The Dialectics of Chinese Labor examines China’s trade union adaptation to the changing demands of the working class. For nearly 50 years, market socialism has transformed China from a rural to an urban economy, posing significant challenges to China’s trade union federation (ACFTU). The labor federation has skillfully reshaped its organizing strategies to respond to workers’ new material realities. Our speaker counters the monolithic position that devalues ACFTU by using direct evidence to reveal its commitment and determination to improve wages and working conditions across the industrial, service, digital, and rural sectors of the Chinese economy.
Our speaker, Immanuel Ness, is the author many books, the most recent of which is Dialectics of Chinese Labor. A year ago, Prof. Ness spoke at the Marxist Forum on his acclaimed Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labor Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (Polity 2023), which focuses on Western financial imperialism and the oppression of the Global South.
Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. A trade union organizer in the US and labor activist in the Global South, Immanuel Ness is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Labor and Society. He is chair of the New York Peace Council and of the International Committee of the PSC/CUNY, a labor union representing faculty at CUNY.
His many books, academic articles, chapters, and edited volumes handbooks focus on US imperialism and labor movements. His other books include Sanctions as War (Brill 2022) , Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto 2016), and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (2014/2021).
