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Agency and the Power Resources Approach: Asserting the Importance of the Structuring Conditions of the Capitalist Social Relations of Production

The publication of this Special Issue on the power resources approach (PRA) is a highly welcome contribution to the wider literature on the potential agency of labour movements. All too often analyses of the global political economy, even if carried out from a critical political economy perspective, highlight the apparently predominant power of capital and, explicitly or implicitly, indicate that resistance against intensified exploitation is as good as impossible. As the contributions to this Special Issue make clear, as difficult as the current situation may be, there are always different power resources available to labour movements. Capitalist restructuring is always contested and labour movements have the possibility to resist. In this short contribution, I will first place the increasing importance granted to agency by the PRA approach within the wider literature of similar attempts to emphasise the possibility of agency, including Harry Cleaver’s focus on workers’ agency and the disruption-oriented approach by David J. Bailey, Mònica Clua-Losada, Nikolai Huke and Olatz Ribera-Almandoz. In a second step, I will then emphasise that even a focus on agency still requires an awareness of the structuring conditions within which agency takes place, if we want to comprehend the possibilities of successful resistance. Drawing on the philosophy of internal relations, the subsequent section outlines how we can conceptualise agency and structure within a historical materialist approach in order to comprehend the historical specificity of capitalism. The concluding section will provide a brief example of the Italian water movement and the referendum against water privatisation in 2011 to illustrate the empirical implications of this conceptual understanding.