21st Century Struggles: Precarity, Repression, and Organizing Resistance

Description

Suggested donation: $75 to $100 each multi-week session or $10 per evening
SPECIAL: $130 IF BOTH PAID BY FEBRUARY 28
No one turned away for inability to pay

Part 1: International Capital and Labor Today
6-week session
February 9 to March 16

Special Session with Bill Henning on the Fight for Contracts for Workers Today
March 23

Part 2: National and International Proposals and Strategies
8-week session
March 30 to May 18

Current capitalism is characterized by instability and contingency on a global scale accompanied by the political imposition of austerity and the undoing of the social wage in developed economies. At the same time, the capitalist class has accumulated immense wealth. By 2016 one percent of the world’s people will possess more than half of the world’s wealth. This trend has intensified every year for the last two decades.

Many theorists emphasize the rise of precariousness (or precarity) in many sectors as a hallmark of neoliberal, globalized capitalism. Most of us are experiencing this in an existential way. We and/or our families and friends can no longer count on a job with a living wage and benefits or on keeping a roof over our heads. We are living through a relentless, systematic marginalization of productive people who at one time could expect a relatively secure existence in the capitalist economy. Now, skilled factory and clerical workers take the jobs of unskilled workers. Unskilled workers become day laborers and fast-food vendors. The petite bourgeoisie of small owners, managers, and professionals scrape by with livings as free-lancers, adjuncts, and consultants.

The Precarity Task Force is exploring these conditions in a two-part class this spring. In the first part, we read Ursula Huws’ Labor in the Global Digital Economy and Samir Amin’s The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. The second part focuses on ideas from a spectrum of the Left about ways of confronting these realities, with readings of Guy Standing’s A Precariat Charter and Stanley Aronowitz’s just published The Death and Life of American Labor, and concludes with readings about new forms of struggle and organizing around the world in the anthology New Forms of Worker Organization, edited by Immanuel Ness.