Silver, BJ. Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge, 2003)

"Manuel Castells argued that the dawn of the "information age" has transformed state sovereignty and the experience of work in ways that undermine the labour movments ability to act as a "major source of social cohesion and workers representation." It has also undermined any possibility that workers might become emancipatory "subjects" in the future - the source of a new "project indentity" aimed at rebuilding the social institutions of civil society. Non-class-based indentity movements, for Casstells are the only "potential subjects of the information age." p2

The power of identity / Manuel Castells
The rise of the network society / Manuel Castells
The Castells reader on cities and social theory / edited by Ida Susser

"The relocation of industrial capitalism in a geographic fix "each created new, strategically lcoated working classes which in turn produced pwoerful new labour movements rooted in expanding mass production industries." p5-6

"There is some irony in the fact that early 20th century observers of the transformations associated with Fordism were certain that these changes spelled the death of labour movmenets." p6

"This transnational capitalist class is increasingly "both a class-in-itself and for it-self...pursuing a class project of captalist globalisation." the "transnational working class" (while not yet a class-for-itself") is increasingly a "class-in-itself" thus providing the objective basis for labour nationalism." p 9 she goes on to mention how some saw seattle as the basis for this new movement


Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise
EO Wright - The American Journal of Sociology, 2000 - JSTOR
Class counts : comparative studies in class analysis / Erik Olin Wright


"In particular the idea that there is no alternative has had a powerful demobilising impact on labour movements. As Frances Piven and Richard Cloward put it the "idea of power" itself has been an important source of workers' power. Mobilisations over the past century have been fueled by the belief that workers do have indeed have power and moreover that their power can be used effectively to transfomr their conditions of work and life for the better." p16

"The insight labour and labour movements are continually made and remade provides an important antidoe against the common tendency to be overly rigid in specifying who the working class is (be it the 19th century craft workers or the 20th century mass production workers.) Thus rather than seeing an "historically superseded" movement" (Castells, 1997) or a "residual endangered species" (Zolberg, 1995) our eyes are open to the early signs of working class formation. as well as "backlash" resistance from those working classes that are being "unmade." p20

"Marx was incorrect to infer that just because capitalists treat workers as interchangeable, workers themselves would willingly relinquish nonclass bases of indenity. Indeed precisely because the ongoing making and remaking of working classes creates dislocation and competitive pressure on workers, there is also an endemic tendency for workers to draw non-class borders and boundaries as the basis for protection from the maelstrom." p22

"To put it in a sentence, the trajectory for the world automobile inudstry suggests that where capital goes, conflict goes. Or to paraphrase David Harvey, the geographical location of production is a "spatial fix" that only "reschedules crises"; it does not permanently resolve them." p41

Harvey, David The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change G 909.82

Spaces of hope / David Harvey

"In both cases, as in the case of the so-called NIC's (newly industrialising countries),which are discussed later, the labour movement strenghtened (and was strenghtened by)other movements aimed at broad, social, economics and political transformations." p53

Citizenship rights and social movements : a comparative and statistical analysis
Tarrow. Democracy and disorder : protest and politics in Italy, 1965-1975 322.44

"Japanese automobile producers established a multilayered subcontracting system that simultaneously allowed them to guarantee employment and to establish co-operative relations with a core labour force while obtaining low cost inputs and flexibility from the lower rungs of the supply network." p70

technological fix - spatial fix and product fix

"The "peripheralisation" of the textile complex in the early decades of the 20th century coincided with the rise of an innovative mass-production automobile complex, centered in the United States - the new leading sector, not just in economic terms but in setting the social and cultural standards of the time." p77

so the rise in a services industry has led to the rise in the idea of the single non associatinal consumer?