What are you seeing? What fascinates and intrigues you? Are you feeling energetic and inspired? What frustrates and disappoints you? How can we make sense of all these observations and feelings?Let’s figure out together why we are stuck and how we can become unstuck.
Labour’s Polycrisis and Our Disenchantment
Course Description
You are all observing what’s going on in the world of labor, in our immediate workplace, in our community and in the national and international labor movement. What are you seeing? What fascinates and intrigues you? Are you feeling energetic and inspired? What frustrates and disappoints you? How can we make sense of all these observations and feelings?
As I sketched out in my recent article, Labour’s Polycrisis, I see a widespread feeling of frustration, a sense of getting stuck, despite many impressive and inspiring struggles:
“Asia is at present and historically a continent full of struggles. In the last century, it has experienced revolutions, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements, and waves of democratisation. Today, there is still a strong spirit of resistance, especially in some of the most repressed places, often not despite repression but because of it. With the largest working class of any continent, what is happening with the working class in Asia matters by default. Yet, with all the struggles, there is a shared feeling that things are stuck or even moving backwards, and why this is so matters.”
Let’s figure out together why we are stuck and how we can become unstuck.
- Session Schedule: 6 Online Sessions / 1.5 hour per session
- Course Fee: USD$60 (Regular Price) / USD$40 (Students/Workers/Unemployed)
- Class Size: Class Limited to 10 Students
Registration Deadline: Nov 2, 2025
Course Facilitator
Kevin Lin is the Managing Editor of Asian Labour Review. He writes about labour struggles in China and Asia, and is interested in building international labour solidarity. He is a co-author of China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry (Haymarket 2024)
Class Time
- 6pm: Pakistan
- 6:30pm: India/Sri Lanka
- 7pm: Bangladesh
- 7:30pm: Myanmar
- 7:45pm: Nepal
- 8pm: Indonesia/Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam
- 9pm: Hong Kong/Taiwan/China/Philippines/Singapore/Malaysia
- 10pm: Japan/Korea
Session Schedule
Session 1 – Nov 3, 2025: What are You Observing? How are You Feeling?
We would like to hear what you are seeing from your position and your perspective?
How do you feel about what you are seeing? Why do you think you feel that way?
Session 2 – Nov 10, 2025: The State of Workers’ Struggles and Movement Building
What are the struggles that you are part of, contribute to, or feel inspired by?
How should we understand and assess the landscape of workers’ organizing in Asia?
Session 3 – Nov 17, 2025: Union Crisis and Alternative Forms of Worker Organizations
Is there a crisis of trade unionism? What are the strengths and limitations of trade unions? How should they change?
What are alternative forms of mass worker organizations that are feasible, being built, or should be envisioned?
Session 4 – Nov 24, 2025: Crisis of Neoliberalism and Crisis of Social Reproduction
How should we place our conditions in the context of neoliberal capitalism? How does neoliberal capitalism manifest, and is it in crisis (or exhausted, decayed)?
How do we make sense of the increasing significance of the crisis of social reproduction that goes beyond production and the workplace?
Session 5 – Dec 1, 2025: Authoritarianism, Right-Wing Populism and Political Power
How do we make sense of the rise of authoritarianism, and right-wing populism? What gives rise to them, and what sustains them?
How can the working class build political power that shifts the balance of power vis-a-vis state and capital?
Session 6 – Dec 8, 2025: Ways out of Polycrisis?
What are the ways out of our polycrisis? Are the protest movements we see in Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines offering possibilities for an alternative vision of society?
How can we better practice collective care that sustains ourselves and our movement?
To contact us: convenor@labourschool.org
