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Marxism and the Oppression of Women opens up an original direction in the Marxist-feminist theorisation of gender and capitalist reproduction. This edition elaborates Lise Vogel's unique contribution via a new introduction and Vogel's 2000 article \"Domestic Labor Revisited.\".

Solidarity is not a unified phenomenon with unchanging qualities; it partakes of moral, political and performative elements that are underpinned and reinforced by a shared work context, an organisational infrastructure and an institutional frame which together create distinctive path dependencies in solidarity across different forms of capitalism. Neo-liberalism has challenged these path dependencies by changing the material conditions and the ideological terrain, by heightening the diversity of the workforce, by restructuring the institutional context. However, this is not the end of solidarity and the article addresses the question of what sort of solidarities are now emerging and how.

A recent flurry of labor movement activity has been driven by younger workers, tight labor markets, and a sympathetic federal government. Nonetheless, US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular. This is because employer opposition and US labor law together imply that workers need to overcome substantial collective action problems at work in order to win union recognition and collective bargaining agreements. These barriers make dense social networks and high levels of social capital at work a prerequisite for unionization. Labor organizing can build this social capital, but faces an uphill battle without policy changes that extend collective bargaining across employers and up the value-chain and make unionization easier. Partnering with labor unions, researchers can study theoretical problems of collective action while also getting a window into what strategies of a renewed labor movement may work.

Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers' struggle is being reborn from below. By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers' inquiries, from call centre workers to teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organisations. In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers' movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.

This article contributes to the debates over the development of solidarity among a fragmented workforce by discussing the case of a strike in which the technicians and contractors at Movistar in Spain were involved. The strike involved employees and self-employed workers working for different contractors. The results highlight that ‘spontaneous’ mobilizations can help to develop a collective identity in fragmented employment systems. More concretely, they show that the lack of involvement of unions at the beginning of the strike helped to generate an identity involving all workers that was not based on occupational or contractual status. However, the findings also highlight that the later involvement of independent unions, which respected the assembling of workers as a space of decision, was key to the sustainment of the collective identity. Furthermore, the results show that mobilizing can be a strong organizing tool in contexts characterized by weak institutional regulation, fragmentation and precarious working conditions.

In refuting Guy Standing’s precariat as a class, we highlight that employment situation, worker identity and legal rights are mistakenly taken as theoretical components of class formation. Returning to theories of class we use Dahrendorf’s reading of Marx where three components of classes, the objective, the subjective and political struggle, are used to define the current formation of the working class in China. Class is not defined by status, identity or legal rights, but location in the sphere of production embedded within conflictual capital–labour relations. By engaging with the heated debates on the rise of a new working class in China, we argue that the blending of employment situation and rights in the West with the idea of precarity of migrant workers in China is misleading. Deconstructing the relationship between class and precarity, what we see as an unhappy coupling, is central to the article.

This article introduces a special issue of Work, Employment and Society on solidarities in and through the experience of work in an age of austerity and political polarisation. It commences by discussing the renaissance of studies of solidarity in the workplace – and beyond. Debates on solidarity as a concept are reviewed in relation to moral economy, labour organising-mobilisation, emotional labour and public sociology. Each of the special issue articles assess the value of the solidarity concept under contemporary conditions. Between them they explore solidarity among gig economy delivery riders (Italy and UK), special needs teachers (England), volunteer lifeboat crews (UK and Ireland) and international ‘social factory’ activists. Two articles examine solidarity within organised labour: first, internationalism among dock workers and second, North American police unions’ construction of a divisive ‘blue solidarity’. The article concludes by calling for continued study of different forms of solidarity in and through work, especially among migrants and individualised workers.

A comparative, ethnographic approach to the question of labour struggles and workers' political agency 'A masterful book – a resource that makes anthropology matter' - Andrea Muehlebach, Professor of Anthropology, University of Bremen When it comes to labor movements, unionized industrial workers on the factory floor have only ever been part of the picture. Across so many different workplaces, sectors of the economy, and geographical contexts, the question of how working people struggle in the day-to-day has no single answer. Here Sian Lazar offers a unique anthropological perspective on labor agency that takes in examples from across the globe, from heavy industry and agriculture to the service and informal sectors. She asks: how do people strive to improve their lives and working conditions? How are they constrained and enabled in that struggle by the nature of the work they do, and by their own positionality in local histories, cultures, and networks? How We Struggle explores worker action across the spectrum from organized trade unionism to individualized strategies of accommodation, resistance, and escape. The book marries a discussion of global political economy and Marxist feminist theories of labor with ethnographic approaches that begin from a perspective of human experience, kinship, and radical heterogeneity.

Im Gegensatz zu aktualisierenden Interpretationen des letzten Werks Otto Bauers ist der vorliegende Aufsatz auf die Rolle fokussiert, die Bauers Buch in den Diskussionen der deutschsprachigen Sozialdemokraten spielte, die von den Nazis ins Exil vertrieben wurden. Der Aufsatz rekonstruiert, wie Bauer auf wichtige Widerstandspositionen einwirkte, wenn er sich mit dem Manifest »Neu beginnen!« auseinandersetzte. Zum anderen ist aber ebenso relevant die Kritik an seiner Konzeption der illegalen Partei, wie sie Curt Geyer 1939 im Licht des exilierten Parteivorstandes der SPD geübt hat. Dem letzten Abschnitt ist der Versuch einer Einordnung dieser Schrift in die Ideengeschichte der demokratischen Arbeiterbewegung gewidmet. In contrast to modern interpretations of Otto Bauer’s late work \"The illegal Party\" this essay focuses on the role it played in the discussion of the representatives of the German speaking labour movement, forced by the Nazis to leave their country. This book had an impact on important positions of resistance like Miles’ \"New Beginning\" and Curt Geyer’s \"The Party of Freedom\". The last part of this essay is dedicated to the attempt to classify Bauer’s book within the history of ideas of the democratic labour movement.

Despite the poor working conditions, between 2003 and 2007 Chilean miners organised the longest and largest strikes in the country since the 1980s, obtaining one of the most important recent victories of the Latin American labour movement. This article uses this experience to illustrate the importance of the links between precarious workers and political activists. Drawing on 18 months of extensive fieldwork conducted at several mining sites in Chile, the article contends that the analysis of precarious workers’ organisations needs to consider workers’ access to different organisational resources, and the role that political parties’ militants play in such access, particularly in the Global South.