Tag Archive: Politics

Human beings in a mob What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a non-believer? – Frank Ocean On November 29, 2012, fast-food workers in New York City walked off the job. The strike, which affected more than two dozen locations, was the largest action involving fast-food franchises in U.S. history. Workers and supporters rallied outside branches of major chains and demanded a living wage. The fast-food strike arrived just days after Walmart employees throughout the U.S. walked off the job on “Black Friday” to protest unfair pay. On January 16, 2013, school bus drivers in New York City went on strike for the first time in more than thirty years. These are emblematic of what has been called a “global strike wave.” [i] While Marxists and neo-Marxists have been quick to champion this as the re-emergence of a historically preordained working class struggle, scholars and activists should be wary of dogmatic revolutionary rhetoric. Tracing the development of neoliberalism as a discursive political and economic project reveals how contemporary worker strikes are both enabled and constrained by the very neoliberal logic against which they often protest. Consequently, labor and progressive social movements [...]

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