti-austerity' movements; examined the latter movements' continuities with the former, and the continuities of both with even earlier movements; and did all this in terms of European social movement theory".

The first review to be published, by Sabrina Zajak in the Forschungsjournal soziale Bewegungen, commented "This book can be recommended to a wide readership interested in the theory and empirical reality of social movements, but also to readers with a general interest in European history and the history of thought." That readership can now access the book at a paperback price, while those teaching in the field can now offer their students an approach to European movements which is both up-to-date and historically grounded and which covers a wide range of countries and movements without attempting to homogenise them under a single idea.

The Council for European Studies' Reviews and Critical Commentary carried an in-depth interview with Cristina Flesher Fominaya about the book, available online at

http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/understanding-european-movements-new-social-movements-global-justice-struggles-anti-austerity-protest/.

Publishers' website: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138025462/

For fans of EP Thompson...

The journal Past & Present is celebrating the work of E. P. Thompson with a three-part series of special virtual issues.  The first collection is available now and explores his seminal work The Making of the English Working Class.  It features fifteen original articles including E. P. Thompson's "Hunting the Jacobin Fox", which was published posthumously in Past & Present.

The first collection is available free up to the end of March at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/5666/2.

History Workshop Online has published a previously unpublished essay of Thompson's about the politics of education, the relationship between activism and academia, and his own experiences. Available online via http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/reflections-on-jacoby-and-all-that-an-unpublished-essay-by-e-p-thompson/

Saturday 18 January 2014

For the immediate release of Margaretta D'Arcy

From the Global Women's Strike:

Statement to the Press and the Public

We are outraged to learn that our dear sister and colleague Margaretta D’Arcy has been jailed – and for three months! – for protesting the use of the civilian airport at Shannon for US wars.  And we are deeply worried about her health and well-being as a cancer patient.  One of the many public services Ms D’Arcy has performed is to protest the Irish government’s many years of complicity in US war crimes and its destruction of Irish neutrality.  She has been dedicated to highlighting that the most devastating impact of war is on women and our children, both directly from the bombs that rain down on us, and by paying with our poverty for the horrendous weapons of massive destruction that surround us all. 

Ms D’Arcy is a veteran of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, which opposed the US military placing cruise missiles on common land in England, and won – the camp is no longer a military base.  To dissent from a perspective of permanent war and austerity, and demand the protection of life and the planet, is increasingly labelled subversive and even criminal behaviour.  While war criminals are allowed to pass through Irish airports and financial criminals go unpunished, the Irish State in thrall to the US, UK, EU and IMF Masters of War has imprisoned a pensioner who has dedicated herself to highlighting and preventing war crimes.

An attack on courageous and principled Margaretta D’Arcy is an attack on us all.

We demand the immediate release of Margaretta D’Arcy.

Selma James
Global Women’s Strike

Maggie Ronayne
Global Women’s Strike, Ireland