Rethinking Labour as a Network-Movement

Valuable and concrete reflections are being published, filling public understanding of the nature and dynamics of the most-recent social and emancipatory uprisings, known also as Global Revolution. The recent articles by Bernardo Gutiérrez and Rodrigo Nunes, both of whom involved in the 15M, Occupy, Gezi, and Brazilian uprisings and systematically put their self-reflections together in a framework of a collaborative action-research network, also named as Global Revolution, are highly informative. They explain very well the reasons why the transnational ‘organization’ of the global ‘revolution’ is different then what we understand from the traditional use of the concepts ‘organization’ and ‘revolution’. Another important resource was produced by Adrià Rodriguez, who have also been very active both in 15M, as other ‘network movements’ since 201-11, and the Global Revolution Research Network.

I have been involved -more directly- in Occupy, Take The Square and Gezi movements/networks, as well, while I was busy with developing an understanding of the emergent new labour movement as a ‘network-movement’. My work at Social Network Unionism and Networked Labour blog/networks heavily relied on the previous work done by people like Peter Waterman, Hilary Wainwright, Marco Berlinguer, Mayo Fuster as well as others they have been collaborating, for instance around the initiatives like Networked Politics. Below are the papers and reports that I published online on various digital spaces before. Now it is worth to put them in a chronological order and reproduce collectively.

May 2014, Transnational networks of radical labour research and (h)activism

March 2013, Another World Now! The coming of the Transnational Revolutions and the Networked Prince

February 2013, Global unionism: the peer to peer model

October 2012, The Dramatic Rise of Peer-to-Peer Communication within the emancipatory movements

August 2012, Organizing, P2P Networking, and Mapping of the Production Process by the Workers: an Argument for a ‘New Unionism 2.0? 

August 2011, Global class warfare and the rEvolutionary working-class agency

Though I was not directly linked to or collaborated with -since I was not aware of- the work done around the Global Revolution research collaboration, I have actively, socially and politically made use of the social networking technologies which mediate, enable and aggregate the new collective political practices. Being part of the same praxis of such network-movements, I have very recently come to realise that there have been overlapping and similarities between the approaches we have been developing when it comes to thinking of the new ontology and epistemology of emerging p2p networked movements.

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