Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives

with editor Robert Ovetz and researcher Gifford Hartman

Rumors of the death of the global labor movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers’ struggle is being reborn from below by workers themselves.

By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers’ inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organizational forms and objectives. These workers’ inquiries, from call center workers to platform, trucking, cleaning, logistics, mining, auto factories, teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energizing unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers’ organizations.

In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers’ movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.

ROBERT OVETZ is a Lecturer in Political Science at San Jose State University in California. He is the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Brill, 2018 and Haymarket, 2019) and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Labor and Society. GIFFORD HARTMAN is a member of the Global Supply Chain Study/Research Group (https://libcom.org/blog/empire-logistics) and is an adult educator, labor trainer and working class historian. He has helped organize wildcat strikes at his own workplace and training sessions to build working class solidarity worldwide.

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