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The article discusses the impact of automation on the working class in the U.S. It notes that the working class fears to be replaced by robots due to technological advances. It provides a background on the rapid automation of manufacturing in 1970s and how the Black workers were affected by the pressure of automation. It notes that the technological advances bring slow productivity growth instead of an increase in economic productivity.

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the "golden age" of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the "carceral state." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the reactions of Russia's new middle classes to the embargo and import substitution and their changing consumption practices against the background of the economic crisis. It serves as an entry point to look at the interplay of the new middle classes' socio-economic positionalities and affiliations with the state within a particular political economy. Drawing on fieldwork data collected in 2015–2018, the article traces the subjectivities and orientations that enable the new middle classes' coping strategies. It demonstrates how their responses are mediated by their imagination of the state and the global hierarchies in which they feel situated to a significant extent through their state membership. The analysis examines how the arrangements of Russia's political economy come into conflict with the image of a "proper" state, which the new middle classes associate with productive capacity and technological advancement. It invites us to revisit the idea of the eclipse of "production" by "consumption" in assessing the performance of a nation-state, which, as the article shows, is reversed in Russia's context. Furthermore, it highlights how the reactions to these new policies become a medium to criticize Russia's post-socialist development and to articulate aspirations for its repositioning in the global system, which is translated into negotiations of the new middle classes' relatively privileged positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the transformative travels of the metaphor of the 'fix' across the unbounded terrain of geographical political economy. It argues for taking the fix seriously as a root metaphor of the field, a signifier of its history and theory-cultures. Critically excavating the entwined genealogies of the metaphor and the field, it illuminates several historically successive and thematic moments of 'fix thinking', including: the spatial fix (1980s); institutional and spatio-temporal fixes of regulationist-theoretical approaches (1990s); and the scalar fix of state rescaling theory (2000s). It reviews these stages and their broader intellectual and political implications for critical geographical scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In political economy, research on growth coalitions and regime theory concludes that progressive coalitions representing lower-income residents and effectively working for policy change at the local level involving development are unlikely since they lack the resources necessary to build and maintain strong coalitions with long-term influence with elected officials. In Los Angeles, a coalition representing the homeless filed a lawsuit in 2012, which involved one of the most powerful developers in the region, and reached a favorable settlement. Given the strength of growth interests and factors working against redistributive policies, I ask the question, how did the coalition muster the political influence and resources necessary to compel the developer to settle the lawsuit? I contend that the settlement is evidence of a progressive coalition in the region that is working to establish a growth with equity framework and that the coalition has established political influence with local officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated at the intersection of Latinx postwar migration, community formation, and urban politics, this article explores the Washington Heights uprising of 1992 as a lens through which to historicize Dominican belonging and urban policing in late twentieth-century New York. It tracks the history of New York's Dominican community beginning in the early 1960s and their myriad struggles leading to the climactic uprising which was spurred by the police shooting of twenty-three-year-old Jose "Kiko" Garcia. Garcia's murder galvanized Washington Heights' Dominican community, prompting deep communal reflection and action concerning the future of Dominican belonging and mobilization in New York City. Meanwhile, Rudolph Giuliani's sharp demonization of the uprising helped secure his mayoral victory the following year. His ascendance to the city's highest office through racial antagonism held significant implications for New York's Latinx people and the evolution of urban policing both in the United States and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past four decades, governments have backed away from the promotion of collective bargaining in Canada resulting in a tendency towards anti-unionism. Examining this new reality, this article investigates two interrelated trends in Canadian anti-unionism over the last two decades in an effort to conceptualize the role of the state in regulating labour relations. First, we investigate legislative attempts to undermine or eliminate the ability of workers to collectively bargain and strike. Second, the article unpacks the political economy of anti-unionism in the private sector by focusing on the role of lobby groups that have shaped labour legislation. These two interrelated threads allow us to expose the relationship between employers and governments, which has threatened the strength of organized labour in the private and public sector and shaped a uniquely Canadian anti-unionism. Finally, we conclude by examining both the strengths and limitations of the unique fight-back strategies used by the labour movement, which has sought to elevate aspects of Canadian labour law to be protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This, we argue, offers restrictive possibilities for advancing collective bargaining rights in the existing labour relations framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wage squeeze/profit squeeze crisis theories provide a powerful framework for the historical analysis of US capitalist crises and the alternating demand-side and supply-side social structures of accumulation (SSA). However, the current neoliberal SSA would seem to defy the logic of this model in its persistence in the face of a deep financial crisis and a failure to realize its espoused objectives. This paper reviews this theoretical model of economic crises, its relationship to and viability alongside the rise and establishment of neoliberalism, and some of the political and economic obstacles that would seem to prevent the construction of a new SSA that would address and correct the glaring deficiencies of neoliberal political economy. JEL Classification: P16, G01 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Fall of 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area became the site of nightly demonstrations that deployed a range of disruptive practices and direct actions. The content and style of these protests reflected both the national political issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and highly local and regional struggles over gentrification and displacement. In this article, I analyze these protests in relation to the regional political economy of the tech-industry, the real estate booms, and the attendant 'eviction epidemic' in the region. In doing so, I lay out an analysis of the relationship between policing and gentrification in the Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area. In the first section, I analyze the regional political economy as the context in which these protests must be understood. In a second section, I argue that the protests created a regional protest geography that, in turn, was met by a regionalized repressive security state. Finally, I read the disruptive practices deployed by these protests as a series of complex and sophisticated contestations which embodied connections among policing, gentrification, and the regional political economy. As such, the Black Lives Matter protests produced an intersectional analysis and can be read as a regional uprising aimed to disrupt the security state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerning the central thesis of Place Matters, I support the idea of regional equity and their analysis that place matters for people's differing life prospects. However, to paraphrase Cornell West, I think "race matters" more than geography. It helps us understand why people of color, especially Blacks, are in places that became bad, and it is also why it is difficult to move Black people out of these places. Has the United States changed so much that White working-class suburbanites are ready to unite with Blacks and Latinos to force a more equitable distribution of resources from the wealthy suburbs? The current campaigns of Sanders and Clinton point in different directions on this question, yet it does not mean that the fight for regional governance can be avoided. Beyond the need to reduce gross inequalities within regions, regional governance and planning is sensible and effective from the perspective of transportation, health, housing, economic development, ecology, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical approach to comparative political economy that focuses on the relative importance of different components of aggregate demand—in the first instance, exports and household consumption—and dynamic relations among the “demand drivers” of growth. We illustrate this approach by comparing patterns of economic growth in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom over the period 1994–2007. Our discussion emphasizes that export-led growth and consumption-led growth have different implications for distributive conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the political economy of health care in the European Union is being changed by the creation of a substantial new apparatus of European fiscal governance. A series of treaties and legal changes since 2008 have given the European Union new powers and duties to enforce budgetary austerity in the member states, and this apparatus of fiscal governance has already extended to include detailed and sometimes coercive policy recommendations to member states about the governance of their health care systems. We map the structures of this new fiscal governance and the way it purports to affect health care decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent documentary films that have sought to narrate, record and criticise the effects on the French workplace of a shift to a new model of finance capitalism driven by ‘pure’ money. The films give representation to subjective experiences in the workplace showing how abstract economics is played out at the most intimate, personal and material level. The films seem to challenge dominant representations of finance capitalism as an order that has emancipated workers from the physical and disciplinary constraints of industrialism. The workers in these films describe the transition to a new economic order in terms of an intensification of corporeal pain. We see an economic order that pits an infinite accumulation of virtual money against the finite productive capacities of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]