547
The Urban As a Contested Terrain: Linking Changes in Global Capitalism to Work, Class and Resistance
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC44 Labor Movements (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
In their recent volume, The City is the Factory, Greenberg and Lewis argue that the momentum of working-class resistance is shifting from workplaces to urban areas with some scholars imagining demands for a “right to the city” as having the potential to connect various layers of the working class. While workplace struggles will continue to resonate across the globe, interconnected technological changes globally are redesigning the overall dynamics of capitalism, amplifying the significance of broader terrains of struggle.New circuits of accumulationarechanging the geographies of production and the logistics of distribution integrating the world economy through extended commodities chains.Accelerated processes of informatization and automation have further spread and distributed work across cities breaking the formal/informal divide, and often blurring the line between work and life, work and social reproduction.
Given this background, in this panel we are seeking papers that on the one hand can produce political economy grounded empirical accounts of new and emerging reconfigurations of work, labour processes, exploitation and class composition in the context of urban areas in both formal and informal spaces (informal production zones, logistic hubs, distribution networks, industrial corridors, ports, special economic zones) and across value and commodities chains. On the other hand, we aim to connect the question of whom, where and how capital is produced to possibilities of workers’ organisation and mobilisation. Are there collective formations and identifications emerging from the new geographies of production/distribution?