From today's vantage point, it is obvious that capitalist development is accompanied by local and macroregional processes of deindustrialization. Smoking chimneys are no longer an everyday sight in the heartland of the industrial revolution, the Northwest of England, and we are used to hearing news about factories being shut or relocated. This raises important theoretical and political questions, which concern both how we understand capitalism, and what we make of the classical socialist idea that organized labour is a force of political progress or even human emancipation. What happens to class relations and working- class solidarity when the factory gates close for good?

In the introduction to this book, contained in Volume 1, I presented two countervailing claims by eminent scholars on this subject matter. The first one came from Manuell Castells, the Spanish sociologist and former minister in the centre- left government of Pedro Sánchez. According to Castells, we find ourselves in a ‘post- industrial period’ marked by ‘informational capitalism’ (2010: 225, 18), which fosters individualization and undermines worker solidarity. The late Leo Panitch, a leading Canadian Marxist intellectual and political scientist, took the opposite view. He argued that the decline of manufacturing in the capitalist centres is accompanied by the emergence of new solidarities among workers, which can be found outside of the industrial sector (Panitch, 2001: 367).

Against this backdrop, I wagered that strike research is an ideal area for exploring this issue systematically. After all, labour stoppages are based on the principle of solidarity among workers. If Castells is right, non-industrial labour stoppages should be few and far between, and if they occur, it should be rare for close cross- sectoral links between workers to emerge. The opposite should be the case if Panitch is correct: There should be ample evidence of workers going on strike in non-industrial sectors – and of what I call broad-based, inclusive or expansive solidarity. Accordingly, the research question pursued in my book is this: What are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or to what extent do they contribute to working- class formation?

In Volume 1 of this book, I positioned my project vis-à-vis existing research and laid the theoretical groundwork for addressing my question.