Worker organisation in precarious times: Abandoning trade union fetishism, rediscovering class

One of the core areas of labour studies in which this call for visibility is probably most needed concerns the forms of workers’ organisation and representation. There is evidence of increasing precarity and informality, which also “reveals how realms of social reproduction co-constitute the dynamics of exploitation observed in production” (Mezzadri, 2020: 157), and the existence of signals to a “return to merchant capital” (Van der Linden and Bremen, 2020), a pre-industrial form of capitalist development. Against all this, working-class representation continues to be largely framed in the trade union form. I argue, paraphrasing Marx and as a way of provoking discussions, that the dependency of research on the trade union as the par excellence form of organisation is creating a fetish of the union form, an interest in the form itself that hides from view broader processes of struggle and collective formation and of working-class mobilisations outside/in parallel/alternative to the union form currently occurring in the underworld of precariousness, the contemporary hidden abode of production.Fil: Atzeni, Maurizio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales; Argentin

Collective Identity, the State and Politics: Understanding Working-Class Organisations in Today’s Argentina

An analysis of the current state and political horizons of working-class organisationsin Argentina can be developed along two intersecting lines. In the first, we have tradeunions representing workers in the formal sector, which accounts for about half ofthe country’s working population. In the second, we have social movements, based inboth the urban and rural space, representing poor and informal workers. These twolines often run parallel to one another but also intersect and merge at different pointsfollowing the cycles of capital accumulation and crisis typical of a peripheral counttry.Fil: Atzeni, Maurizio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales; Argentin

Collective Identity, the State and Politics: Understanding Working-Class Organisations in Today’s Argentina

An analysis of the current state and political horizons of working-class organisationsin Argentina can be developed along two intersecting lines. In the first, we have tradeunions representing workers in the formal sector, which accounts for about half ofthe country’s working population. In the second, we have social movements, based inboth the urban and rural space, representing poor and informal workers. These twolines often run parallel to one another but also intersect and merge at different pointsfollowing the cycles of capital accumulation and crisis typical of a peripheral counttry.Fil: Atzeni, Maurizio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales; Argentin

Collective Action, Organisation and the Struggle for an Alternative Food System: An Interview with Pocho, Union Trabajadores de la Tierra, Argentina

The following is an interview with Pocho, Union Trabajadores de la Tierra (utt) activist from the Argentinean province of Chubut.1 utt is among the most interesting examples of how, in the relatively short span of a decade, a small organisation defending the rights of migrant agricultural workers in the green belt of La Plata has become an organisationally structured social movement with a nationwide presence, able to propose plans for the construction of an alternative food system. This growth and expansion have been the result not of a strategy planned at headquarters level but rather a consensus-based social struggle driven by the immediate interests of the agricultural workers involved. Echoing what Pocho says in the interview, the economistic dimension of the struggle has been and continues to be at the core of utt struggles, despite the national relevance and impact of mobilisation events such as the verdurazo.2 In a similar way, the alternative system of food production and distribution put into practice by utt with the agro-toxin-free colonias agricolas, or the network of popular fruit and vegetable shops (almacenes populares), while addressing the interests of the working class as a whole and directly intervening in the sphere of public policies, emerged initially as political tools and proposals around which to articulate the everyday struggles of agricultural producers to improve their lives. This bottom-up, workers-based construction of a social movement, and thus the way in which labour-related conditions of exploitation, rather than just ecological motives, have structured the organisational building process of utt, are important considerations when reflecting on broader issues of working-class organisation around the world.Fil: Atzeni, Maurizio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales; Argentin

Collective Action, Organisation and the Struggle for an Alternative Food System: An Interview with Pocho, Union Trabajadores de la Tierra, Argentina

The following is an interview with Pocho, Union Trabajadores de la Tierra (utt) activist from the Argentinean province of Chubut.1 utt is among the most interesting examples of how, in the relatively short span of a decade, a small organisation defending the rights of migrant agricultural workers in the green belt of La Plata has become an organisationally structured social movement with a nationwide presence, able to propose plans for the construction of an alternative food system. This growth and expansion have been the result not of a strategy planned at headquarters level but rather a consensus-based social struggle driven by the immediate interests of the agricultural workers involved. Echoing what Pocho says in the interview, the economistic dimension of the struggle has been and continues to be at the core of utt struggles, despite the national relevance and impact of mobilisation events such as the verdurazo.2 In a similar way, the alternative system of food production and distribution put into practice by utt with the agro-toxin-free colonias agricolas, or the network of popular fruit and vegetable shops (almacenes populares), while addressing the interests of the working class as a whole and directly intervening in the sphere of public policies, emerged initially as political tools and proposals around which to articulate the everyday struggles of agricultural producers to improve their lives. This bottom-up, workers-based construction of a social movement, and thus the way in which labour-related conditions of exploitation, rather than just ecological motives, have structured the organisational building process of utt, are important considerations when reflecting on broader issues of working-class organisation around the world.Fil: Atzeni, Maurizio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales; Argentin

Mobilisation theory, workers solidarity and the evolution of conflict: collective action in multinational companies in Argentina

In this research is provided a comparative analysis of workers’ mobilisation through a qualitative interpretation of processes, dynamics and effects of collective action in two care multinationals in Córdoba, Argentina, during 1996/1997. What drives workers to periodically contest their surrounding reality and how do they structure their protests? The thesis is based on the view that conflict is inevitable, mobilisation representing one possible form of it, due to the position workers have in the employment relation and for the constant existence of a gap between social needs and commodities produced within capitalist systems. Mobilisation is based on these theoretical objective conditions but subject do not immediately realise this and in the same terms, the process of collective protest implying in itself a deeper consciousness among workers of the meaning of their action. When subjects contest the inevitability of the social system surrounding them remains unpredictable, but the thesis has identified some factors whose absence or presence profoundly influences the chances for collective action to start and be maintained. At the same time the emphasis on the factors that are obstacles to mobilisation allows us to understand the concept of solidarity and its importance within the same process of mobilisation. Contrary to theoretical perspectives that intend collective action as based on individuals’ sense of injustice, this thesis emphasises the need for a reconceptualisation of solidarity within a theory of mobilisation. More generally the thesis calls for a re-evaluation of collective action as a process intrinsically collective whose nature disappears within a social context that constantly tends to individualise and divide. The case of Argentina and the historical perspective within which the mobilisations analysed are inserted, invite us to reconsider the role of traditional trade unions as organisers of protest and the relations between isolated workers’ struggles and more generalised social protests

A Marxist perspective on workers collective action

Introduction: What drives workers to periodically contest their surrounding reality and how do they structure their protests? Providing answers to these crucial questions has always been at the centre of Marxist thinking and workplace research. Within this tradition there are key debates around structure and agency, and between subjective and objective conditions in the mobilizations of workers. This chapter aims to add to the theoretical debate and to militant action by proposing a reconstruction of a theory of workers' collective action rooted around four main pillars: the need to avoid subjective and individually based explanations, the centrality of the capitalist labour process' contradictions, the need to constantly demystify capital, the rediscovery of solidarity. With this background in mind and developing on previous work (Atzeni 2009), the chapter starts with a critique to Kelly's (1998) mobilization theory for the role played in it by the concept of injustice, a subjective, individually framed concept considered as the basis of any mobilization. The next section returns to the capitalist labour process that, insofar as it is the site of both capital valorization and workers' co-operation, constantly creates contradictions, with consequences in terms of workers' opportunities and constrains for collective action. The final section make a point for reconsidering solidarity theoretically central, for being the social relation that expresses the collective nature of the labour process, and relevant as a tool for action and in workers' organising

Searching for injustice and finding solidarity? A contribution to mobilisation theory

This paper, using empirical data from cases of mobilisation in 1996 in Argentina, offers new evidence to build on the theory of mobilisation as recently proposed by Kelly. The use of injustice as the basis of mobilisation, raises some doubts for both its intrinsic subjective nature, and in the light of cases of spontaneous mobilisations. A re-formulation of the theory is suggested, less attached to a mechanical sequence and more rooted in the contradictions of the capitalist labour process. Contact the author at: [email protected]