Capital-in-Crisis, Trade Unionism and the Question of Revolutionary Agency

Shaun May was born in Hull, England in 1960 into a working-class family. He read Biochemistry and Chemistry at undergraduate level, followed by postgraduate studies in Education at the University of Hull. After graduating, he worked as an organic chemist, a biology lecturer in further education and later as a teacher in state schools in East Yorkshire. Now living in East Yorkshire, England, he is an independent socialist writer whose present work focuses on the urgent question of revolutionary agency. Capital-in-Crisis, Trade Unionism and the Question of Revolutionary Agency is his first book.

Contents: Introduction: «Practical Critical Activity» and the Conception of Revolutionary Agency – Globalizing Capital-in-Crisis – The Altered Character of Capital’s Crisis – A Century of Lenin’s Imperialism – On Changes in the Proletariat with Capitalist Globalization and the Need for a Critique of Marx’s Conception of the Proletariat – The Impact of Capital-in-Crisis on Nature – The Trajectory of Trade Unionism Under Capital’s Unfolding Structural Crisis – Capital’s Offensive against Social Provision – Impasse and Outmodedness: The Twilight of the Trade Unions – The Organization of the Proletariat under Cyclical and Structural Forms of Capital’s Crisis – Labour’s Growing Crisis of Organization – Breaking Out of the «Bottleneck» of Historically Limited, Self-Subsistent Trade Union Organization – «Socialist Pluralism» and the Conception of the «Social Union» – From Trade Unions Towards the Formation of «Social Unions»? – The Social Union as Revolutionary Agency against the Capital Order – The Question of Revolutionary Agency in the Twentieth Century – Lenin and the Question of Revolutionary Agency – Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, the «Bolshevist-Leninist» Approach to Trade Unionism and the Demise of the Sectarian Politics of the «Revolutionary Left» – A Critique of «Vanguardism» and the «Party-Form» – Marx’s Realms: Capital, Natural Necessity, True Realm of Freedom – The Broadcasting and Print Media: In the Ideological Service of Capital and its State Power – Whatever Happened to the «National Liberation Struggle»?