Labor unrest and capital accumulation on a world scale

The dissertation analyzes the interrelationship between labor unrest and capital accumulation on a world scale from the late nineteenth century to the present. Two central premises guide this study. First, that labor movements within different nation-states are linked by the existence of a world-scale division of labor and an interstate system. Second, that struggles and resistances by subordinate groups are a primary motor of change in the long-term evolution of the capitalist world system.;Part I surveys the main trends in labor militancy in the world-economy from the late sixties to the present with specific focus on the United States, Western Europe, Brazil, South Africa and Poland. The weakening and subsequent decline in militancy among workers in core countries and the simultaneous emergence of strong and effective labor movements in numerous semiperipheral countries in the 1980's are analyzed as a single world-scale historical process of labor-capital conflict bound together by the global restructuring of capital accumulation.;Part II discusses problems involved in conceptualizing and measuring labor unrest as a process of long-term, world-scale social change. The inadequacy of state-collected strike data for the purposes of this study is emphasized. A new database on world labor unrest--constructed by the World Labor Research Working Group at the Fernand Braudel Center from newspaper accounts--is introduced and its reliability is assessed.;Part III uses time series of labor unrest derived from the World Labor Research Working Group database in order to assess the plausibility of theories which link long waves of capital accumulation (Kondratieff cycles) to a long cycle of labor militancy. It is argued that processes of world-scale labor unrest over the last century can be better explained by studying their interrelationship with processes of global political change, i.e., cycles of world hegemony and rivalry (world war and peace). The period from the crisis of British world hegemony in the late nineteenth century to the current crisis of US world hegemony is analyzed. A final chapter draws conclusions about the likely future trajectory of labor unrest in the world system.