New Book

The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century

6th Apr 2019

The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Dario Azzellini and Michael G. Kraft

• $28 / £24.99 • 9781608460168 • 321 Pages

Historical Materialism, new in paperback catalogue: https://we.tl/t-DNvshoI187

The Class Strikes Back examines case studies of twenty-first-century workers’ struggles from both the Global North and South, highlighting the stories of workers fighting to organize and join democratic and independent unions.

The Class Strikes Back examines a number of radical, twenty-first-century workers’ struggles. These struggles are characterised by a different kind of unionism and solidarity, arising out of new kinds of labour conditions and responsive to new kinds of social and economic marginalisation. The essays in the collection demonstrate the dramatic growth of syndicalist and autonomist formations and argue for their historical necessity. They show how workers seek to form and join democratic and independent unions that are fundamentally opposed to bureaucratic leadership, compromise, and concessions.

Specific case studies dealing with both the Global South and Global North assess the context of local histories and the spatially and temporally located balance of power, while embedding the struggle in a broader picture of resistance and the fight for emancipation.

Contributors include: Anne Alexander, Dario Azzellini, Mostafa Bassiouny, Antonios Broumas, Anna Curcio, Demet S. Dinler, Kostas Haritakis, Felix Hauf, Elias Ioakimoglou, Mithilesh Kumar, Kari Lydersen, Chiara Milan, Carlos Olaya, Hansi Oostinga, Ranabir Samaddar, Luke Sinwell, and Elmar Wigand.

Customers in North America can order the book direct from Haymarket’s website at a 30% discount, with free postage: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1198-the-class-strikes-back

We encourage customers elsewhere to order through independent bookstores where possible, particularly the Alliance of Radical Booksellers in the UK: http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/  

Dario Azzellini, PhD (1967), Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany and Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), Mexico, is visiting scholar at the Murphy Institute/CUNY. He has published monographs, edited books, and articles on social movements, social transformation, labour and migration studies, and Latin American Studies.

Michael G. Kraft, PhD (2004), Vienna University of Economics, is a lecturer on social movements and economic and social transformations. He has published on heterodox economics and neoliberalism, social struggles, and workers’ self-management in Ex-Yugoslavia.

For publicity requests or any other queries, contact uk@haymarketbooks.org (Europe) or john@haymarketbooks.org (US, rest of world).