Editorial Essay

Book Launch & Lecture Tour

Published
August 28, 2024
Read Time
1 min read
Immanuel Ness speaking at a lecture event

Join Immanuel Ness for a series of upcoming discussions on the arguments at the heart of Dialectics of Chinese Labor.

Dialectics of Chinese Labor: Trade Unions under Market Socialism is now available open access from Brill. To mark the launch, I will be speaking at a series of universities and labor institutes over the coming months.

The talks will focus on the book's central argument: that the Chinese labor regime is a contested, dialectical arrangement whose outcome depends on the balance of forces inside the country — neither the state-capitalist caricature of Western liberal accounts, nor a finished socialist project (see the concluding chapter, Ness, Dialectics of Chinese Labor, pp. 204–208).

For a preview of that argument in practice, see Organizing China's Delivery Workers and Shifts in Guangdong's Industrial Zones.

Dates and venues will be posted here as they are confirmed. If you would like to host a talk or arrange a reading group, please use the contact page.

About the Author

Immanuel Ness

Immanuel Ness is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg and author of Dialectics of Chinese Labor.

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