Joseph Choonara – författare

The words ‘precarity’ and ‘precariousness’ are widely used when discussing work, social conditions and experiences. However, there is no consensus on their meaning or how best to use them to explore social changes.This book shows how scholars have mapped out these notions, offering substantive analyses of issues such as the relationships between precariousness, debt, migration, health and workers’ mobilizations, and how these relationships have changed in the context of COVID-19.Bringing together an international group of authors from diverse fields, this book offers a distinctive critical perspective on the processes of precarization, focusing in particular on the European context. The Introduction, Chapters 3 and 8, and the Afterword are available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Marx's groundbreaking analysis of capitalism retains its relevance today. This book guides readers as they grapple with Marx's masterpiece, Capital.Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Marx's Capital inspired, in particular, by the crisis of 2008-9 and the period of slow growth that has followed. Marx was capitalism's greatest critic and his work retains its relevance 150 years after its initial publication. Here, Choonara breaks down the thousand page text, making it inviting and accessible for the reader. A Reader's Guide to Capital is an essential tool for students, activists, and others looking to read this classic text today. 'Marx hoped that he would gain a readership among a working-class audience for his book. There have been a few attempts at producing guides for readers to promote the object: Choonara's is by far the best' — Michael Roberts, author of The Long Depression

p>This book carefully guides the reader through each chapter of the first volume of Capital. It sets Marx’s arguments in context, and explains their relevance today, and it offers insights into Marx’s method, highlighting key concepts running through the book. It also offers pointers to wider works that can provide further illumination.

Precarity is a key theme in political discourse, in media and academic discussions of employment, and within the labour movement. Often, the prevailing idea is of an endless march of precarity, rendering work ever more contingent and workers ever more disposable. However, this detailed study of the UK labour force challenges the picture of rising precarity and widespread use of temporary employment, suggesting instead that employment tenure and the extent of temporary work have proved stubbornly stable over the past four decades.Choonara offers a new approach to labour markets, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of Marxist political economy to interrogate research data from the UK. This book examines why, despite the deteriorating conditions in work, employment relations have remained stable, and offers insight into the extent of subjective insecurity among workers. Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets will be of use to students and scholarsacross the sociology of work, labour economics, industrial relations and political economy.

Precarity is a key theme in political discourse, in media and academic discussions of employment, and within the labour movement. Often, the prevailing idea is of an endless march of precarity, rendering work ever more contingent and workers ever more disposable. However, this detailed study of the UK labour force challenges the picture of rising precarity and widespread use of temporary employment, suggesting instead that employment tenure and the extent of temporary work have proved stubbornly stable over the past four decades.Choonara offers a new approach to labour markets, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of Marxist political economy to interrogate research data from the UK. This book examines why, despite the deteriorating conditions in work, employment relations have remained stable, and offers insight into the extent of subjective insecurity among workers. Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets will be of use to students and scholarsacross the sociology of work, labour economics, industrial relations and political economy.

In 1979 British trade unions had 13.2 million members, and 29,474,000 working days were lost to strikes. A workplace survey the next year counted 328,000 shop stewards. By 2025, union density was 22.4 per cent, and nobody counts workplace representatives any more: the last survey was in 2011.What the revolutionary left did next is usually explained as a sequence. Rank-and-file organisation is what a rising level of struggle produces, so it cannot be built in a downturn, and revolutionaries must work instead through the structures that exist: the branch, the committee, the slate. This Guide calls that the downturn alibi, and shows it refuted inside the Socialist Workers Party's own founding documents. In autumn 1979 Tony Cliff described the Communist Party's Broad Left as a machine that won union elections by "e;placing the most minimal demand (the vote) on the stewards and branch committees"e;, and listed its orientation to left officials among the causes of the decline. In 1983 he called it a swamp. A quarter of a century on, the British far left's industrial work runs through that very form.Twenty-six documents, in extract, let the reader test that. The rank-and-file strategy in its own words, in Steve Jefferys' balance sheet of 1975 and the Fourth International's Turin industrial conference of 1969. The downturn thesis at length, beside a Manchester factory occupation that built rank-and-file organisation in its worst year. Two cases where the tradition split on how to vote: the Teamsters, whose reform caucus outlived the president it elected, and Comisiones Obreras, where power was concentrated without a penny going missing. Then Britain, from the Liverpool dockers to the strike wave of 2022, and the same argument from Morocco, Genoa and Lisbon.The conclusion is not that union elections do not matter. It is that the fixed point is never the ballot but the assembly, and that a strategy which asks a member for a vote will get a vote.Cliff, Jefferys, Choonara, McIlroy, Conway, Tucker and Eidlin among others.