CLaSP Past Events 2017
26 January, Reading group on Guido Starosta (2016) ‘Revisiting the New International Division of Labour Thesis’
The New International Division of Labour Global Transformation and Uneven Development, edited by Greig Charnock and Guido Starosta, Palgrave Macmillan
The City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus
9 February, ‘Democracy, Leadership and the foundations of im/migrant worker power: A comparative analysis of im/migrant worker organisations in Berlin, New York and London’
Mark Bergfeld (School of Business and Management, QMUL)
The City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus
27 April, ‘The Struggle for Development’
Ben Selwyn (University of Sussex),
Room 4.27a (Boardroom), Francis Bancroft, QMUL Mile End Campus
22 June, 'Chinese labour regimes: mutations, expansions, resistance'
A Centre on Labour and Global Production workshop with
Rutvica Andrijasevic (University of Bristol), Anastasia Frantzeskaki (Port Employees Federation of Greece); Giorgos Gogos (Head of the Piraeus dockworkers union, Greece); Gaochao He (Sun Yat-Sen University and Harvard Law School); Pun Ngai (University of Hong Kong); Carlos Oya (SOAS) and Tim Pringle (SOAS)
“The ongoing wave of strikes in China is the latest manifestation of a dynamic that can be summed up in the phrase: where capital goes, labor-capital conflict shortly follows.” --- Beverly Silver
The emergence of China as a global economic power in recent decades has been striking – Its ~10% per annum GDP growth since 1989 is but one indication. This economic boom has been accompanied by enormous changes to the domestic labour market, as hundreds of millions have made the change from rural agricultural to urban industrial workers. At the same time, strikes by workers have been rising since 2004, and have intensified since 2010, when the government stopped releasing official statistics. In 2016, China Labour Bulletin had recorded 2,662 worker collective actions – an increase of 20% from a year before.
Meanwhile, Chinese capital has been flowing overseas in search of new investment opportunities, with over $130 billion invested last year alone, an increase of 55 percent on 2015. Major investments stretch across the globe, from Latin America (the canal in Nicaragua) to Europe (the Port of Piraeus in Greece) and Africa (natural resource extraction throughout the continent), competing increasingly with North America and European capital under greater pressure due to the differential impact of the economic crisis.
At this workshop, we will discuss these developments and attempt to answer a series of questions: What kinds of labour regimes are emerging in China and in Chinese owned firms abroad? What forms of resistance do they engender? And what opportunities and challenges exist for linking the struggles of workers in China with the struggles of workers in Chinese owned firms abroad?
The workshop is free but please register here so we have an idea of numbers attending:
Room GC201, Graduate Centre, QMUL Mile End Campus
7 September, Labour in industrial fisheries:
‘Fish, Boats and Crews: Working and Living Conditions in the Fishing Sector of Turkey’
Umut Ulukan, Department of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, Ordu University, Turkey
‘Labour regimes in the tuna industry in the Western Indian Ocean: Connecting boats, ports and factories’ and Liam Campling, Director of CLGP, School of Business and Management, QMUL
City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus
2 November, Book launch seminar:
The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left
Jeffery R. Webber, School of Politics and International Relations, QMUL
This talk will explain the political dynamics and conflicts underpinning the contradictory evolution of left-wing governments and social movements in Latin America in the last two decades. Throughout the 2000s, Latin America transformed itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. What is left of the Pink Tide today? What are the governments’ relationships to the explosive social movements that propelled them to power? As China’s demand slackens for Latin American commodities, will they continue to rely on natural resource extraction? This talk is grounded in an analysis of trends in capitalist accumulation from 1990 to 2015, in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela. It explains inequality there today through a Marxist framework, rooted in a new understanding of class and its complex associations with racial and gender oppression. The talk will also cover indigenous and peasant resistance to the expansion of private mining, agro-industry and natural gas and oil activities. Finally, the presentation will conclude with remarks on “passive revolution” in Bolivia under Evo Morales and debates around dual power and class composition during the era of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus
Thursday 16 November 2017 [PDF 738KB], ‘Uneven development in global value chains’
One-day workshop co-organised by the Centre d’Economies de l’Université Paris Nord (CEPN), and Centre on Labour and Global Production QMUL (CLGP)
‘Producing: A labour regimes perspective’, Elena Baglioni and Liam Campling, CLGP
Discussant, Peter Gibbon, Danish Institute for International Studies
‘Value, tax and global inequality chains’, David Quentin, CLGP
‘The trade-labour nexus’, Adrian Smith, CLGP
‘The financialisation-globalization nexus’, Tristan Auvray, CEPN
‘Standards as power: the case of transatlantic trade negotiations’, Benjamin Burbaumer, CEPN
‘The monopolization of the intellectual forces of production’, Cedric Durand, CEPN
‘Upgrading/ downgrading: An economic perspective’, Steven Knauss, CEPN
‘Governing: A critical management perspective’, Florence Palpacuer, Université de Montpellier
‘The limits of corporate social responsibility’, Corinne Vercher, CEPN
14 December, ‘The Common as a Mode of Production’
Carlo Vercellone, Professor of Economics at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a member of CEMTI and of the Laboratory of Economics.
Carlo Vercellone presents research from the new book The Common as a mode of production. Towards a critique of the political economy of common goods (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2017). What is the common? What are its foundations? Is it a set of well-defined resources – so called common goods – or a generic principle governing the social organisation of production? These questions need to be asked because the debate on the Common is as rich as it is confusing. On the one hand, notions such as Common, in the singular, commons, common goods, common property, common-pool resources, etc., are at times used as synonymous and at others as opposite, with no clear-cut definition. On the other hand, debates frequently lose sight of the extent to which these terms are used to cover highly differentiated approaches not only to theory, but also to the political role that the Common might play in projects of social transformation.
The purpose of the book is to contribute to clarify these questions through a multidisciplinary approach that combines theory and history. The aim is twofold. The first is to provide the reader with a guide to a critical analysis of the main economic and legal theories of common goods. Particular attention is granted to the benefits and limitations of Elinor Ostrom’s contribution and to the debate on the so-called tragedy of the commons. This survey of the literature serves the purpose of showing what the Common is not, or, at least, what it should not be reduced to. The second aim is to put forward an approach that is alternative to that of political economy. In this framework, the Common is theorised as an actual “mode of production”.
City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus
30 December, Finance and global production networks
‘Variegated Firm Finance in Global Production Networks: Car Component Manufacturers in Hungary and Eastern Germany’
Emile Boustani, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus