review

While cooperation exists since times immemorial, in its modern form it constitutes a 'product' of specific socio-economic and political conditions. Within this context, cooperatives and other alternative experiments have offered an opportunity to challenge existing capital-labour relations and inter-work relationships and rethink the way we relate everyday practices to political organization in general. This in turn implies an effort to reconceptualise the links between the economic and social field of action.

I was gripped by this book. I enjoyed it partly because it tells my own story – and who can resist their own story? Or rather (because only I can tell my own story), it tells the author’s story of a series of events and of a movement that I was part of. Namely: that wave of North American and European counter-summit protests that emerged with the mobilisation against the WTO in Seattle in November 1999 (or possibly with the ‘Carnival Against Capital’ in London a few months earlier), and then waxed and waned over the course of the following eight years or so.

Introduction

It has been two years since Occupy emerged on the global scene, inspired by an on-going wave of protest movements and upheavals. Like its predecessors, the movement was met with great skepticism – not least by many self-acclaimed leftist academics and journalists. How could a political movement, one objection went, be of any significance and endurance if it failed or refused to produce a clear, univocal agenda? How could it affect society or politics beyond the border of its own tent camp?

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution is a book that draws on the very interesting idea, initially proposed by Henri Lefebvre in 1968, about the need for a renewed and transformed urban life. Lefebvre dubbed this need for transformation of the urban landscape and life ‘right to the city’: a right that those producing and sustaining the city lack and must fight to claim.

Introduction: Alternatives as critique

‘Aunt Betsey’, announces Christie as she prepares to leave home as a young lady in her late teens, ‘there’s going to be a new Declaration of Independence’. She means a declaration of her own independence as she decides that she is coming of age and is, ‘…going to take care of myself’, thereafter finding employment as a servant, actress, governess, companion (in the old fashioned sense), and seamstress, pursuing a feminist search for survival and fulfillment that symbolically is still going on.

In The problem with work, Kathi Weeks issues a clarion call for the abandonment of moralistic pro-work politics. Rather than better work or better wages, Weeks asks us to imagine a life beyond work and the wage. Part polemic, part philosophical rumination, part political program, The problem with work revives neglected strands of Marxist analysis, including demands for less work or no work, demands for wages for housework, and demands for a basic income.

Despite my dislike of the topic, I began to nose around it with a mixture of repugnance and fascination, like a substance abuser circling around the long-denied admission of his own addiction. (Powers, 2005: 614).

How can I recognize this forbiddingly foreign totality as my own doing, how may I appropriate it and make it my own handiwork and acknowledge its laws as my own projection and my own praxis? (Jameson, 2009: 608).

Migrant activism and integration from below in Ireland brings an original perspective to Irish migration studies by providing an in-depth exploration of migrant associations in contemporary Ireland. This book makes an important contribution to Irish migration studies by focusing on the role of migrant-led organizations as vehicles of social change and integration. Given the isolation often associated with the migration experience, organizations and associations can be seen as providing a vital social link for migrants in contemporary Ireland.