Folk Devils and the Hipster Figure: On Classification Struggles, Social Types and Figures in Moral Panic Research

This chapter draws on a case study of contested societal reactions to the middle-class hipster figure and gentrification in contemporary London. The analysis shows how public reactions involve forms of class politics and classificatory struggles over the moral meaning gentrification processes and the role of the hipster figure in the latter. Through this, the chapter discusses how the folk devil can be conceptualized as a social type by drawing on Bourdieu’s research on classification.

Sex Work, Queer Economic Justice, and Communicative Ethics

There are various academic and activist perspectives on sex work as an area of inquiry at the intersection of queer, feminist, and class politics. Exploring this topic with an eye toward a communicative ethic helps to foreground consent and mutuality when considering some of the major theoretical topics connected with sex work. A historiography of the sex wars of the 1970s and 1980s illuminates how public discussions about feminism and sexuality were influenced by the emergence of pornography as a major media force. Taking seriously the refrain “sex work is work,” how labor can be a useful analytic for connecting sex work to the broader economy is considered, while also pointing to the limits of categories such as “sex,” “work,” and “labor.” Situating sex work in the contemporary context of neoliberal and paternalistic rationalities of the state, how advocates for sex workers are caught in a communicative double bind is discussed. Taking into account shared commitments among scholars of sex work in the communication discipline, alternatives to criminalization provide scholars and activists a place to start in imagining a future that is safer for queer bodies and practices.

The Realignment of Class Politics and Class Voting

Since the early days of the study of political behavior, class politics has been a key component. Initially researchers focused on simple manual versus nonmanual occupations and left versus right parties, and found consistent evidence of a strong effect of class on support for left-wing parties. This finding was assumed to be simply a matter of the redistributive preferences of the poor, an expression of the “democratic class struggle.” However, as the world became more complex, many established democracies developed more nuanced class structures and multidimensional party systems. How has this affected class politics? From the simple, but not deterministic pattern of left-voting workers, the early 21st century witnessed substantial realignment processes. Many remain faithful to social democratic (and to a lesser extent radical left) parties, but plenty of workers support radical right parties or have left the electoral arena entirely. To account for these changes, political scientists and sociologists have identified two mechanisms through which class voting occurs. The most frequently studied mechanism behind class voting is that classes have different attitudes, values, and ideologies, and political parties supply policies that appeal to different classes’ preferences. These ideologies are related not only to redistribution but also to newer issues such as immigration, which appear to some degree to have replaced competition over class-related inequality and the redistribution of wealth as the primary axis of class politics. A secondary mechanism is that members of different classes hold different social identities, and parties can connect to these identities by making symbolic class appeals or by descriptively representing a class. It follows that class realignment can occur either because the classes have changed their ideologies or identities, because the parties have changed their policies, class appeals, or personnel, or both. Early explanations focused on the classes themselves, arguing that they had become more similar in terms of living conditions, ideologies, and identities. However, later longitudinal studies failed to find such convergences taking place. The workers still have poorer, more uncertain, and shorter lives than their middle-class counterparts, identify more with the working class, and are more in favor of redistribution and opposed to immigration. While the classes are still distinctive, it seems that the parties have changed. Several social democratic parties have become less representative of working-class voters in terms of policies, rhetorical appeals, or the changing social composition of their activists and leaders. This representational defection is a response to the declining size of the working class, but not to the changing character or extent of class divisions in preferences. It is also connected to the exogeneous rise of new issues, on which these parties tend not to align with working-class preferences. By failing to represent the preferences or identities of many of their former core supporters, social democratic parties have initiated a supply-side driven process of realignment. This has primarily taken two forms; class–party realignments on both left and right and growing class inequalities in participation and representation.

The attitude of students of European universities to euthanasia from the point of view of religious ethics

Если человечество вступит на путь легализации медицинских убийств и оправдания из чувства милосердия, велика вероятность перехода к чувству целесообразности, и масштабы такой деятельности тяжело предсказать. В этой связи необходимо вспомнить принцип «наклонной плоскости» который, описал Архиепископ Сан-Францисский Иоанн. Если наложить суть данного принципа «наклонной плоскости» на проблему эвтаназии то мы получим следующее: если сегодня узаконить искусственное лишение жизни безнадежных больных, за час до их предполагаемой смерти, то завтра такое человеколюбие пришло бы к выводу о необходимости искусственно прерывать жизнь больных за 3 дня до их возможной смерти, далее — за один месяц, за полгода, год. Идея классовой политики, расовой чистоты, экономической целесообразности, и подобные идеи, будут требовать себе новые человеческие жертвы. Основные религии мира имеют не однозначные взгляды на эвтаназию, сравнительный анализ начнем с позиции православной церкви. Биологическую смерть Православная церковь рассматривает не как отмирание жизненно важных органов, а как таинство, великое благословение, которое наполнено скрытым духовным смыслом. Эвтаназия в Европе больше не является запретной темой, и доказательством этого является тот факт, что она была легализована в Нидерландах, Бельгии, Люксембурге, Албании. Некоторые формы эвтаназии также используются в Швейцарии, где можно приписать гипнотический препарат, но пациент должен принимать это близко к сердцу. If humanity takes the path of legalizing medical murders and justifying them out of a sense of mercy, there is a high probability of a transition to a sense of expediency, and the scale of such activities is difficult to predict. In this regard, it is necessary to recall the principle of the "inclined plane", which was described by Archbishop John of San Francisco. If we impose the essence of this principle of the "inclined plane" on the problem of euthanasia, we will get the following: if today we legalize the artificial deprivation of life of hopeless patients, an hour before their expected death, then tomorrow such philanthropy would come to the conclusion that it is necessary to artificially interrupt the life of patients 3 days before their possible death, then one month, six months, a year. The idea of class politics, racial purity, economic expediency, and similar ideas will demand new human sacrifices. The main religions of the world have ambiguous views on euthanasia, a comparative analysis will begin with the position of the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church considers biological death not as the death of vital organs, but as a sacrament, a great blessing that is filled with hidden spiritual meaning. Euthanasia in Europe is no longer a taboo topic, and the proof of this is the fact that it has been legalized in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Albania. Some forms of euthanasia are also used in Switzerland, where a hypnotic drug can be attributed, but the patient must take it to heart.

Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class

In this essay I discuss a specific notion that has become particularly influential in framing the discussion of identity and identity politics – intersectionality. I show that the original formulation of that notion was crucially intertwined with debates on class and class politics. After shedding light on the “prehistory” of intersectionality in black feminism, I discuss the original formulations of the concept in the works of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins. A focus on the notion of “oppression” as well as on the tensions between “irreducibility” and “simultaneity” of systems of oppression in intersectional writings leads me to examine some of the pitfalls of identity politics today. An attempt to rethink the notion of class in the light of intersectionality closes the essay.

The return of the labour process: race, skill and technology in South African labour studies

From its beginnings, the sociology of work in South Africa has been preoccupied with three enduring themes: skill/deskilling, racism in the workplace, and Fordism/racial Fordism. With the advent of democracy in the 1990s there was a shift away from studying the labour process. We argue in this article that there has been a return to taking seriously the ways new forms of work in this postcolonial context pose new questions to the global study of work. A central preoccupation in the study of work has been the racialised reinscription of post-apartheid workplace orders, now in the context of new dynamics of externalisation and casualisation of employment. Another important theme is the shift away from studies of the formal sector workplace and toward the broader implications of the precarianisation and informalisation of labour. This focus coincided with the growth of new social movements by mostly unemployed (black) township residents around state services provision. This includes studies on working-class politics more broadly, with attention focusing on questions of organising and mobilising. More recently this interest in precarious labour has grown into studies of the gig economy, returning to earlier themes of technology and skill, as well as new forms of waged labour and wagelessness. We argue for the ongoing salience of labour process studies for understanding the specific issues of the securing and obscuring of value, and through the articulations of ‘racial capitalism’ offered by the long tradition of labour studies in South Africa.

Civil Society and Latent Mobilisation Under Authoritarian Neoliberal Governance

This chapter reflects on the impact of Turkey’s authoritarian neoliberal governance on the transformation of civil society with a particular focus on latent counter-mobilisation. The first section focuses on how Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) has transformed civic space through a selective approach that switches between repression and facilitation. The AKP represses autonomous and dissident organisations and activists through judicial harassment and new regulations while facilitating the growth of a government-oriented civil society sector (GONGOs). The GONGOs fulfil two aims: softening the immediate effects of the state’s withdrawal from social provision and generating bottom-up consent for authoritarian neoliberal governance. The second section analyses resistance against the AKP’s authoritarian neoliberalism by focusing on the case of a unique social movement, Müslüman Sol hareket (Muslim Left movement), which fuses class politics with Islamic social justice. Based on insights from original fieldwork and interviews with activists conducted in 2018–2019 in Turkey, the discussion demonstrates that the syncretic amalgamation of socialism with Islamic justice has emerged at the unexpected intersections of ideologies and everyday experiences and challenges simultaneously the AKP’s neoliberal exploitation, instrumentalisation and politicisation of religion, and authoritarian governance.

Rethinking Working-class Politics: Organising Informal Workers in Argentina

Our article engages with discussions about the implications of precarious work and its impact on workers’ capacity to organise by analysing the case of Argentina’s Confederation of Popular Economy Workers (CTEP, Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular). The organisation was created in 2011 with the aim of representing a broad and heterogeneous group of workers in varying conditions of informality, precarious self-employment and workfare programmes. We trace the history of the organisation and analyse its development by focusing on the role of social assistance as a crucial expression of the changing relations between precarious workers and the state. Social assistance has provided some resources for addressing the reproduction needs of precarious workers and of the territories in which they live, and also the material means through which an organisation like CTEP has sought to consolidate its political work among precarious workers. Nonetheless, social assistance has also worked as a means to circumscribe broader demands for change into issues to be addressed through social policy. Our argument is that central to CTEP’s trajectory as an organisation of precarious workers was its attempt to break away from the narrow confines of social assistance, pushing for changes that would allow its members to gain some autonomy both materially and institutionally. KEYWORDS: Argentina; precarious worker organisations; CTEP; social assistance policy