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Far from simply being a 'bookend' of the industrial age, deindustrialization is an integral part of capitalist development and thus has a long history. In the North American context, the early scholarship on deindustrialization emerged from the efforts to resist plant closures as they were happening. More recently, the field of deindustrialization studies has been reinvigorated by authors who have shifted the centre of gravity from the US Rust Belt to Europe and increasingly to other parts of the world. This introduction traces the emergence and recent transformations in the field of deindustrialization studies. It also introduces this themed issue on the politics of deindustrialization, which tells the stories of shuttered mines, mills, and factories within the wider restructuring of the international division of labour in the late twentieth century. The articles, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, extend outward to how workers, their unions, state actors, and the general public responded to the challenge of deindustrialization. The authors are all affiliated with the 'Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time' (DePOT) research project (deindustrialization.org), which brings together many of the world's leading deindustrialization scholars to put the field in transnational perspective. By extending the range of comparisons and scales of analysis, this special-themed issue invites us to broaden our understanding of deindustrialization, both thematically and methodologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural America is shaped by a conflicted sense of the ordinary: a place where a pastoral imagination of the countryside overlaps with, obscures, and, at times, is obscured by images of addiction and economic abandonment. This essay explores how these two senses of the ordinary are interdependent: how the possibility of a postindustrial future depends on the abjection of a deindustrial present. The essay approaches this problem through the analytic lenses of three scenes along a road known as "heroin highway" in rural New York. Tracing the ambivalence of these ordinary scenes makes it possible to see people and places excluded from the American dream as essential products of its logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthracite coal mining landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania is in ruin, a by-product of two centuries of unchecked capitalism. Much of the land is stripped of its timber and surface mines lay abandoned. The industry began its decline after WWI and virtually collapsed during the post-WWII era. Waste piles of coal litter the landscape, and the streams and rivers are considered dead because of the minerals and high acid content of water draining from abandoned mines. Many scholars have written about the extreme work conditions the coal workers faced, the demise of the coal industry, and the impact of deindustrialization on the region's people. Often overlooked is how members of the mining communities had a radical hope. Radical hope helps oppressed people to see that another condition and another world is possible, although not guaranteed. Re-examining oral histories from the anthracite region recorded in the 1970s, when the industry was in its great decline, demonstrates how these mining communities anticipated a future good, understanding the struggle to attain it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two unconnected crises in the 1970s, a crisis of profitability of global capitalism and a deep crisis of political legitimacy in China, led to creation of a formidable alliance between corporate/financial-led US capital and the Chinese state that sought to resolve both crises by opening China for corporate exploitation. The solution, however, masked different objectives. Transnational corporations moved to China in search of cheap labour to counter falling profits and Beijing sought to use foreign capital to develop the Chinese economy and gain access to technology. Over time China's interests and those of the USA diverged, as US deindustrialisation became the obverse of China's dynamic industrialisation. Factions within the US elite began to promote a different approach towards China than that of alliance and accommodation and were able to grab the upper hand during Donald Trump's presidency, advocating an aggressive approach towards China. This posture consolidated under the Biden administration. These developments set up a struggle for hegemony to which China and the USA bring differing advantages and disadvantages. While a hegemonic transition is one possible outcome of this conflict, the possibility of a hegemonic stalemate or hegemonic vacuum cannot be discounted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the micro-foundations of failed market insertion in Romania's chemical sector. During the EU pre-accession period, transnational integration regimes (TIRs) induced FDI-dependence. In turn, mass-privatization policies in conjunction with weak state capacities—evidenced by domestic development policies with limited operational use—caused failed market insertion. Two former state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are analyzed in this manner, and two pathways to failed integration emerge: via domestic mismanagement and multi-national corporations' (MNCs) rent-seeking practices. The findings extend the diversity of the TIR framework and provide a nuanced account of downturn scenarios during EU integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how deindustrialization as economic restructuring and housing regime changes evolved interconnectedly in Romania during the Great Transformation from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. This article also explores how they acted as conditions for the emergence of a real-estate-development-driven housing regime (REDD-HR) alongside other factors. The analysis is from the perspective of the geographical political economy on the variegated pathways of these phenomena across borders and secondary statistical data collected by two research projects conducted in Romania in the past two years. In the Eastern semiperiphery of global capitalism or a country of the Global Easts with a socialist legacy, after 1990, the state restructured the economy by privatizing industry and public housing. During state socialism, the housing regime supported industrialization-based urbanization, whereas deindustrialization-cumprivatization in emerging capitalism facilitated the appearance of real estate development. On the one hand, the article enriches studies on deindustrialization by highlighting the role of housing in the transformation of industrial relations; on the other hand, the paper revisits housing studies by analyzing deindustrialization as a process with an impact on the changing housing regime. Altogether, deindustrialization-cum-privatization and the changing housing sector are analyzed as prerequisites of the REDD-HR.

Tracing the history of gendered working-class responses to deindustrialization in the Montréal neighbourhood of Saint-Henri reveals that many of the local political initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s were connected to longer-term working-class efforts to navigate shifting patterns of capital accumulation extending back to the 1940s. The gendered tradition of territory-based organizing in this community encouraged women workers' shop-floor militancy and was foundational for new forms of local political advocacy around issues like health care and housing. In deindustrialization's moment, the concerns of a precariously employed, feminized working-class population spurred a crossover of industrial struggle with survival-focused reproductive labour issues, centred around a grassroots organization called the popir (Projet d'organisation populaire, d'information, et de regroupement). This pattern of gendered working-class militancy and solidarity persisted throughout the 1980s and shaped resistance to Saint-Henri's subsequent gentrification at the turn of the new millennium. Retracer l'histoire des ripostes de la classe ouvrière à la désindustrialisation dans le quartier montréalais de Saint-Henri dans une perspective genrée permet d'établir des liens entre les initiatives politiques locales des années 1960 et 1970 aux tentatives d'adaptation de la classe ouvrière au contexte changeant d'accumulation du capital qui remontent à la décennie 1940. La tradition genrée de l'organisation locale au sein de cette communauté a encouragé le militantisme des travailleuses sur le plancher des usines et est au fondement de nouvelles formes d'organisations locales de défense des droits autour d'enjeux comme l'accès aux soins de santé et au logement. Dans un moment de désindustrialisation, les préoccupations d'une population ouvrière précaire et majoritairement féminisée ont donné l'élan au croisement entre les luttes industrielles et les enjeux de survie liés au travail reproductif, concentré au sein d'une organisation de base nommé le popir (Projet d'organisation populaire, d'information et de regroupement). Ce schéma de militantisme et de solidarité mené par une classe ouvrière genrée a persisté jusque dans les années 1980 et a servi de modèle à la résistance contre l'embourgeoisement de Saint-Henri au tournant du millénaire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the various articles published within the issue on topics like deindustrialization, working class studies, and capitalism.

Although mine closures are an inherent feature of extractive industry, they tend to receive less attention in the literature on deindustrialization than the closures of manufacturing and other heavy industries. Until recently, the settler-colonial context of hinterland mineral development and its impact on northern Indigenous lands and communities in Canada have also remained largely unexplored within this literature. Mineral development is historically associated with the introduction of a colonial-capitalist industrial modernity across Canada's northern regions. Yet the boom-and-bust nature and ultimate ephemerality of mineral development has meant that resource-extractive regions have also been subject to intensive "cyclonic" periods of closure and deindustrialization. This article examines the experience of deindustrialization on the part of the Inuit community of Arctic Bay, who were largely "left behind" by the closure of Nanisivik, Canada's first High Arctic mine. Through documentary sources and oral history interviews we illustrate how, for Arctic Bay Inuit who were engaged in the cyclonic economies of Nanisivik's development and closure, there were myriad dimensions of social loss, displacement, and resentment associated with the failure of this industrial enterprise to deliver promised benefits to Inuit, beyond more commonly understood socioeconomic impacts such as job loss. Bien que les fermetures de mines soient une caractéristique inhérente de l'industrie extractive, elles ont tendance à recevoir moins d'attention dans la documentation sur la désindustrialisation que les fermetures d'industries manufacturières et d'autres industries lourdes. Jusqu'à récemment, le contexte colonial de l'exploitation minière de l'arrièrepays et son impact sur les terres et les communautés autochtones du nord du Canada sont également restés largement inexplorés dans cette documentation. Le développement minier est historiquement associé à l'introduction d'une modernité industrielle capitaliste coloniale dans les régions du nord du Canada. Pourtant, la nature en dents de scie et l'éphémère ultime du développement minier ont fait que les régions d'extraction de ressources ont également été soumises à des périodes « cycloniques » intensives de fermeture et de désindustrialisation. Cet article examine l'expérience de désindustrialisation de la communauté inuite d'Arctic Bay, largement « laissée pour compte » par la fermeture de Nanisivik, la première mine canadienne dans l'Extrême-Arctique. Grâce à des sources documentaires et à des entrevues d'histoire orale, nous illustrons comment, pour les Inuits d'Arctic Bay qui étaient engagés dans les économies cycloniques du développement et de la fermeture de Nanisivik, il y avait une myriade de dimensions de perte sociale, de déplacement et de ressentiment associés à l'échec de cette entreprise industrielle à livrer les avantages promis aux Inuits, au-delà des répercussions socioéconomiques mieux comprises comme la perte d'emploi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services' inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism's declining trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the growing trend of labor organizing among tech workers in the United States. It acknowledges the significant power that tech workers hold in the industry and the recent increase in collective actions. The article also explores the complex class position of tech workers and the potential implications of unionizing in a capitalist market. Despite the historically unfriendly environment for unions in the tech industry, there has been a rise in tech union activity, with notable events like the Google walkout in 2018. However, these unions still represent a small portion of the industry. The article discusses the issues driving tech worker mobilizations, such as compensation and job security, and the challenges they face in organizing. It also draws parallels between tech workers and past labor movements, highlighting the efforts of the Alphabet Workers Union and the Communications Workers of America. The article concludes by considering the potential impact of tech worker unions on the industry and the unique perspective of tech workers that makes them suitable for unionization. [Extracted from the article]

Based on 52 qualitative interviews with working-class individuals, this paper explores the social and economic decline of a coastal locale referred to as High Town in Teesside in the North East of England. First, the paper outlines how the locality expanded as a popular seaside resort under capitalism's post-war period. It then assesses how the seaside existed together with industrial work, offering stable employment opportunities, economic security and a sense of community. Next, the article documents the shift to neoliberalism in the 1980s, specifically the decline of High Town's seaside resort, the deindustrialization process and therefore the 2015 closure of High Town's steelworks. It explicates how this exacerbated the locale's economic decline through the loss of industrial work's 'job for life', its diminishing popularity as a coastal area and the further deterioration of the town centre. The paper concludes by suggesting that High Town has lost its raison d'être under neoliberalism and faces difficulties in revival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy, small artisan businesses have been promoted as a liberatory alternative to large-scale enterprise and mass production in the wake of the 2007 global financial crisis. We analyze advice manuals for aspiring artisan entrepreneurs by adapting Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) framework and analysis of management textbooks to investigate books for would-be artisan business owners. These texts are "manuals of moral instruction" (58) that offer the reader the promise of a more fulfilling and ethical life through self-employment. We reveal that the artisan economy promoted by these advice manuals represents a further evolution in capitalism's co-optation of the artistic critique via the oppositional strata of punk and indie youth subcultures—and their style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deindustrialization was one of the most disruptive social transformations of the twentieth century. Why did democratic capitalist regimes permit and survive this process, while state socialist regimes did not? Drawing on historical evidence from the United Kingdom, Poland, and the United States, this article advances two mechanisms as explanation: first, enabled by the polity-economy distinction characteristic of capitalism, the belief that "there is no alternative" (TINA) could appear credible in the West but not the East. Second, the Western turn toward market-led deindustrialization reduced the economic costs of deindustrialization and, more important, deprived unrest in the West of focal points for protest, lowering political costs too. Strengthening the case for these two mechanisms, I rule out four alternative explanations: generic inefficiency in planned economies, differential elite views on the necessity of structural change, immediate acquiescence by Western electorates or unions, and a uniquely successful return to high growth rates in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: banking; capital; development; finance; industry; investment; labor; production; speculation; capitalism; deindustrialization; equality; outsourcing EN banking capital development finance industry investment labor production speculation capitalism deindustrialization equality outsourcing 20 31 12 02/20/21 20210101 NES 210101 Graph: Photo illustration by Aaron Lenchner. On the one hand, we have vested primary authority for the I issuance i and I modulation i of our supply of investment capital - the national money supply - in federal instrumentalities.[8] On the other, we have delegated primary responsibility for the I allocation i of our publicly generated investment capital to private sector lending institutions licensed by public authority.[9] "Public capital, private management" has long been our mode of financial hybridity. The only way to get public capital allocation right, and thus to get credit modulation and long-term productive investment right, is to manage public capital (Labor's Capital) publicly and private capital privately. [Extracted from the article]

Populists are trying to take down the global economic order and its institutions. While some of those forces might be fueled by racism, they also play to legitimate social concerns that include massive plant closings and deindustrialization, inadequate skills programs, and lack of decent jobs. Some of these problems also concern the Global South, as workers there face exploitation, unhealthy working conditions, and other social ills caused by global capitalism. In light of these problems, this Article argues that the International Labor Organization (ILO) should design new conventions on lead firm liability and mass layoffs. While other scholars and policymakers have already argued that lead firms should shoulder employer responsibilities of their suppliers, contractors, and franchisees, this is the first law review article that calls for an ILO convention that can diffuse such rules globally. The Article also calls on the World Trade Organization (WTO) to advise the ILO on these labor-protective conventions. The WTO, as an expert trade body, can better ensure stakeholders that these new conventions will comply with international trade law and policy, including with WTO "public morals" exception rules and with rules on technical barriers on trade and tax and subsidies. In doing so, the WTO can guarantee that the new conventions, far from hurting trade, will help to enhance the global trade regime. Moreover, the WTO, through its "peer review" practice, where stakeholders can discuss how to create and implement new labor and trade policies, can help coordinate a muchneeded global dialogue for a more inclusive globalization. This is also true of the ILO conventions that we advocate for here. We conclude by addressing likely arguments against our proposal, including from scholars and policymakers skeptical of the role that international law can have on the current political turmoil. After addressing those objections to our proposal, we maintain that collaboration between the ILO and the WTO, while certainly not the panacea for all the complex and daunting problems of our times, remains critical to restore legitimacy to the global economic order in a postpopulist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American playwright Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat (2017), is set in the town of Reading, Pennsylvania, and traces the life of a working-class community as they experience the devastating, multi-faceted effects of deindustrialization across the first decade of the twenty-first century. While concerned with the changing nature of American manufacturing under late capitalism, the play's depiction of labor draws on a broader historical lens, and charts the intergenerational transmission of class inequalities over time. Nottage uses a series of formal and structural strategies to draw attention to how characters remember and narrate the past, and how these memories' racial and gendered tensions ultimately constrain their efforts at mobilization. In its focus on memory, biography, and the body, Sweat not only participates in what has been called the recent deindustrialization literature, but also revisits some of the key aesthetic choices surrounding the depiction of capitalism in modern American drama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on a study of a large chemical plant published over forty years ago and the changes that have taken place in the nature of work and employment in the meantime. It examines the ways in which utopian ideas have influenced accounts of changing workplace relations often associated with the advance of new technologies. The study itself is seen to lie on the cusp of the major transformations reflected in the location of industrial plant, the nature of the division of labour, and the practice of management. Deindustrialization – involving the closure of many manufacturing facilities – is identified as a critical moment opening up other rapid changes in the composition of the labour force and the application of new technologies to new settings in the service economy. Across the period a change of discourse is registered, seen most clearly in the move from ideas of industrialism to those involving capital and labour. The paper documents a spatial, sectoral, and temporal shift in capital, culminating in its penetration of civil society and daily life, creating major questions for social-scientific approaches to industrial relations and for the organizational practices of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Effects of trade liberalization on manufacturing export transformation in central European new EU member states are examined. • Alternative export evolution scenarios over 1990–2015 period are constructed using synthetic control method. • Trade liberalization of 1990s improved export performance, quality and technological intensity of exports. • The magnitude of effects depends on the speed of trade liberalization. • Robustness of findings is confirmed with sensitivity analysis. Abstract Prior to 1990s Baltic and Central European new member states of the European Union (NMS) have mainly exported to markets of other centrally planned economies. The exception from this were Croatia and Slovenia whose more liberal institutional setting and existence of economic relationships with market economies resulted in sizeable portion of exports being directed to Western European markets. The aim of this paper is to explore the effects of trade liberalization with European Union on changes in the structure and quality of exports from NMS in the period 1990–2015. Results obtained using synthetic control method (SCM) signal that the timing of trade liberalization with the European Union shaped the evolution of export performance, structure and quality of exports from NMS. The most advanced NMS managed to reap full benefits of preferential access to EU markets. The effects on countries that later embarked on this process, Slovenia and in particular Croatia have been several times smaller. Trade liberalization increased quality of exports and the share of high technology intensive industries in its structure across all NMS. Robustness of findings is confirmed through sensitivity analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before 1990, Romania went through a forced industrialized policy, but after this time, most of the industrial bussiness went bankrupt, and their sites and buildings were abandoned. Nowadays, most of the cities in Romania encounter the problem of abandoned industrial sites. This has become an interesting problem for the local authorities to overcomein the future. The aim of this paper is to study the process of deindustrialization of the country and suggest methods of regenerating the areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically engages with Savage et al.’s conceptualisation of ‘elective belonging’. Drawing on research in a case study site in central Salford, it argues that historical processes of deindustrialisation, slum clearance and social housing residualisation have been compounded by the subsequent strategies of gentrification and impact upon the forms of ‘belonging’ that can be constructed by marginal working-class people. Correcting for the predominance of research on belonging from the perspective of middle-class incomers, findings are organised around the themes ‘the local/incomer distinction’, ‘perceptions of and orientations to the neighbourhood’, ‘the power of economic capital’, ‘social others and social distance’ and ‘tectonic communities’. It is argued that the privileging of attracting inward investment into such locales necessarily entails that the elective belonging of the privileged is secured at the expense of the prescribed belonging of the marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small artisan businesses have been promoted as a liberatory alternative to large-scale enterprise. We analyze advice manuals for aspiring artisan entrepreneurs by extending Boltanski and Chiapello’s framework. While they analyze the transformation of large firms, we show the same themes have been adopted by small businesses. Focusing on themes of autonomy and creativity, we reveal that the artisan economy promoted by these texts represents a further evolution in capitalism’s co-option of the artistic critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are there forty million poor people in America? When you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.... We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.... Who owns the iron ore?.... You begin to ask the question, 'Why do people have to pay water bills in a world that's two third water?'--Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967 (italic print mine). In his speech "Where Do We Go from Here," the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. underscored the connection between features of capitalism and water injustice in America. This paper draws upon King's economic and social justice framework to explicate principles upon which "true" water justice in America must be based. Case examples of water inequalities in urban communities in the Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio "Rust Belt" suggest how water and other environmental inequalities operate to marginalize America's racial and ethnic minorities and poor. This paper also reviews citizen protests against these inequities for guidance in advancing equal opportunity and human dignity for all groups in America and world-wide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

In this article I address one of the key aspects of feminist arguments about the economy-that is claims about domestic and caring labor and its necessity for capitalism. I address who undertakes caring labor, in what social relations, and in which spaces in Western economies, where deindustrialization and the rise of service-dominated employment have been associated with a transformation in the nature of work and the composition of the workforce. I review the ways in which this contemporary economic and employment change has been theorized by economic sociologists and economic geographers, in particular by labor geographers-that part of the discipline to which I feel the greatest connection-suggesting that changes in what is often termed reproductive labor have been relatively neglected at the expense of a focus on immaterial, high-status employment in knowledge-based economies. Through a historical example, I then illustrate the production of difference between women workers in caring jobs in the United Kingdom, arguing that closer attention to the intersection of embodied social attributes adds to explanations of continuity and change in the labor market as well as revealing a legacy of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the state of the U.S. politics following the November 2014 election. Topics include the criticism of Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) over the Democratic Party's victory, the Richmond Progressive Alliance's support of candidates running for city office in Richmond, California against a slate owned by the energy company Chevron Corp., and the working-class issues in the Democrat's campaign.

The analysis of deindustrialisation has been led by heterodox economists, especially those in the structuralist and Kaldorian traditions, based on a conception of sectoral specificity and the role of manufacturing in growth. Sectors are not the units of Marxian economic analysis, but thinking through the meaning of sectors in Marxian terms allows for an analysis of the meaning and implications of a change in sectoral structure. Deindustrialisation is the sectoral shift that has been most prominent in recent decades and which is likely to have significant implications for the future of capitalism. This article develops an original Marxian theorisation of deindustrialisation. This conceptualisation includes a distinction between two forms of deindustrialisation. As well as taking into account changes in sectoral structure, the proposed typology considers whether such changes are associated with a shift between those activities that produce surplus value and those that do not or only a shift in the composition of surplus-value-producing activities. The distinction between different forms of deindustrialisation allows for an arguably richer analysis of this phenomenon than in more narrowly sector-based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]