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In this article, basic income (BI) will not be considered as a measure to raise living standards and social well-being. Rather, it will be presented as an indispensable structural policy for achieving a healthier social order governed by a more equitable compromise between capital and labor. Embracing the French Regulation School approach, we maintain that such a compromise is founded on the redistribution of productivity gains. Describing the dynamics of productivity enables a better understanding of the main features and development of contemporary capitalism. In advancing our argument, we focus on the socioeconomic transformation that has overtaken the Fordist paradigm within Western countries and propose the term "cognitive capitalism" to describe the new economic system. We argue that BI can be seen as a viable economic policy able to contrast the instability generated by the present form(s) of accumulation, as it increases productivity through network and learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of its implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twentieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a 'zero-sum' conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory reconfiguration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub- and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled configuration of state territorial organization is provisionally labeled a 'glocal' state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are sites of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels within a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly 'glocalized' state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which these transformed 'glocal' territorial states attempt to promote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. Global city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the interface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe. A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]