Jonathan White - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
I've had a slightly odd career. I started out in academia researching and writing about eighteenth-century Britain and consumerism. Then the difficulties associated with building a career on short-term contracts, family life and a growing interest in trade union activism led to a career change. Since 2005 (I think), I've worked for the University and College Union first in their campaigns and policy units and now providing bargaining and employment policy support. I've retained an interest in privatisation, marketization and all the other bad 'ations' associated with neoliberal public sector reform, which took me towards political economy and a small volume called Building an Economy for the People. I now work on precarious employment and in my spare time write about and teach Marxist theory at the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School and am associate editor of its house journal, Theory and Struggle.
less
Uploads
Books by Jonathan White
This pamphlet has been a collective work and represents the product of a seminar held in 2011 in ... more This pamphlet has been a collective work and represents the product of a seminar held in 2011 in London and attended by many of the contributors.
Papers by Jonathan White
Scarcely a week goes by at the moment without some press story about precarious work in Britain a... more Scarcely a week goes by at the moment without some press story about precarious work in Britain and it’s undeniable that something profound has happened to Britain’s labour market. The full-employment boasted by Tories is in truth closer to full under-employment – a swelling in the ranks of part-time workers. Self-employment, real and bogus has expanded massively. But what exactly is going on? And how should the labour movement respond? In a new essay for Trade Union Futures, I look at how an engagement with Marx’s ideas and a focus on the role of financialised multinationals and the state can shed a different light on this issue and give some pointers to the trade union movement in how to respond.
This article is based on a lecture I gave at the Marx Memorial Library. In it, I examined the way... more This article is based on a lecture I gave at the Marx Memorial Library. In it, I examined the way that Marx used his understanding of the Paris Commune to formulate his understanding of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat to start to dissolve the abstracted power of the bourgeois state back into society.
The work of Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov is not well known but this article argues that he m... more The work of Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov is not well known but this article argues that he made a significant contribution to the development of dialectical materialist philosophy which needs to be revived as part of a living Marxist understanding of the world.
This is a chapter in a new book edited by Tressie McMillan Cottom and William A Darity Jr, For-Pr... more This is a chapter in a new book edited by Tressie McMillan Cottom and William A Darity Jr, For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). The chapter uses the UK government reforms to the higher education sector, aimed at opening up the field to for-profit providers, as a case study of market creation, arguing that the market is being politically constructed and that the particular features of the emerging market are the consequence of political struggles.
It is over 20 years since John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and J.H. Plumb published their seminal wor... more It is over 20 years since John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and J.H. Plumb published their seminal work Birth of a Consumer Society. 1 If in 1993 it was possible to say of this volume that it represented a 'swallow preceding a summer that is yet to follow', surely that is no longer the case. The study of the eighteenth century in Britain has been significantly transformed and its central thematic concerns and concepts transfigured in the wake of the commercialization thesis. Even studiously performative archaics like Jonathan Clark remain trapped within the terms of debate established by the story of commercial modernity, arguing in essence over the timing and extent of changes whose essential nature are not in question. 2 The key claim made in The Birth of a Consumer Society was that eighteenthcentury Britain, and England in particular, underwent a revolutionary transformation that saw the creation of a mass market in consumer goods and the emergence of modern spending patterns based on consumption for pleasure rather than need. The desire to acquire was not new, its authors argued, but more people than ever could enjoy the experience of buying material goods. Rising population and incomes unleashed the drive to emulate which permeated down through the social order, creating Cultural and Social History 2006; 3: 93-104
This pamphlet has been a collective work and represents the product of a seminar held in 2011 in ... more This pamphlet has been a collective work and represents the product of a seminar held in 2011 in London and attended by many of the contributors.
Scarcely a week goes by at the moment without some press story about precarious work in Britain a... more Scarcely a week goes by at the moment without some press story about precarious work in Britain and it’s undeniable that something profound has happened to Britain’s labour market. The full-employment boasted by Tories is in truth closer to full under-employment – a swelling in the ranks of part-time workers. Self-employment, real and bogus has expanded massively. But what exactly is going on? And how should the labour movement respond? In a new essay for Trade Union Futures, I look at how an engagement with Marx’s ideas and a focus on the role of financialised multinationals and the state can shed a different light on this issue and give some pointers to the trade union movement in how to respond.
This article is based on a lecture I gave at the Marx Memorial Library. In it, I examined the way... more This article is based on a lecture I gave at the Marx Memorial Library. In it, I examined the way that Marx used his understanding of the Paris Commune to formulate his understanding of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat to start to dissolve the abstracted power of the bourgeois state back into society.
The work of Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov is not well known but this article argues that he m... more The work of Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov is not well known but this article argues that he made a significant contribution to the development of dialectical materialist philosophy which needs to be revived as part of a living Marxist understanding of the world.
This is a chapter in a new book edited by Tressie McMillan Cottom and William A Darity Jr, For-Pr... more This is a chapter in a new book edited by Tressie McMillan Cottom and William A Darity Jr, For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). The chapter uses the UK government reforms to the higher education sector, aimed at opening up the field to for-profit providers, as a case study of market creation, arguing that the market is being politically constructed and that the particular features of the emerging market are the consequence of political struggles.
It is over 20 years since John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and J.H. Plumb published their seminal wor... more It is over 20 years since John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and J.H. Plumb published their seminal work Birth of a Consumer Society. 1 If in 1993 it was possible to say of this volume that it represented a 'swallow preceding a summer that is yet to follow', surely that is no longer the case. The study of the eighteenth century in Britain has been significantly transformed and its central thematic concerns and concepts transfigured in the wake of the commercialization thesis. Even studiously performative archaics like Jonathan Clark remain trapped within the terms of debate established by the story of commercial modernity, arguing in essence over the timing and extent of changes whose essential nature are not in question. 2 The key claim made in The Birth of a Consumer Society was that eighteenthcentury Britain, and England in particular, underwent a revolutionary transformation that saw the creation of a mass market in consumer goods and the emergence of modern spending patterns based on consumption for pleasure rather than need. The desire to acquire was not new, its authors argued, but more people than ever could enjoy the experience of buying material goods. Rising population and incomes unleashed the drive to emulate which permeated down through the social order, creating Cultural and Social History 2006; 3: 93-104