About the Book

Knowledge is playing an important role in the development of contemporary capitalism yet little is known of how labour movements produce, disseminate and utilise knowledge and how that in turn informs strategy and effects outcomes.

This book seeks to redress this balance through the production of a theoretically informed yet richly empirical edited collection that raises the question of how labour movements learn, what strategies they deploy to defend their interests and to what extent processes of neoliberal globalisation and the new geography of global capitalism are producing alternative geographies of labour knowledge production and practice.

The authors argue that the production and dissemination of alternative knowledge is central to a resurgence of working-class power. Worker education in different forms and through different organisational settings is proving to be indispensable to counter-hegemonic labour movements seeking to defend and extend workers rights. Through a series of in-depth case studies from around the globe, this book will illustrate the importance of knowledge for raising the political consciousness of workers and their allies in the fight for social and economic justice. Developing from Santos’s notion of the ‘South’ as a metaphor for all those left out of the benefits of contemporary capitalism, case studies will be drawn from workers movements in both the geographical South and North.