Water Grabbing, Capitalist Accumulation and Resistance: Conceptualising the Multiple Dimensions of Class Struggle

The purpose of this article is to reflect on how we can conceptualise the multiple types of struggles over water. Through a historical materialist engagement with social reproduction theorists, post-colonial interventions and eco-socialism, we argue that capitalist reproduction not only depends on the exploitation of wage labour but also the expropriation of natures and people along different forms of oppression. By focussing on historical processes and the intertwined dynamics necessary for capitalist reproduction, we reveal the internal relations of these struggles to each other and global capitalism. Moreover, by putting forward a conceptual and methodological guide for how to approach water struggles relationally, we can point to the anti-systemic potential of these struggles. We argue that the diversity of protesters apparent in struggles against water grabbing captures internally related and mediated forms of class struggle, where the terrain of class struggle is inclusive of the whole social factory

Wristband accelerometers to motivate arm exercise after stroke (WAVES): study protocol for a pilot randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Loss of upper limb function affects up to 85 % of acute stroke patients. Recovery of upper limb function requires regular intensive practise of specific upper limb tasks. To enhance intensity of practice interventions are being developed to encourage patients to undertake self-directed exercise practice. Most interventions do not translate well into everyday activities and stroke patients continue to find it difficult remembering integration of upper limb movements into daily activities. A wrist-worn device has been developed that monitors and provides ‘live’ upper limb activity feedback to remind patients to use their stroke arm in daily activities (The CueS wristband). The aim of this trial is to assess the feasibility of a multi-centre, observer blind, pilot randomised controlled trial of the CueS wristband in clinical stroke services. METHODS/DESIGN: This pilot randomised controlled feasibility trial aims to recruit 60 participants over 15 months from North East England. Participants will be within 3 months of stroke which has caused new reduced upper limb function and will still be receiving therapy. Each participant will be randomised to an intervention or control group. Intervention participants will wear a CueS wristband (between 8 am and 8 pm) providing “live” feedback towards pre-set movement goals through a simple visual display and vibration prompts whilst undertaking a 4-week upper limb therapy programme (reviewed twice weekly by an occupational/physiotherapist). Control participants will also complete the 4-week upper limb therapy programme but will wear a ‘sham’ CueS wristband that monitors upper limb activity but provides no feedback. Outcomes will determine study feasibility in terms of recruitment, retention, adverse events, adherence and collection of descriptive clinical and accelerometer motor performance data at baseline, 4 weeks and 8 weeks. DISCUSSION: The WAVES study will address an important gap in the evidence base by reporting the feasibility of undertaking an evaluation of emerging and affordable technology to encourage impaired upper limb activity after stroke. The study will establish whether the study protocol can be supported by clinical stroke services, thereby informing the design of a future multi-centre randomised controlled trial of clinical and cost-effectiveness. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN:82306027. Registered 12 July 2016. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13063-016-1628-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden

A time of reproductive unrest: the articulation of capital accumulation, social reproduction, and the Irish state

Moore M. A time of reproductive unrest: the articulation of capital accumulation, social reproduction, and the Irish state. New Political Economy . 2022.By the end of 2013, the Republic of Ireland had exited the bailout and was entering a period of economic recovery. Yet by 2015 the largest collective protest since independence emerged, challenging the proposed introduction of water charges. Since water, multiple successful social movements organising primarily on the terrain of social reproduction have developed. In this article, I argue that this period of reproductive unrest sharpened inherent contradictions in the way that capital accumulation, social reproduction and the Irish state are articulated to one another. Moreover, these contradictions are not unique to Ireland, but rather emblematic of neoliberal states more broadly. The article intervenes into debates on neoliberal crisis management since the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, as well as demonstrates the value of using social struggles as a lens through which to understand potential fractures in the global political economy

Liquid gold or the source of life? Understanding water commodification as a contradictory and contested political project

Moore M. Liquid gold or the source of life? Understanding water commodification as a contradictory and contested political project. Globalizations . 2021.The global water crisis is framed as a problem of global scarcity. However, struggles over water are over more than access or availability, they are struggling over what water is, which captures contradictions inherent to capitalist accumulation in neoliberal capitalism. Using an incorporated comparison, I bring into relation the Irish anti-water charges protests and struggles against the unconventional gas industry in Australia. In each case, the boundaries between nature, social reproduction, and production systems were reconfigured, re-defining who or what can survive, and in what form. Each struggle unpicked the political project behind the commodification of water, and as social relations and logics once taken as given became denaturalized, water as the embodiment of these socio-power relations also came to figure differently. What became clear was that it was not water that was in crisis but rather the social relations and processes that reduced it to a commodity

Wellsprings of Resistance: Struggles Over Water in Europe

Moore M. Wellsprings of Resistance: Struggles Over Water in Europe. Brussels: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation; 2019

Georg Lukács, History And Class Consciousness: Studies In Marxist Dialectics

Moore M. Georg Lukács, History And Class Consciousness: Studies In Marxist Dialectics. Progress in Political Economy. 12*29.2020

A Time Of Reproductive Unrest

Moore M. A Time Of Reproductive Unrest. Progress in Political Economy . 2022

Über den Werkzeugkasten hinausgehen: Soziale Bewegungsforschung aus einem materialistisch dialektischen Blickwinkel

Moore M, Engelhardt A. Moving Beyond the Toolbox: Providing Social Movement Studies with a Materialist Dialectical Lens. Momentum Quarterly - Journal for Societal Progress. 2017;6(4):271-289

Eco-social policy in the global political economy: Analysing shifting discourses on agricultural subsidies

Schulze Waltrup R, Moore M, Paulsen T. Eco-social policy in the global political economy: Analysing shifting discourses on agricultural subsidies. European Journal of Social Security . 2023.While critical political economy (CPE) has yet to play a prominent role in eco-social policy research, this paper argues that a deeper engagement with CPE and a better understanding of the global political economy can enhance eco-social policy debates. CPE can help us to see the contradictions in and impediments to integrating environmental and social policies, and particularly why both of these categories continue to be mediated and shaped by economic logics. In order to develop these arguments, we analyse recent international discourses on agricultural subsidies promoted by key policy actors such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. By examining agriculture as a nodal point between diverse scales and domains such as the local, global, environmental, social, and economic spheres, we explore how certain positions are prioritised over others. We argue that the discourse on 'repurposing subsidies' in global agricultural policy expresses a 'new critical orthodoxy' that recognises the need for transformation but fails to address the structural conditions of the global political economy responsible for environmental and social crises. Instead, the proposed solutions rely on existing institutions and capitalist logics to resolve current crises, even if the latter are underpinned by these logics. Our analysis underlines the need for eco-social policy scholarship to be cognizant of how environmental and social policy integration is always embedded within a particular global political economy that reproduces certain inequalities and is not a neutral policy terrain