The Author
Immanuel Ness
Author of Dialectics of Chinese Labor — scholar, activist, and editor writing from the front lines of global labour movements.
Immanuel Ness is a Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Dialectics of Chinese Labor: Trade Unions under Market Socialism (Brill, 2026), a Marxist sociology of state owned enterprises (SOEs), trade unions, the platform economy, and transitional socialism in China — from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.
He edits the Brill series Studies in Political Economy of Global Labor and Work, with the aim of making as much scholarship as possible open access — freely available to students, researchers, and organizers everywhere.
The Argument
It may look formal — it's published by the oldest private publisher in the world — but this is a highly controversial book. It argues that the labor movement is working.
Dialectics of Chinese Labor asks readers to set aside received assumptions and look closely at what workers and trade unions are actually achieving under China's market socialism — in SOEs, the gig economy, migration, urbanization, and the rural sector. It is an invitation to think differently — and to read with an open mind.