Bücher veröffentlicht von The Merlin Press Ltd

transform! 2023 considers the class character of the contemporary nationstate, its measure of relative autonomyfrom capital, and the left's strategies totransform it. While neoliberalism has cut back the state's function as a guarantorof public welfare, it has strengthened its role as an organiser of global marketisation and finance. However, with thepandemic the crucial necessity of public healthcare services became a burning question for large sections of thepopulation, and worker-led initiatives to transform production and protect the environment raised the question of the state's possible role in socio-ecological transformation.

Is the voice of James Connolly, silenced by a British bullet in 1916, coming back? This book offers a measured consideration of Connolly, alive to his continuing political relevance.

Over the past few years a new breed of multinationals has arrived, almost unnoticed, on the scene. Like early capitalist adventurers, they have found a rich new source of wealth to exploit. But this seam of gold is to be found, not in the mountains of California or the depths of Africa but at the very heart of the welfare states of the developed world. This important collection of essays anatomises the emergence of the 'public services industry' and analyses the way in which government services have been commodified so that they can be privatised or outsourced. It charts the growth of the global companies that have sprung up to supply these services and documents the devastating impact on workers, including work intensification, casualisation, loss of union protection and erosion of occupational identities. It also explores the changing relationship between the state and the private sector and the implications for democracy of developments which transform citizens into shoppers.

George Julian Harney was one of the half-dozen most important leaders of Chartism. This selection from the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle is the first book to reprint any of his journalism. Harney is a key figure in the history of English radicalism.

Supply chains are becoming ever more tightly integrated as corporations vie with each other to bring their products to global markets before they lose their value through replication or obsolescence. This restructuring of supply chains involves the interaction of a range of different public and private, local and global actors, including companies

It is often argued that 'digital labour' or 'virtual work' is fundamentally different from traditional forms of labour carried out offline, with 'work' and 'play' collapsed together to become 'playbour' and new forms of value creation that do not fit traditional economic models. But however 'immaterial' their labour processes, workers still have bodies that become exhausted and require feeding and housing in the 'real' economy. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, this collection takes a critical look at how online work can be theorised and categorised (including revisiting concepts of 'deskilling' developed in the 1970s). It also analyses how the development of online work has meshed with broader trends in organisational restructuring to erode traditional employment norms, time structures and models of behaviour at work, placing new stresses on offline daily life.

This book focuses on the men of the convict transport Eleanor who arrived in NSW in 1831. They were all from the counties of Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire and were transported for their part in the Swing riots - the great agricultural uprising of 1830-31. This episode which touched thirty counties and has been called 'the last peasants' revolt' led to more than 480 people being sent to Australia ('the largest single group in the history of transportation' (George Rude). The men on the Eleanor who made up 30% of the Swing transportees. Part I of the book deals with the men of the Eleanor in their English setting, Part II with their experiences as convicts and free men in New South Wales. The chapter headings below give a clear indication of the contents of each chapter and the focus of the book on ruined and then reconstructed lives Written with full academic apparatus but with that elusive being the general reader in mind, this theme will appeal to that large readership in England which is interested in rural social history and popular protest.In Australia there is a large and enthusiatic readership for books on colonial history, convictism and works which provide a context for family history. This book also has the advantage of being focussed on Hardy's Wessex and is thus, to some extent, a contribution to the regional history of southern England. The Swing Riots are a topic which features in the history syllabuses of most examination boards in southern England.

A study of essential philosophical categories in Marxism.

Shedding light on one of the most remarkable and original figures among German Marxist thinkers, this volume presents a selection of engaging writings by Rosa Luxemburg. Revealing how Luxemburg was one of the earliest victims of fascism and was murdered in Berlin in 1919 for her beliefs, this compilation includes rare pieces previously unavailable in English. Annotated and placed in context, these writings illustrate Luxemburg's aversion to splits in the Labor movement--particularly in Germany and Russia--and examine her thinking about culture, nationalism, and women's rights. Reviews and documentation on the history of the Left are also included.

Can knowledge workers of the world unite? This question becomes ever more urgent as telecommunications technology shrinks the world and as more and more work is based on creating, processing and transporting information. Communications, information and cultural workers hold together the new global value chains that characterise more and more industries. But, with employers responding to global crisis by exerting ever-greater pressure on wages and working conditions, will these workers be able to overcome national and language differences and the divisions between occupational groups to unite against them? This important collection brings together articles from around the world to assess the state of play. From striking IT workers in China to screenwriters in Hollywood, from postal workers to cartoonists, from librarians to logistics workers, what these workers have in common is that their work is not only embedded in global value chains but also necessary for modern communication to function. This includes communication among workers and the organisations that represent them. The message: knowledge workers can learn a lot from each other about how to understand - and resist - the global forces that are shaping their lives. Volume 4, number 2 of the innovative interdisciplinary journal Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation will be of interest to anyone studying the new international division of labour whether this is from the perspective of labour sociology, management theory, economic geography or industrial relations.

Volume 6 Number 1 of the international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal 'Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation focuses on gender in the international division of labour. The new global division of labour is bringing about huge changes in who does what work, how, when and where. But this dynamic new landscape is shaped by some very old forces. The gender division of labour in the home still, directly or indirectly, plays a dominant role in determining the very different experiences of women and men in this new global labour market, although it faces multiple new contradictions and stresses in a context of rising female employment and mass migration: clashes between traditional and modern values; shifting boundaries between work that is paid and unpaid, formal and informal; and a situation where the time pressures on one group of women may only be resolved through the 'grey' labour of others, often migrants. Drawing on research in Asia, Africa, Europe and America, this issue explores and analyses some of these dilemmas and describes how women are addressing them in their daily lives, in the process raising new questions for future research.

This is Volume 4 No 1 of the international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation. When the irresistible force of globalisation meets the immovable object of specific national labour laws, industrial relations and working practices, as the song goes, 'something's gotta give'. This issue explores what gives when work is reshaped in this encounter. Pummeled between the rock of global market forces on the one hand and national laws, traditions and cultures on the other, how is work being reshaped in different industries and countries and what price is being paid by workers in their daily lives? How are national policies and trade union strategies able to resist the impact of global forces? And what other factors are shaping the experience of work in the 21st century?

Call centres illustrate the consequences of globalisation for labour perhaps more clearly than any other form of employment. Call-centre workers sit at the interface between the global and the local, having to transcend the limitations of local time zones, cultures and speech patterns. They are also at the interface between companies and their customers, having to absorb the impact of anger, incomprehension, confusion and racist abuse whilst still meeting exacting productivity targets and staying calm and friendly. Finally, they take the brunt of the conflict at the contested interface between production and consumption, having to deal in their personal lives with the conflicts between the demands of paid and unpaid work. Drawing, amongst others, on organisational theory, sociology, communications studies, industrial relations, economic geography, gender theory and political economy, this important collection brings together survey evidence from around the world with case studies and vivid first-hand accounts of life in call centres from Asia, North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe. In the process it reveals many similarities but also demonstrates that national industrial relations traditions and workers' ability to negotiate can make a significant difference to the quality of working life in call centres.

Communism aims at putting working people in charge of their lives. A multiplicity of Councils, rather than a big state bureaucracy is needed to empower working people and to focus control over society. Mattick develops a theory of a council communism through his survey of the history of the left in Germany and Russia. He challenges Bolshevik politics: especially their perspectives on questions of Party and Class, and the role of Trade Unions. Mattick argues that a The revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the a association of free and equal producersa, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state. Based on the peasantry, but designed with accelerated industrialisation to create an industrial proletariat, they were ready to abolish the traditional bourgeoisie but not capital as a social relationship.This type of capitalism had not been foreseen by Marx and the early Marxists, even though they advocated the capture of state-power to overthrow the bourgeoisie a but only in order to abolish the state itself.a

Was October 1917 a coup d'etat or a social revolution? Writing as both a historian and political activist, Ernest Mandel vigorously reasserts the deep legitimacy of the Russian Revolution. He considers mistakes made by the Bolshevik leadership in 1917-21 and sets out lessons to be learnt.

In 1946, after a series of stormy strikes and a mass occupation at Ford Motor Company'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 a number 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 U.S. activities--from 20th-century shop-floor struggles to the 21st-century fight against plant closure. Based on original research and oral history, this study offers a primer for activists and analysts on the confrontation between worker militancy and the rigors of "Fordism." This book is a lively look at working-class history as made daily by so-called "ordinary" workers, the links between basic workplace struggles and revolutionary conflict, the pressures toward "cooperation" between union and management, and the interweaving of gender and ethnicity issues with the class-based structures of a major industrial workplace.

Globalisation opens up many new choices for employers, both to relocate work and to tap into a flexible labour pool through the use of migrant workers. There is a complex interplay between the movement of jobs to people (offshore outsourcing) and the movement of people to jobs (migration). As well as examining the spatial dynamics of offshore outsourcing, this collection explores some of the ways that both jobs and workers are becoming more mobile, and looks not only at the implications of this for the careers and conditions of workers in footloose employment but also what it means for the workers who are left behind when global forces snatch away their more geographically rooted jobs. Drawing on research carried out in Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America and Asia, this collection brings together a diverse range of studies, in the process providing important new insights into both the barriers to and the enablers of employers' access to a global reserve army of labour. It also demonstrates that global spatial restructuring is not necessarily a single one-off process but typically involves complex mutual adaptation at a local level.

A generation ago, they wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s and facing the imminent triumph of the Right under Margaret Thatcher, they sought to apply our experiences as feminists to creating stronger bonds of solidarity in a new kind of Left movement.

The history of the antiapartheid movement brings up images of boycotts and public campaigns in the UK, but another story went on behind the scenes, in secret.

Based on many original documents, this book surveys Iranian political history from 1941 through 1957, focusing on the Tudeh Party: the only substantial left-wing organization in Iran during this period.

Passing the buck is Volume 5 No 1 of the international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation. Casual labour is often thought of as a hangover from the bad old days, when agricultural workers were hired by the day, homeworkers slaved hidden away in back rooms and street vendors eked out a living in urban slums. Modernisation, new technology, industrialisation and economic development, it might be thought, are doing away with such primitive conditions. Unfortunately, as this volume shows, this is far from being the case. In fact the logic of financialisation and the restructuring of global value chains is leading in precisely the opposite direction, with new forms of casualisation taking place right within the heart of the 'formal' sector, and employees of global corporations experiencing growing precariousness in both developed and developing countries, driven by the pressures of competition in a global economy, This important collection brings together new theoretical insights into the dynamics of the new casualisation of employment, as well as presenting empirical evidence of its spread from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Problems and conflicts within and between European states have taken on new and alarming dimensions as economic crisis and neoliberal austerity policies continue to wreck havoc. The longer essays in transform! 2015 draw connections between newly arising national conflicts, crises in social relations and democracy, and the diminishing appeal of Euro

This biography rescues from obscurity those in the Irish revolutionary movement who, like Sean McLoughlin, not only envisaged, but fought for, an Ireland very different to the impoverished capitalist neo-colony that would come into being after 1922.