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This analysis starts off from the contemporary relevance of the theory of 'the radicalism of tradition', arguing that it presents a challenge to Marxism because Marxist work has not sufficiently attended to elements of a theory of worker subjectivity scattered in the critique of political economy. This theory is located on a lower level of abstraction than is commonly assumed and can be applied to subjective dynamics in labour militancy. However, this requires that some basic categories in Marx's critique are reconsidered, especially those that do not seem immanent to the capitalist social formation, categories that appear, and have mostly been read, as the ahistorical ground on which properly social forms arise. Therefore, apparently ahistorical categories pertaining to use value and concrete labour's use value for capital are explored to reconstruct a theory relating capital's positing of labour to contemporary militancies that appropriate tradition. In contrast to the view of tradition as external to capital, the view advanced is that 'reactionary radicalism' relates to how capital, as totalizing social form, abstracts tradition. Furthermore, tradition is radicalized through a negative subjectivity inherent to the commodification of labour power and the real subsumption of labour; proletarian experience is a precondition of radicalized tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis in this article develops a theory of the mediation of social inequalities by economic forms. It is argued that economic forms are co-constituted with unequal social relations (e.g., race, class and gender) and that economic forms bring such relationships together. The theory is developed with reference to the co-constitution of determinate constructions of race and the commodity form (including its legal construction as an abstract form of property) and the form of wage labor. These processes of co-constitution entail the reproduction and modification of dualist modes of thought traceable to the prehistory of the commodity form; their interconnections to economic forms relate otherwise dissimilar inequalities to this characteristically modern duality. In turn, these common symbolic features facilitate the mutual articulation and reinforcement of different inequalities. This theoretical argument is illustrated by the mutual articulation and reinforcement of race and class in the disjunction of free and unfree labor which defines modern wage labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historical and comparative study attends to the phenomenon of collective resignation by registered nurses in the Swedish health services, with the aim of exploring the existence and utilization of shop floor power. The study uses two kinds of data: incidences of collective resignation since the 1980s are explored using newspaper data; second, two cases of collective resignation are comparatively explored using interview data. First is analyzed how contemporary opportunities to take this form of worker action arose. Then is analyzed how differences between the two cases shed further light on opportunity structures in different contexts of nursing, and on nurses' ability to organize the resignation threat as a collective act. The study clarifies the existence of nurses' shop floor power as it relates to opportunity structures, while also pointing to the significance of the extent of collectivism when nurses challenge employers by threatening this kind of industrial action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses an episode of collective resignation. Carried out mainly by specialist nurses, this is a proliferating form of worker protest in Sweden that poses a challenge to austerity policy and emerges in a specific industrial-relations context. Mobilizing for collective resignation, activist nurses navigate terrains of neoliberal governance, marketization and flexible labour-market dynamics. The collective resignation is also a form of action underpinned by a discourse of gender equality. Our analysis, which attends to the co-emergence of gendering and subject formation in the narratives of a group of activists and to the use of gender-equality rhetoric in framing collective action, shows how opportunities for collective action arise that also restrain the exercise of agency. In this case, subject formation included contrasting nursing to tropes of archetypical militant workers and negotiating tensions between care and collective action. This involved reproducing and challenging established forms of gendering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the April 15, 2012 performance art piece "Painful Cake" by artist Makode Linde for a reception at the Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art) in Stockholm, Sweden with Swedish culture minister Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth. Topics include the history of anti-black racism in relation to imperialism, the life of freak show slave Sara Baartman (known as the Hottentot Venus), and the notions of shame and guilt in relation to whiteness. The thought of theorist Gayatri Spivak is noted.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of "politicization of caring," observed in studies of nurse labor conflict, in the context of a small-scale episode of conflict at a Swedish hospital ward. Using analytical concepts drawn from work on the role of images of gendered ideal workers in management cultivation of consent, and the method of positioning analysis, it tries to identify the little researched discursive practices involved in the politicization of caring. Analysis of interviews with registered nurses, who took part in a conflict where some of them threatened to resign unless wages were raised and working conditions improved, shows a range of such strategies: including problematizing identities in nursing, expanding the context of caring work, using a discourse of professionalism, and redefining the interpellated image of nursing. Findings indicate that politicization thus has important effects on the gendering of nursing and the viability of neoliberal restructuring of healthcare work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]