Economic growth and working-class decline

Author(s):  
Marc Blecher
Author(s):  
Daniel Briggs ◽  
Rubén Monge Gamero

The evolution of Valdemingómez should not just simply be seen as some organic process whereby working class and immigrant people have somehow ended up congregating there in search of economic security and work in the city but as a consequence of macro processes of economic growth and technological advancement and how rural domestic economies submitted to urban industrialization in Spain. Equally, its configuration as a ghetto, compounded by drug markets should not be viewed as a consequence of poverty saturation but of spatial and structural processes which have rendered people in the urban metropolis increasingly socially redundant resulting in their destitution and political disaffection. Here in this chapter, we look at these processes charting the evolution of the Cañada Real Galiana in which is situated Valdemingómez, and how economic change in Spain, which led to the growth of the suburbs, collided with the economic crisis, increasing zonal inequalities in the capital and expanding drug markets.


2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM TOMLINSON

One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour's ideological and policy debate. The centrality of this issue reflected the fact that understanding the firm was inextricably linked to a raft of broader arguments within the Left about the nature of modern capitalism. The benign view of the corporation that flowed from the revisionist wing of the party was challenged by the ‘declinist’ politics of the 1960s, and in office after 1964 Labour pursued a modernizing agenda which centrally involved seeking to shape the behaviour of the private sector in order to deliver the higher economic growth that Labour so much desired. The failure of this growth to materialize led to great disillusion across the party about the policies pursued by the Wilson government, and this in turn led to a fundamental rethink of policy that was to underpin the radical agenda of the party in the 1970s.


Author(s):  
Emma Griffin

Nineteenth-century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation's wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the ‘breadwinner wage’ of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape. This book unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives — and finances — of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, the book changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.


Bread Winner ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 295-301
Author(s):  
Emma Griffin

This concluding chapter returns to the ‘enigma’ raised at the beginning of the chapter — whether or not this study of six hundred-odd autobiographies has shed any light on why decades of robust economic growth failed to lift all out of poverty. It explores the survival of poverty in an increasingly prosperous society through a new lens — the working-class autobiographies. These sources are not often used by economic historians, but the chapter proposes a mingling of life and social histories with statistical records and modern economic theory to better explain how the economy grew and who benefited from it. After all, there can be no denying that Victorian economic growth had vastly increased the wealth of the nation by the outbreak of war in 1914. Yet whilst industrial capitalism could create wealth, it was itself unable to distribute it in such a way that most of society could benefit from it.


Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Marco Soresina

Abstract The years 1945–55 were a period of reconstruction for Italy; the following decade was one of economic growth. An aspect of this transition is analysed here, in relation to the forms of social integration created in working-class neighbourhoods. The case-study focuses on Milan, and the two organizations studied are the consulte popolari (the ‘people's councils’), created by the left in the immediate post-war period, and the ‘social centres’ created in the mid-1950s by the IACP (the Autonomous Institute of Public Housing). Both were attempts to involve the new, outlying suburbs in the city's political life, each of them trying to adapt to different political phases. Both, I would like to suggest, succeeded in achieving certain results.


Author(s):  
Matthew Y. Heimburger

Progressivism was a political and socioeconomic movement central to American national politics from the Gilded Age (1890s) to the end of the Roaring Twenties. At its heart, it was a populist, bipartisan reaction to the excesses of the wealthy ‘robber-baron’ classes and the threat of revolution from the disenfranchised working class – many of whom did not share in the dramatic economic growth of the age – accompanied by a distinctly anti-immigrant nativism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Avkash Daulatrao Jadhav

India has been a country to raise inquisitiveness from ancient times. The era of colonialism in India unfolds many dimensions of struggle by the natives and the attempts of travesty by the imperialist powers. This paper will focus on the two landmark legislation of the end of the 19th century specifically pertaining to the labour conditions in India. The changing paradigms of the urban and rural labour underwent a phenomenal change by the mid 19th century. The characteristic which distinguishes the modern period in world history from all past periods is the fact of economic growth.   


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-151
Author(s):  
Armando Boito

Lulism is one of the most important political phenomena of twenty-first-century Brazil. It can be compared to the Varguism that dominated Brazilian politics between 1930 and 1964 in its broad popular but politically unorganized base and its policy of state intervention in the economy to stimulate economic growth, increase the state’s room for maneuver against the imperialist countries, and promote a moderate income distribution. These two variants of populism differ, however, in that Varguism was based on the working class while Lulism, which may be called “neopopulism,” is based on the marginal mass of workers and has less potential to destabilize the political process. Bonapartism, to which Lulism has also been compared, is distinct from it in that what links its leadership to its base is the fetish of the state based on order rather than the fetish based on protection. O lulismo é um dos fenômenos políticos mais importantes do Brasil do século XXI. Pode ser comparado ao varguismo que dominou a política brasileira entre 1930 e 1964 em relação à sua ampla, mas politicamente desorganizada, base popular, e sua política de intervenção estatal na economia para estimular o crescimento econômico, aumentar a margem de manobra do Estado contra os países imperialistas e promover uma distribuição de renda moderada. Essas duas variantes do populismo diferem, no entanto, no sentido de que o varguismo era baseado na classe trabalhadora, enquanto o lulismo, que pode ser chamado de “neopopulismo”, é baseado na massa marginal de trabalhadores e tem menos potencial para desestabilizar o processo político. O bonapartismo, ao qual o lulismo também foi comparado, é distinto dele, pois o que liga sua liderança à sua base é o fetiche do estado baseado na ordem, e não o fetiche baseado na proteção.


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