scholarly journals Contesting neoliberalism: Mapping the terrain of social conflict

2021 ◽  
pp. 030981682110548
Author(s):  
David J. Bailey ◽  
Paul C. Lewis ◽  
Saori Shibata
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
The United States ◽  
Linear Process ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Event Analysis ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism

This article explores the terrain of social conflict as it developed across advanced capitalist democracies throughout the ‘age of austerity’ that followed the global economic crisis. It shows how a (broadly defined) working class mobilised in different ways in different capitalist contexts, contesting the institutional forms (and the crises that emerged from them) which constitute each particular model of capitalism. Considered this way, we are able to conceptualise and explain the forms of working-class mobilisation that have emerged in opposition to contemporary neoliberalism. In doing so, we go beyond a narrow focus on workplace-focused or trade-union-led forms of working-class mobilisation, highlighting the continuing contestation of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on a protest event analysis of 1,167 protest events in five countries (Spain, Germany, Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom), and developing a Régulation Theory approach to the study of protest/social movements, we provide an overview of the most visible patterns of social contestation in each national neoliberal capitalist context, tracing links to the institutional configurations that constitute those national models of capitalism. While there exists no direct (linear) process of causality between the model of neoliberal capitalism and the forms of mobilised dissent witnessed, nevertheless we are able to clearly trace the different pressures of capital accumulation that have given rise to the protest/social movements identified in each case, thereby allowing us to gain a better insight into both each particular model of capitalism and the forms of dissent that constitute it.

scholarly journals What Do Health Libraries Tweet About? A Content Analysis

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine J Neilson
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Awareness Tool ◽  
Medical Libraries ◽  
Twitter Activity ◽  
Grounded Theory Approach ◽  
A Current ◽  
Shed Light

Many libraries have adopted Twitter to connect with their clients, but the library literature has only begun to explore how health libraries use Twitter in practice. When presented with new responsibility for tweeting on behalf of her library, the author was faced with the question “what do other health libraries tweet about?”. This paper presents a content analysis of a sample of tweets from ten health and medical libraries in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Five hundred twenty-four tweets were collected over 4 one-week periods in 2014 and analyzed using a grounded theory approach to identify themes and categories. The health libraries included in this study appear to use Twitter primarily as a current awareness tool, focusing on topics external to the library and its broader organization and including little original content. This differs from previous studies which have found that libraries tend to use Twitter primarily for library promotion. While this snapshot of Twitter activity helps shed light on how health libraries use Twitter, further research is needed to understand the underlying factors that shape libraries’ Twitter use. Beaucoup de bibliothèques ont choisi d’utiliser Twitter pour communiquer avec leurs clients, mais la littérature a commencé à peine à explorer comment des bibliothèques de la santé utilisent Twitter dans la pratique. Lorsqu’on lui a présenté la nouvelle responsabilité de s’occuper du compte Twitter pour la bibliothèque, l’auteure s’est demandé « qu'est-ce que d’autres bibliothèques de la santé disent sur Twitter ? ». Cet article présente une analyse du contenu d’un échantillon de Tweets de dix bibliothèques médicales au Canada, aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni. 524 Tweets ont été recueillis au cours de quatre périodes d’une semaine en 2014 et ont été analysés selon une théorie ancrée afin d’identifier des thèmes et des catégories. Les bibliothèques de la santé incluses dans l’étude paraissent utiliser Twitter principalement comme outil de sensibilisation, se concentrant sur des sujets en dehors de la bibliothèque et l’organisation en général, et comprenant peu de contenu original. Cela se différencie d’autres études qui ont trouvé que les bibliothèques sont enclines à utiliser Twitter principalement pour la promotion de la bibliothèque. Bien que cet aperçu d’activité sur Twitter aide à éclairer la façon dont des bibliothèques l’utilisent, une recherche plus approfondie est nécessaire afin de comprendre les facteurs sous-jacents qui touchent l’usage de Twitter par des bibliothèques.

scholarly journals Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 236-248
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Unconscious Fantasy

Abstract This paper brings core concepts coined by Karl Marx in conversation with Jacques Lacan to analyse some of the mechanisms that have mystified subjects’ consciousness, and contributed to a scenario where the (white) working-classes in the United States and elsewhere turned to the far right that further undermines their existence, instead of uniting with the raced and gendered working class to overthrow capitalism. It explains that the money fetish, which we find at the centre of the American Dream of wholeness (on earth), serves as the unconscious fantasy object petit a to deal with the desires and fears subjects fundamental non-wholeness creates, which have been heightened by the insecurities of neoliberal capitalism and exploited by the far right. It also shows how religion offers the illusion of wholeness in the sky, which produces subjects who endure rather than rebel against their suffering. Finally, it explains how the far-right brands the sexed and raced working-classes as inferior to uphold the illusion of the white working-class subjects as whole, which further undermines the creation of a revolutionary proletariat.

scholarly journals The Failure of Lifestyle Environmentalism and the Promise of the Green New Deal for Working-Class People

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Karen Bell ◽  
Gnisha Bevan
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Policy Paradigm ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Low Income Groups ◽  
The Uk

There is an urgent need to address a range of environmental issues, including climate change, but the policies enacted to date have usually done nothing to address class inequities and have often led to increased working-class disadvantage. The causes of the climate and other environmental crises have often been located in problematic individual lifestyles, with little recognition of the time, economic and health constraints that make it difficult for working-class people to adopt green lifestyles. The Green New Deal (GND) presented an alternative policy paradigm that argued for environmental policies that, rather than increasing the pressure on disadvantaged groups, would have co-benefits for working-class people, low-income groups and communities of colour. However, the policy did not lead to electoral success for the political leaders that proposed it, in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), due to opposition representations of it as costly and threatening to working-class jobs. We interviewed 40 working-class people in the UK to find out how much they knew about the Green New Deal, what they thought about it as an environmental policy and how they felt about environmentalism, more generally. Our research indicates that there was a general lack of knowledge about GND, but great enthusiasm about it once explained, albeit with reservations about its implementation and limitations. The GND has huge potential to benefit the lives of working-class people but, we conclude, more, and better, outreach is needed for people to understand its potential to improve their lives.

scholarly journals Emergent Cultures of Activism: Young People and the Building of Alliances Between Unions and Other Social Movements

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Mijin Cha ◽  
Jane Holgate ◽  
Karel Yon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Young People ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
The United Kingdom

This article considers emergent cultures of activism among young people in the labor movement. The authors question whether unions should reconsider creating different forms of organization to make themselves relevant to new generations of workers. Our comparative case study research from the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—where young people are engaged in “alter-activism” and unions have successfully recruited and included young workers—shows that there is potential for building alliances between trade unions and other social movements. The authors suggest that emerging cultures of activism provide unions with a way of appealing to wider and more diverse constituencies.

Freedom to Move, Freedom to Stay, Freedom to Return

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (135) ◽  
pp. 138-159
Author(s):  
Sunaina Maira
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
The Right

Abstract This article focuses on the sanctuary movement in the United States and Europe, putting into conversation with one another migrant solidarity activists from different national contexts. This transnational roundtable draws on interviews with activists in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and on a workshop on sanctuary activism that involved forty activists from the Bay Area, Europe, and Australia. The article explores the meaning of sanctuary in these different locations and the strategies used by activists to create various forms of sanctuary while grappling with its contradictions. It addresses three key themes: (1) the meaning of sanctuary in campaigns that enact the right to freedom of movement across borders; (2) the binary of “good”/deserving versus “bad”/unworthy migrants; and (3) an abolitionist sanctuary model that links border violence to carcerality, neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and fascism.

Fighting for “Respectability”

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 350-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Media

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the White male boxer has long held a special appeal among the public and media. Boxing “heroes” are constructed not only on the basis of Whiteness but also on the basis of their perceived “working-class” nature, at a time when “working-class” or “blue-collar” identities in both the United Kingdom and the United States are subjected to forms of negative stigmatization. However, central to the appeal of the White, “working-class” boxing hero is their asserted “respectability,” which is used to establish distance from less “respectable” forms of raced, classed, and gendered identities. The media representations that surround boxing champions Ricky Hatton and Kelly Pavlik illustrate the way in which their “respectability” is asserted, explored, and related to broader conversations about a perceived growing “White underclass.”

The Class Analysis of Poverty: Is the Underclass Living off the Socially Available Surplus?

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chernomas ◽  
Ardeshir Sepehri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
The U.S

In a recent article Erik Olin Wright argues that the U.S. underclass is a drain on the socially available surplus and thus a hindrance to capital accumulation. Wright's argument is not supported by available evidence from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom on the state's distributive activities. This evidence suggests that the social welfare necessary to sustain the underclass is provided by transfers from wage and salary earners rather than from profit.

A materialist analysis of contemporary feminist movements

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brunella Casalini
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Social Reproduction Theory ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Class Play

Social movements on the left, such as the International Women’s Strike on 8 March 2017, see in the present moment a reorganization of capital accumulation in which gender, sexuality, race and class play significant roles. The 8 March strike, in particular, has been characterized by the willingness to emphasize and render visible the link between masculinist violence, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and the dynamics of dispossession, privatization of common resources, and environmental destruction caused by neoliberal capitalism—dynamics that are rendering ever-wider strata of the population vulnerable to poverty, marginality and insecurity. This study draws on an analysis of the contributions that approaches such as social reproduction theory and the feminist reinterpretation of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought on primitive accumulation may make to understanding the present historical moment, in order to interrogate the nature of the contemporary struggles of feminist social movements.

scholarly journals German economic will

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (118) ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Aqeel Makki Kazim
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Market ◽  
German Industry ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The United Kingdom

The economic renaissance of Germany began in the mid-nineteenth century, specifically in the year 1848, with the emergence of industry in the east of the country and the creation of a railroad linking the east of the country with its west, and the state and industrial investors at that time adopting a savings approach at the expense of consumption, and thus the emergence of surplus savings and capital accumulation (the basis of economic growth). This helped the German industry to recover locally to cover the need of the local market without resorting to importing, that is, self-reliance in providing life requirements.     And the Germans continued this approach, especially for capitalists and industrialists, until they reached a degree with which the local market became unable to absorb the huge amount of industrial production surplus, then they headed towards the global market because the local market was in a state of sufficiency and this production exported abroad was strongly echoed in The souls of different peoples of the world that have not yet known the industry, except for the United Kingdom since 1776, the United States since 1840, France 1845, Japan 1868, and the Scandinavian countries in 1910 all of that made German investors get more profits and thus their country was dependent on one of the most important traps. This applies to the taxes obtained from the owners of productive capital (a capitalist system) and will not continue after this case until Germany has reached a real economic risk represented by the diminishing of the initially limited raw materials it has, as we know that Germany lacks natural resources such as oil and gas and others, but despite this, it seemed this The country since more than 80 years since the emergence of the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom and the emergence of the writings of the eminent economist (Adam Smith) in the year 1776 and his famous book (The Wealth of Nations), with an industrial revolution that surpassed itself first, and the cradle of the industrial revolution (United Kingdom) second and tens of years Which introduced it in AD A fierce bankruptcy with its French and English opponents after that, in pursuit of the sources of the raw materials needed to ensure the continued rotation of the industrial wheel  

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