Challenging Global Capitalism

Michael Denning: Wageless Life.

Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. Since the beginnings of the wage-labour economy, wageless life has been a calamity for those dispossessed of land, tools and means of subsistence. Expelled from work, the wageless also…

Patrick King: Introduction to Boggs

This issue of e-flux journal presents one of the most remarkable, and overlooked, conjunctural texts to come out of the Black Power movement: “Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come,” by James Boggs, an autoworker, organic intellectual, and lifelong…

Maria Eichhorn: 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours

5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours is both a gift and a burden. Eichhorn presents a challenge — to Chisenhale’s staff, its Board of Trustees, stakeholders, funders, partners and programme participants, but also to its audiences — to ask questions and reassess…

Writing factory history in the 21st century

During the course of the 19th century, the factory became the dominant image of work in capitalism and it continued to be so during most part of the twentieth century. So strong was the identification between capitalism and factory work that Marxist…

Lesley Gill: Class Struggle Postponed

In October, a popular referendum narrowly rejected the peace accords that could have signaled an end to guerrilla fighting in Colombia, where left-wing insurgencies have struggled with state forces and paramilitaries for fifty years — the world’s longest armed…

Migration and unfree labour in the contemporary United States: from FDR to Trump

A common misconception, ingrained both in the liberal and Marxist traditions, is that unfree labour — work that is performed under some form of coercion — is a remnant of the past, at odds…

Balestrini: We Want Everything

Almost a decade later, in 1969, the workers from the south on the assembly lines of the north revolted in waves of wildcat strikes and violence. This was a new movement, of workers that rejected the values of classic worker organizations, and most especially the Communist…

Rick Halpern: On Trump

Before noon today I had received a half dozen or so messages from liberal friends, and those further to the right, asking, post-California, what now? Where do you stand? Will you vote for Clinton? It’s a curious sort of question, one that makes me wonder whether these folks have listen to…

Daniel Ozarow: The elephant in the factory? Workers self-management as an alternative post-crisis production model