Collected Work
For over 25 years, the CPCP has convened scholars and organizers committed to producing knowledge for collective liberation. The writings collected here showcase the breadth, rigor, and political imagination of CPCP fellows’ work, from critical analysis to strategies for social change.
Filter by seminar theme to see work developed in that year and click “more” to access each piece.
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“Save Mary Jane Veloso: Solidarity and Global Migrant Activism in the Filipino Labor Diaspora”
On April 29, 2015, Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina migrant worker who was sentenced to death in Indonesia for trafficking heroin into the country, was granted a stay of execution by Indonesian President Joko Widodo. In this article, Francisco-Menchavez argues that transnational networks activated by this case exemplify the power of systematic migrant worker organizing both in Filipino diasporic sites where Filipinos migrant use ongoing local campaign work against precarity to create migrant class consciousness in critique of neoliberalism and the Philippine state.
The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labour After the Avant-Garde
The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.
“Financial Markets, Developers and the Geographies of Housing in Brazil: A Supply-Side Account”
This paper looks at how financial markets influence the development industry, its business strategies, and the nature and location of its products. Adopting a supply-side account, the paper inquires into the rising role of financial markets as a source of funding for a consolidating development industry and its influence on the geography of housing in Brazilian cities. Analysing the wave of Initial Public Offerings occurring in the mid 2000s, the paper highlights that narratives of quick capital gains associated with the removal of the land banking bottleneck faced by developers supported a convention giving priority to the growth in total output, and contributed to the observed changes in the forms, scales and locations of housing projects in Brazilian cities. As discrepancies between the promises of returns for shareholders and actual financial results emerged, the growth convention unravelled, making way for other narratives and strategic moves to resonate anew and possibly change again the geographies of housing.
Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing
Global Unions, Local Power tells the story of the most successful and aggressive campaign ever waged by workers across national borders. It begins in the United States in 2007 as SEIU struggled to organize private security guards at G4S, a global security services company that is the second largest employer in the world. Failing in its bid, SEIU changed course and sought allies in other countries in which G4S operated. Its efforts resulted in wage gains, benefits increases, new union formations, and an end to management reprisals in many countries throughout the Global South, though close attention is focused on developments in South Africa and India. In this book, Jamie K. McCallum looks beyond these achievements to probe the meaning of some of the less visible aspects of the campaign. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in nine countries and historical research into labor movement trends since the late 1960s, McCallum's findings reveal several paradoxes. Although global unionism is typically concerned with creating parity and universal standards across borders, local context can both undermine and empower the intentions of global actors, creating varied and uneven results. At the same time, despite being generally regarded as weaker than their European counterparts, U.S. unions are in the process of remaking the global labor movement in their own image. McCallum suggests that changes in political economy have encouraged unions to develop new ways to organize workers. He calls these "governance struggles," strategies that seek not to win worker rights but to make new rules of engagement with capital in order to establish a different terrain on which to organize.