A New Theory of Industrial Relations: People, Markets and Organizations after Neoliberalism, by Conor Cradden. Routledge, London, 2017, 208 pp., ISBN: 9781138124615, £105.00, hardback.

Published date01 September 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12423
Date01 September 2018
AuthorDanat Valizade
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12422
56:3 September 2018 0007–1080 pp. 679–690
BOOK REVIEWS
On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War,byKim
Moody. Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL, 2017, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781608468461,
$18.00, paperback.
As a co-founder of the rank-and-file media, educational and organizing initiative
Labor Notes, and leading intellectual of the US labour movement, Kim Moody has
come to represent — through books such as An Injury to All (1998) — a critically
important barometer of the state of the ‘ocial’ labour movement and of sources
for the generation of new forms of workers’ political and industrial mobilization and
organization.For those engaged in activist education in the United Kingdom, Moody’s
analysis has helped shape educational approachesto critically analysing the failure of
the neo-liberal era of New Labour and labourmovement leaders to arrest trade union
decline, thus engendering the need to explore a new broad-based radicalized form of
worker’s organization through social movement unionism (SMU). For Moody, SMU
is ‘deeply democratic, as that is the best way to mobilize the strength of numbers in
order to apply maximum economic leverage. It is militant in collective bargaining and
in the belief that retreat anywhere only leads to more retreats — an injury to one is an
injury to all’ (1997, p. 4).
In his latest book, Moody revisits the need to re-examine the failure of traditional
political alliances to assert the interests of organized labour — all within the context
of recurrent transformation in the composition of the working-class precipitated by
unprecedented change in the organization of capitalism in the United States. As such,
the central aim of the book is to present capitalism as having entered a new phase in
the recent era, in which the restructuring of the workingclass consolidates new terrain
for a renewed upsurge of labour and social rebellion.
The book is structured in three parts. The first examines the eects of lean
production, new technologies and the rise of flexible working from the early 1980s
and the resultant industrial and occupational restructuring of the US working class.
Part 2 moves on to examine the arguable shift in the terrain of class conflict through
corporate processes of merger and acquisition, but most notably via the ‘logistics
revolution’ required to support global supply chain infrastructure. The final section
of the book explores the potential for a radicalclass politics in the United States which
providesan alternative to the ‘big money’ influences of the Republican and Democratic
Parties.Here, Moody argues that a confluence of organizing potential in the workplace
combined with urban-based mass working-class political activism is key to generating
a socialist-appealing body of politics outwith conventional party machinery and that
will ‘go beyond conventional social democracy’.
It is the second part of the book which is its arguablestrength, and certainly from the
perspective of trade union activists and organizers(like myself) dedicated to examining
C
2018 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.

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