Antonio Gramsci and Britain’s Corbyn moment

Camila Bassi

Introduction

From the mid-1990s, the British Labour Party explicitly oriented to free market capitalism and adopted a new version of Clause IV of the Party constitution, which decisively turned away from the original promise to ‘secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’ (cited in Gani, 2015). New Labour, as it was branded, pushed politically conservative discourse and policy on social justice (in contrast to redressing poverty and inequality), on workfare (as opposed to welfare), and on crime and immigration, and it implemented public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives to dismantle the public sector and welfare state. New Labour’s landslide electoral successes in 1997 and 2001 indicated its firm hegemony of the Party and the labour movement base: a swing in the Party’s basic contradiction, as a bourgeois-workers’ party, to its right-wing pole.

A majority on the British Left regarded such changes as irreversible. No one predicted that in the Labour Party leadership race of 2015 the socialist candidate of Jeremy Corbyn would win, and with a huge mandate. Corbyn’s election manifesto included demands for growth not austerity, public ownership of the railways and the energy sector, a large-scale public and private house-building programme and rent controls, reinvestment in the welfare state, the abolition of zero hours contracts, and the right of trade unions to organise collectively to redress workplace injustice. While arguably not going far enough, notably, in failing to promise that Labour Party MPs will not implement existing Conservative Government funding cuts to the public sector, Corbyn nonetheless stands in stark opposition to unbridled capitalism.

The 2015 elections in Argentina and its impact on labour

Bruno Dobrusin

Luis Campos

The right-wing victory

On November 22nd, Argentina underwent the second round of the 2015 presidential election. The stand-off between the candidate of the Peronist party, then-governor of Argentina’s largest province, Daniel Scioli, and the right-wing mayor of the City of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, was decided in favour of Macri by a margin of just over 2 percent of the vote (51-49%). The victory of Macri represents a significant change both in Argentina and in South America. The wave of victories of left and center-left governments seems to be coming to an end in the region, the continental right-wing (with the support of the usual external forces) are getting the upper-hand.

Protracted Displacement: Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Bilge Pınar Yenigün

Özge Berber-Agtaş

The world faces the greatest movement of people since World War II, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Turkey has become a major refugee-hosting country owing to an unpredicted influx of Syrian refugees forced to flee from the civil war (UNHCR, 2014). Syrian refugees are still considered as ‘guests’ (a word chosen over ‘refugees’) in Turkey, but their displacement will not be resolved in the near future and will continue to be defined as protracted and unresolved. According to the UNHCR, 4 603 363 registered refugees have been forced to leave Syria, with most moving to Turkey (2 503 549), Lebanon (1 069 111) and Jordan (635 324) since 2011 (UNHCR, 2016).

When the civil war began in 2011, the Turkish government declared an open-door policy and welcomed the Syrian refugees. It predicted that the conflict would end swiftly and allow Syrian ‘guests’ to return home, precluding any need to plan for their long-term or permanent stay in Turkey (İçduygu, 2015). Five years later, more than two million refugees have crossed the Turkish border and thousands are risking their lives attempting to travel to Europe.

Corporate-backed private school chains for the poor: The South African experience

Sonia Languille

Since the 2000s, there has been an impressive growth in basic education enrolment in the global South. However, the quality of education has remained low for the majority of learners. Against this undisputed diagnosis, advocates of education privatisation argue that access to quality education in developing and emerging countries calls for an expansion of private provision through so-called ‘low-cost’ or ‘low-fee private schools for the poor’ (Tooley and Dixon 2005). While private education has been reserved for a wealthy elite for decades, low-fee private schools would purportedly serve the educational needs of the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. This article provides critical insights into emerging ‘affordable’ private-school chains in South Africa.

Commodification of education: a global trend

Over the past decade, private schooling has been on the rise in low and middle income countries. However, the actual scope of the low-fee schools phenomenon remains difficult to assess: education censuses cover private institutions imperfectly, and some low-fee schools remain unregistered. Notwithstanding this statistical uncertainty, the spread of low-fee, for-profit private schools epitomises a global trend: over the past three decades, worldwide, profit-oriented investment in the field of education has increased, although the intensity of education privatisation, in its various forms, has differed according to national contexts.

‘Carwasheros’ unionise in New York City: community-labour partnerships and the challenges of organising a runaway industry

Carwasheros on strike in Park Slope, Brooklyn
(Photo Credit: Center for Popular Democracy)

New York City carwashes harbour some of the most exploitative labour practices in the city. State law sets carwash workers’ hourly minimum wage at nearly three dollars below the state minimum – US$7.25 per hour in 2012, when carwash workers began organising. Employers are expected to pay workers the difference in tips, but minimum wage violations are rampant in this cash-run and largely unregulated industry. A 2008 New York Department of Labour report found 78% of investigated carwash operators violated minimum-wage laws, depriving workers of more than US$6.5 million (Smith, 2008). Compounding already precarious working conditions, many carwasheros, as some workers call themselves, are undocumented immigrants, a vulnerability employers prey upon by threatening to call immigration when workers begin to organise (Center for Popular Democracy, 2013).