Search results
Introduction In this chapter, we focus on three interrelated factors that affect workers’ ability to influence their employment relationship and which are therefore critical determinants of the balance of power between capital and labour. The first addresses the general nature and changing role of the state as a social and institutional actor and the extent to which it has undermined the role of worker voice through the decollectivisation of employment relations. The second focuses on a key dimension of the state by considering the role of the law per se in
10 The State and the trade: the drink question at the turn of the century It has come to be a struggle for mastery between the State and a trade, and the time has fully come for a decision of the question – Who is to be master? (Arthur Wellesley Peel) Every government that has ever touched alcohol has burnt its fingers in its lurid flames. (David Lloyd George) When, in 1903, Sidney and Beatrice Webb described the late eighteenth century as ‘the most remarkable episode in the whole history of publichouse licensing in England’ they were wrong. What they had no
From the publication of the Discourse , Ascham stated the necessity to obey the civil magistrate that ruled with equity and de facto held the power to ensure self-protection to its subjects regardless of constitutional settlement. But what was the form of government that better secured protection to its subjects? Ascham argued that there were no forms
142 6 Towards a modern colonial state: reorganizing leprosy care, 1890–1900 The death of Father Damien in the Kulawao leprosy settlement on the Hawaiian island of Molokai in 1889 spread fears of leprosy as an ‘imperial danger’ across the world. Once again, the international medical community was convinced of leprosy’s contagiousness and considered the advisability of compulsory segregation. These developments occurred during a reorganization of leprosy care in Suriname in the 1890s. However, this reorganization had a dynamic of its own tied to the heritage of
Neo-jihadism’s evolution beyond AQ saw the emergence of AQI, Islamic State of Iraq, and then IS. As with propaganda produced by AQ, propaganda produced by IS condemned US military and economic activity and sought to rationalise neo-jihadist violence and recruit audiences with anti-Western and anti-capitalist grievances. Also consistent with AQ, IS spokespersons’ statements on the political economy of the US reflect the organisation’s geo-economic ambition. Where AQ propaganda over time increasingly focused on the non-material, financialised, and ideological
persistent number of Labour-held councils was to actively struggle against central government on behalf of the residents they represented. Far from simply refusing to set legal budgets, itself a radical act in excess of anything seen today, left councillors back then articulated and sought (albeit unsuccessfully) to create a coalition around a vision of municipal socialism beyond the Keynesian Welfare State and against the emergent New Right. In contrast, since 2010, London Councils have sought to smoothly manage budget cuts and procure consent for a new normal of
This review of the James Baldwin symposium at Virginia State University weighs the insights presented by a number of Black and white scholars, only a few of whom might be considered deeply informed about his life and legacy. Even so, the emerging thinkers provide a wealth of new and interesting perspectives on Baldwin, and the event was highlighted by Molefi Kete Asante’s critical lecture. His comments are a veritable call to arms, an invitation to Baldwin devotees to contend with his conclusions, a process which this article will begin.
38 2 The power of state preferences: the ‘natural cases’ of the campaigns for Falun Gong and IPR protection D ifferent advocacy campaigns achieve different results and take different functional forms. Those explored in this chapter were chosen precisely because they differ radically in terms of the reception each has met from the Chinese government, and the results they produced –one was embraced by the state while the other was wholly rejected. In the case of the campaign mounted by Falun Gong and its supporters against the state for its own campaign to
173 6 Social research and state planning Introduction The First Programme for Economic Expansion was launched in 1958. By the early 1960s the scope of programming was widening as the stagnation prevailing for most of the 1950s gave way to a period of continuous economic growth. Initial crisis conditions had enabled increased social spending to be left off the programmers’ agenda. The changed politics of increasing prosperity, as well as their own expanding ambitions, meant that this could no longer be sustained. This chapter begins by sketching Ireland’s social
Intended for researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, this book draws on detailed longitudinal fieldwork in rural south India to analyse the conditions of the rural poor and their patterns of change. Focusing on the three interrelated arenas of production, state, and civil society, it argues for a class-relational approach focused on forms of exploitation, domination and accumulation. The book focuses on class relations, how they are mediated by state institutions and civil society organisations, and how they vary within the countryside, when rural-based labour migrates to the city, and according to patterns of accumulation, caste dynamics, and villages’ levels of irrigation and degrees of remoteness. More specifically it analyses class relations in the agriculture and construction sectors, and among local government institutions, social movements, community-based organisations and NGOs. It shows how the dominant class reproduces its control over labour by shaping the activities of increasingly prominent local government institutions, and by exerting influence over the mass of new community-based organisations whose formation has been fostered by neoliberal policy. The book is centrally concerned with countervailing moves to improve the position of classes of labour. Increasingly informalised and segmented across multiple occupations in multiple locations, India’s ‘classes of labour’ are far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Forms of labouring class organisation are often small-scale and tend to be oriented around the state and social policy. Despite their limitations, the book argues that such forms of contestation of government policy currently play a significant role in strategies for redistributing power and resources towards the labouring class, and suggests that they can help to clear the way for more broad-based and fundamental social change.