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This article examines transition in Kocaeli, an industrial city in the north-western part of Turkey, away from left-wing politics and trade unionism in the early 1970s, and toward Islamic politics from the mid-1990s onwards. It does do by investigating the ideological, political, and social transformation of the working class. Based on fieldwork involving in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with current and former workers and trade union leaders, the article analyzes the various aspects of, and limits to, the hegemonic relationships between workers and left-wing politics on the one hand, and with Islamic politics, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author encourages the scholars of labor politics to address the politics of labor decline in the U.S. Topics discussed include the role unions play in civic engagement, political differences across states, and the ability of strong unions to encourage more political activity among members, increase community and legislative engagement, and shift the composition of legislatures.

The article discusses about the nature and concept of constituent power and looks at the political views of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès on it. It presents Sieyès ideas on division of labor in France's Third Estate, their power and engagement in politics, and the need for political representation to exercise their constituent power.

As a populist leader, Hugo Chavez famously used emotionally charged populist rhetoric to appeal to a broad base of poor and working-class Venezuelans. Was his choice of linguistic discourse a tool of popular control, response to public opinion, or both? Answering this question sheds light on the effectiveness of classical democratic conceptions of vertical accountability for populist leaders. Using a theoretical framework incorporating macro implications of Zaller's receive-accept-sample (RAS) model, the concept of Erikson, Mackuen, and Stimson's mood, and latent public opinion, we develop several competing expectations regarding rhetoric and presidential approval in Venezuela. Using computational sentiment analysis on a unique dataset of transcripts from Chavez's Aló Presidente broadcasts, we evaluate Chavez's quarterly public approval ratings with vector autoregression (VAR) and Koyck models. Results indicate presidential approval levels are causally linked to not only exogenous economic factors but also leader discourse. Results also indicate that leader language is not shaped by approval levels, illustrating the power of messaging and media control for populist leaders and the potential limits of democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguing there are alternatives to the generally moribund trade unionism currently found in the United States, this article presents the Kilusang Mayo Uno Labor Center of the Philippines, an exemplar of social movement unionism, as providing one alternative developing among labor organizations in the Global South. It presents a theoretical discussion of social movement unionism. It seeks to ascertain if the KMU is still conducting social movement unionism, or it has reverted back to economic or political unionism. It reports a 2015 trip across the three major regions of the country by this researcher—after six trips between 1986 and 1994—where the situation is detailed and the KMU's efforts are examined. It finds that the KMU is still implementing social movement unionism. It illustrates one alternative to U.S. trade unionism, and suggests that the workers around the world might consider learning from a southern labor center such as the Kilusang Mayo Uno. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1938 and 1946, women in the textile industry in Argentina participated actively in the Unión Obrera Textil (uot, Textile Workers' Union). This paper analyzes the experience of those workers with Argentina's Communist Party (Partido Comunista), which had taken over leadership of the Union in 1939. Also discussed is the formation of the Women's Commission within the Union and the strategies it developed to achieve insertion into the female sector of the textile working class, including what I call 'female unionization'. The study is based on sources related to labor: El Obrero Textil (eot) -the publication of the Unión Obrera Textil- La Obrera Textil (lot), and La Página de la Mujer (lpm) -two sections of the eot- as well as bulletins issued by the Communist Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article analyzes the emergence of the Confederation of Popular Economy Workers (CTEP). The organization strives to organize workers in what has been historically conceptualized as the “informal economy,” but that CTEP proposes should be understood as the “popular economy.” First, we discuss CTEP's questioning of dominant views about the centrality of standard work in the definition of who is a worker. We argue that CTEP has the potential to contribute to bridging the divides among a deeply fragmented working class. Second, we examine CTEP's understanding of the popular economy and the premise of the existence of a surplus population excluded from labor markets in contemporary capitalism. One of CTEP's key demands has been the institution of a “social salary” that would recognize the social importance of workers in the popular economy and help them overcome poverty. We argue that while this proposed political solution to the problem of poverty may contribute to building a new class awareness among precarious and informal workers, it may, at the same time, also perpetuate the dependence of precarious workers to the state and, therefore, increase the ever‐present dangers of both political manipulation and political isolation from other segments of the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habermasian public sphere theory has been challenged widely and persistently on the basis of its rationalist universalism, which brackets off material concerns in the process of deliberation for an ostensibly common good. Against a relativist tendency in these critiques, I argue here for an alternative, materialist model of radically democratic counterpublicity as a standard for the adjudication of a public’s fidelity to the interests of those it hails. To this end, I draw from Negt and Kluge’s description of proletarian public spheres and Lukács’ theory of mediation to theorise, describe, explain and intervene as political actors in working-class public spheres. We must retain the ability to fathom a concept of publicness tied to a socialist, anti-capitalist political project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Bensaïd’s theoretical and political framework deserves to be habitually known in the English-speaking world. His philosophical work has a universal dimension, but because it was also the product of particular political upsurges and downturns, it is necessary to understand these particular political moments to thoroughly understand the universal scope and significance of his work. This paper will look at these political developments (with a focus on France) and pay particular attention to the crisis of the workers’ movement, strategy and Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political language, ushering them into the public sphere and allowing them to comprehend the emerging capitalist world. As a particular liaison of scientific knowledge and a practical political weapon, it allowed its adherents to redefine themselves and make political claims. Such a situational Marxism, drawing from but not reducible to the prevailing ‘orthodoxy’, allows one to see the latter as a socially diverse plethora of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of Iowa, focusing on how voters have changed allegiance from the Democratic party to the Republican party in a single decade while turning the state government from complete Democratic to complete Republican control. Topics discussed include organized labor in the Midwest and how it interacts with the regions increasingly diverse working-class majorities.

The article presents a commentary on the outcome of the presidential vote of the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections in the key state of Pennsylvania, focusing on the fact that Republican candidate Donald Trump received a larger percentage of votes from white, working-class voters than had been the trend in previous recent elections.

The article explores how the World War I reshaped working class' radicalism in Oregon. The author believes that the division of workers in the state hardened and became more salient during the war, with everything to do with the state's wartime expansion and the ways White workers leveraged wartime state power in their own interests. It notes the immigrant working-class radicalism with repression and violence, and unionization of shipyard workers.

The South American Secretariat (SAS) of the Communist International (CI) was created in early 1925 for the purpose of reinforcing the ties between the workers and farmers movements of South America and Moscow. Despite its great relevance for the development of communism in the region, no specific studies were done on the SAS as the central subject of analysis. This article argues that even though the Communist International always sought to exert a marked influence on the Secretariat, the parties in South America were proud of their relative independence from Moscow and forged a competitive relationship with agents sent by the CI. The analytical reconstruction of the theoretical-practical terms in which they received the order to Bolshevize the SAS Communist parties helps to explain this complex situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay undertakes an examination of the OWTU and the challenge of Working class Political Party formation and Electoral politics, 1962-2012. This area of study has been neglected by Historians and Political Scientists who have tended to focus on the narrow interpretation of the trade union. From 1965 and 1977, the OWTU played significant roles in the creation of the Workers and Farmers Party (WFP) and the United Labor Front (ULF. This essay contends that the union's involvement with these political parties was fraught with difficulties and challenges, and its efforts did not convince the working class that it was in their best interest to support the movement at the polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most democracies, lawmakers tend to be vastly better off than the citizens who elect them. Is that because voters prefer more affluent politicians over leaders from working-class backgrounds? In this article, we report the results of candidate choice experiments embedded in surveys in Britain, the United States, and Argentina. Using conjoint designs, we asked voters in these different contexts to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several of the candidates’ personal characteristics, including whether they had worked in blue-collar or white-collar jobs. Contrary to the idea that voters prefer affluent politicians, the voters in our experiments viewed hypothetical candidates from the working class as equally qualified, more relatable, and just as likely to get their votes. Voters do not seem to be behind the shortage of working-class politicians. To the contrary, British, American, and Argentine voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for working-class candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If politicians in the United States were paid better, would more middle- and working-class people become politicians? Reformers often argue that the low salaries paid in state and local governments make holding office economically infeasible for lower-income citizens and contribute to the enduring numerical under-representation of the working class in our political institutions. Of course, raising politicians’ salaries could also make political office more attractive to affluent professionals, increasing competition for office and ultimately discouraging lower-income citizens from running and winning. In this article, we test these hypotheses using data on the salaries and economic backgrounds of state legislators. Contrary to the notion that paying politicians more promotes economic diversity, we find that the descriptive representation of the working class is the same or worse in states that pay legislators higher salaries. These findings have important implications for research on descriptive representation, political compensation, and political inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article outlines the theory and practice of labour-centred development (LCD). Much development thinking is elitist, positing states and corporations as primary agents in the development process. This article argues, by contrast, that collective actions by labouring classes can generate tangible developmental gains and therefore that, under certain circumstances, they can be considered primary development actors. Examples of LCD discussed here include shack-dwellers’ movements in South Africa, the landless labourers’ movement in Brazil, unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina and large-scale collective actions by formal sector workers across East Asia. The article also considers future prospects for LCD. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Democratic management is a notion of worker democracy unique to China. It has been revived and extended legislatively to enterprises of all types in the past decade. Can democratic management bring about mutually beneficial labour relations in China? Drawing on social exchange theory, this study uses mixed methods to explore employees' current experience and the outcomes of democratic management in Chinese coal-mining firms. An employee survey reports a positive relationship between employees' perceived efficacy of democratic management and wider organizational commitment. It suggests that democratic management has the potential value of creating a harmonious labour relationship. However, the success of such management is subject primarily to the commitment of top managers. The triality of motives for top management to conduct democratic management may undermine employees' organizational commitment when employees perceive that top managers are more committed to an exchange relationship with the higher authorities than one with employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial activity has become increasingly important in affluent economies in recent decades. Because this ‘financialization’ distributes costs and benefits unevenly across groups, politics and policy likely affect the process. Therefore, this article discusses how changes in the power of organizations representing the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of financialization affect its pace. An analysis of the United States from 1949–2005, shows that when unions are stronger, and when the Democratic Party is in power and is more reliant on the support of working-class voters, financialization is slower. In contrast, when the financial industry is more highly mobilized into politics, financialization is faster. The study also finds that financial deregulation was one policy translating the political power of these actors into economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes some of the key transformations in French electoral politics and political rhetoric today. Focusing on the question of the evolving Left voting bloc in the wake of globalization and both sociological and ideological evolution in the electorate on the left and right, the different electoral strategies and ideological discourses of the Left are examined. Special attention is paid to the shift in the working class vote and the tensions within the French Left today over how to restore a coherent voting bloc. On one hand, some suggest that a new, diverse Left coalition must be formed; on the other hand, some advocate a return to a popular and republican conception of the Left electorate that aims to challenge the Right and extreme Right on pivotal issues such as security and authority. Finally, some of the key notions employed in these debates are analyzed in light of alternative discourses within the Left that make reference to an ethics of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Discussion Papers is the property of Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This contribution to a roundtable on Satnam Virdee's recent Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider praises the range, coherence and method of the book's unprecedented synthetic account. It argues that Virdee's careful consideration of race, nationality and migration changes the whole story of the working-class movement in Britain. The article closes by wondering whether the author's optimism regarding the fostering of solidarity in the recent past can fully survive scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is it that the Swedish populist nationalist party the Sweden Democrats receives its strongest support from the established working class, in spite of the high degree of class voting and left–right mobilization which is known to characterize Swedish politics? Based on surveys from the SOM (Society, Opinion, Media) Institute as well as the Swedish National Elections Studies, this article shows that this is not a result of increasing anti-immigrant attitudes in the working class or of decreasing left–right polarization among voters. Rather, we present the argument that the weakening alignment between the working class and the Social Democratic Party and the weakened left–right polarization between the main parties have created a structure which has left room for a realignment between large parts of the working class and the Sweden Democrats along the alternative underlying ideological dimension of authoritarianism/libertarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Existing literature on international migration suggests that partisan differences exist in regards to policies that regulate the conditions of migrants residing in host countries (migrant policies), but not in regards to policies determining the admission of new migrants (migration policies). We propose that partisan differences exist regarding migration policies, but that these differences are conditional on a party-labor relationship. In our empirical analysis, we use error correction models to examine asylum and labor migration policies in Western European countries from 1984 to 2006. We find that migration policies become more liberal as government partisanship moves to the left only when unskilled manual workers split their votes between left-wing and right-wing parties. The result implies that a strong relationship between left-wing parties and workers, which mutually benefits both groups in some areas (such as welfare), may be incompatible when conflicts arise between their interests concerning issues such as international migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lien Social et Politiques is the property of Institut National de Recherche Scientifique (INRS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Depictions of white working-class people are steadily on the rise in reality television. To understand this phenomenon, and the ways in which it articulates white working-class people in the United States today, I analyzeHere Comes Honey Boo Boo, a popular reality series on TLC featuring a self-described “redneck” family. I argue that this series highlights the family's inability—because of their working-class status—to conform to “ideal whiteness,” a whiteness that displays dominant cultural standards bolstered by neoliberalism, such as wealth, rationality, personal responsibility, and self-control. The family members consequently become exemplars of “inappropriate whiteness,” a marginal identity presented as humorous and, through the use of surveillance and spectacle, authentic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a supplement to the classic works of electoral studies, this article investigates the relationships to politics and vote of working-class youth from the Parisian banlieues on the basis of a qualitative field study conducted during the 2012 presidential campaign. In doing so it addresses the general question of why and how a population that is usually seen as disconnected from politics votes anyway. We show that disinterest in politics does not equate to dispossession. Internal divides within the working class, elliptic appropriations, personal references and everyday life all contribute to the construction of opinions that translate into electoral positions. Finally, this article constitutes a methodological contribution to electoral sociology in addition to quantitative works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the issue of fundamentalist terrorism in general, should be examined in relation to the contradictions of living in a neoliberal global capitalist system. These contradictions are played out at the political, cultural, and ideological levels in a way that obscures the fundamental antagonism, making any radical solution to the problem of fundamentalist terrorism beyond our reach. I examine these contradictions in four different themes around which the issue of fundamentalist terrorism is staged within the hegemonic neoliberal global capitalist order: the clash of civilizations; colonial and postcolonial politics; leftist solidarity; and the failure of all practical solutions in the fight against fundamentalist terrorism. I end the piece with a call for rethinking the issue of fundamentalist terrorism within the politics of the commons. When the tragic news of the most recent terrorist attack in Paris broke out, the Western media coverage of the massacre sounded all too familiar. From the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the signs of the Islamophobic narrative about Islamist (not Islamic) terrorism have become too easily recognizable. Nonetheless, the issue of Islamist terrorism in mainstream media is still framed within a neoliberal ideology that fails to look into the root causes of fundamentalist terrorism, Islamist, or otherwise, around the world in relation to the intensification of predatory forms of capitalist development and its corollary apartheid politics and practices of enclosure. Similarly, any analysis of the coverage of fundamentalist terrorism as symptomatic of the racist, Islamophobic public and official discourses in the US get it half right. Politically speaking, global capitalism is turning larger segments of people in the global South into an uncounted and discardable excess who exist outside state power, the market, and the international political order, making them easily vulnerable to reactionary, extremist movements. However, the neoliberal framework makes the struggle, today, between groups that are anchored in their exclusivist, identitarian thinking, rather than between the global capitalist system itself and the "radical universality" of the dispossessed and disposable surplus of the world population. In this paper, I argue that the issue of fundamentalist terrorism, as it has been framed in the media representation of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, should be understood in the context of the contradictions of living in the shadow of the neoliberal global capitalist system. These contradictions are played out in four different themes that obscure the fundamental antagonism within the hegemonic neoliberal global capitalist order: the clash of civilizations master-narrative; colonial/postcolonial politics in the new age of empire; leftist solidarity politics; and the failure of all practical solutions in the fight against fundamentalist terrorism. Any radical solution to the problem of fundamentalist terrorism, it is suggested, can be reconfigured only within the politics of the commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the protest movement that surfaced as a result of the decision taken by Belfast City Council to remove the Union flag from Belfast City Hall in December 2012. This article examines why the issue conflagrated as it did and led to a mobilisation within working-class Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist (PUL) communities on the issue. Examining the flag protests within the context of more general PUL disaffection with the Good Friday Agreement and its associated peace process, this article looks at the flag protests as an avenue for disaffected PUL communities to assert a new counter-memory that challenges not only the ‘other’ but also those within the leadership of political Unionism who are said to have used PUL communities during the conflict only to abandon them in the post-conflict transition. This article concludes by examining the future potential of the new political movement born out of the flag protests and the avenues open to it to challenge the hegemonic position of traditional Unionism that has left PUL communities behind as Northern Ireland progresses in transition out of political conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on how racial and class differences impact the degree of trust that voters have in their elected officials. The author argues that there are concrete reasons why specific groups of people should be represented by a member of their group (so-called descriptive representation). Examples are given of Black citizens in the U.S. placing more trust in Black elected officials and of Labour Party elected officials in Great Britain taking care to dress and speak like their working class constituents.

The authors argue that if people from poor backgrounds served in the Swiss government, they could be more effective in creating policy changes than if elites advocated for those policies. However, the authors' study did not find that legislators from the middle and lower classes were effective in creating changes in policy. Some of the potential reasons for this are the influence of political parties and the need for working class members of the government to be ideologically aligned with their working class constituents.

This article provides a new perspective on parliamentary representation in South Asia, focusing on the collective under-representation of population majorities based on the macro-demographic categories of age, class, and gender. Situating this analysis within debates on descriptive representation, it presents the first comparative analysis of the contemporary demographic characteristics of members of parliament (MPs) in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Highlighting three major gaps in parliamentary representation, it finds quotas, proportional representation electoral systems, and leftist parties to have positively impacted the descriptive representation of South Asian women, the working class, and young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We locate the 1980 formation of the Singapore National Employers' Federation (SNEF) within a history of Singaporean tripartism. This redresses a general neglect of employer associations in that system and suggests re-conceptualising Singaporean tripartism into three overlapping phases between 1960 and 1985. The motivations for the first two are well understood. Once in government, the People's Action Party (PAP) suppressed political and union opposition and then sought legitimacy and the integration of Singapore's working class, including by providing a central role for a subordinated union movement. We argue that in a third phase, emerging during the 1970s, PAP brought employer associations into its national distributed leadership model that meshed close personal ties and institutional tripartite roles. SNEF's formation was necessary for rapid tripartite implementation of the PAP's radical shift in economic strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2014, the workers of Maruti Suzuki who had been sacked in summer 2012 organized a fifteen-day long march through the surrounding villages and into New Delhi. Half of the permanent staff and all contract workers had been arbitrarily fired after an uprising in the factory. The article reports about how the workers led the march and accounts for their perspectives on the struggle. Several intellectuals and trade union leaders, such as Yogendra Yadav and Arundhati Roy, held speeches during the march, and striking public sector workers met and hosted the workers participating in the march. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Portuguese Revolution , the process popularly known as the "Carnation Revolution” that lasted from 25 April 1974 to 25 November 1975, took place against a backdrop of military humiliation in defeat by peasant guerilla movements in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. However, an analysis of four distinct types of social conflicts - strikes; demonstrations; occupations of factories, other workplaces, and public services; and occupations of vacant houses - suggests that class struggle within Portugal was the essential dynamic of the Revolution. Revolution came to Portugal through an active workers’ movement against fascism within the context of a global economic crisis. Working people had decided it was time for democratic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Luigi Rinaldi of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). When asked about the economic situations of workers in the food industry, Rinaldi explains that discussions should begin with the topics on food justice and capitalism. He describes the struggle of low-wage workers in the deindustrialized food service industries. He discusses the relationship of IWW with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The article discusses the history of British workers' movement and the War Emergency Workers' National committee during World War I. The history of workers' resistance movements during the war is examined as an impetus for the postwar foundation of various European communist political parties, political conflict in Great Britain during the war is analyzed, and information is offered on the history of British political parties and their ideologies. The role of the Committee in shaping the Labour Party and contributing to the 1924 election of Ramsay MacDonald to the position of prime minister is described.