Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> At this moment in time, the very future of democracy in America has become a serious question. Many journalists and commentators have raised questions of crisis of White, Christian, male authority that impel an ‘illiberal democracy’, one-party rule, and/or a new civil War. The wave of progressive movements in the 1960s, resurgent in the 21st century, and challenging traditional, essentialist, identities and values were experienced by many as threats and dangers, fostering fears, anxieties, and grievances that elicited backlashes engendering various reactionary movements that are now a powerful force. These ‘authoritarian populisms’, racialized nationalisms, gendered ethnoreligious nationalisms, neo-fascisms, and indeed some clearly fascist movements extolling racial, gender, or Christian supremacy are mobilizing to preserve the culture and country of the ‘real people’ who feel victimized, challenged, and face demise. A basic fault of modern political economies has been the fundamental conflict between political democracy, majority rule, and/or rules of law and the economic anarchy, which privileges a few while many face duress; these conditions lead to the irrationality and scapegoating, especially racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism flourish to foster a variety of authoritarian, reactionary mobilizations across the globe. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Mechanisms to control Hong Kong’s young workers are embedded in inadequate labour protections within the government’s social welfare system and in prevalent informalization workplace practices. This article maintains that these control mechanisms have their origins in Hong Kong’s colonial era. Following Harvey, we argue that these control mechanisms are expressions of contradictions of capital in production and reproduction spheres. We identify the foundational and moving contradictions of capital expressed in Hong Kong’s lack of social welfare and employment protections, commodification of education, speculation in the housing market, patterns of work casualization and technology-induced labour-saving strategies, leading to precarity and everyday distress among young workers. New control mechanisms and contradictions of capital notwithstanding, this article highlights experiments to create spaces of resistance by Hong Kong’s young working classes in the hope of resisting the increasing degradation of their everyday living standards. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Many Chilean women employers desire domestic workers who are also ‘partners’ or ‘someone to do life with’. Taking ‘partnership’ or ‘compañerismo’ seriously, this paper draws on an affective labor framework and economic sociology to examine how care and power operate in affective and highly commodified labor relations between Chilean women employers and migrant Filipina domestic workers. We contextualize this discussion within historical relations of servitude in Chile and salient demands for more horizontal social and gender relations. We show that rather than reinforcing power or control, employers’ emphases on affective aspects of the labor relation enable their willful ignorance of power hierarchies, through normalizing the racialized presence of the worker in the household. However, explicit talk about money exposes the material conditions of affect and care in this racialized affective relationship. This reveals the uneven distribution and production of both care and power in the household, and highlights the disruptive nature of care work as affective labor. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article draws on a study conducted over a period of 17 months, including chatnography and semi-structured interviews with 30 female platform drivers working in China’s hail-riding industry, and makes three important contributions to the labour process and the social reproduction process scholarship. First, it fills a gap in the burgeoning literature on the gendered experience of gig work and of work–family flexibility in an on-demand economy. Women’s surplus production, as a means of subsistence for oneself and the family, is contradictory to childcare commitments in the labour process. Second, it theorises that the communicative space is a space for social reproduction in which labour-power is replenished outside the household. Labour productivity is not solely determined by algorithmic logic and platform control, but rather is organised by the social reproduction process. Third, it discusses how female platform workers negotiate technological insecurity and resist the platform’s control over and sexual exploitation in the communicative space. This sheds light on how the social reproduction process creates a potential for women’s solidarity. Women fight against sexual harassment and gender-based violence by utilising communication technologies, such as WeChat and TikTok. The social reproduction process organises labour resistance in a time of individual and collective crisis. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Forty years have passed since the implementation of the pernicious neoliberal structural reforms on the African continent in 1981. If 2021 marked a 40-year commemoration of a diabolical neocolonial project such as neoliberalism, then the year 2020 signified another 40-year period of rebirth aborted, as the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980 was undermined in favour of the Berg Report of 1981. These two periodizations delineate African liberation or continued neocolonial oppression, yet also coincide with Thandika Mkandawire’s life’s strivings. How do Mkandawire’s ideas on social policy, inspired by radical African Nationalists, aid in the dismantling of contemporary forms of racialized neoliberal social policy making? Mkandawire’s life straddled two 40-year periods (1940–1980 and 1980–2020) marked by sui generis contributions to African and global social sciences. This paper recasts his scholarly contributions on transformative social policy as a prophetic theoretician of African liberation. Mkandawire’s scholarly corpus provides a programmatic approach to the unmaking of a hierarchical racialized neoliberal global order. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In Czechia, one of the statistically most equal and least indebted states, almost one-tenth of its (mostly low-income) population is entrapped in debt enforcement proceedings. I foreground such a contradiction to investigate the politics of the debtfare state in East-Central Europe (ECE). This nuances the scholarship on the repolitization of the ECE neoliberal state by populist forces and their instrumentalization of its middle-class welfare state strategies in the 2010s. Identifying the Czech debt enforcement industry as a leading poverty industry in ECE, I explore its depoliticizing origins in the Debt Enforcement Order (DEO), a flagship legal framework regulating the creditor–debtor–bailiff relations. Interpreting the political struggle over the DEO-centered debtfare state strategy, I then trace its limited repolitization since the mid-2010s, which redirects its reforms from their original pro-creditor and -bailiff prioritization to a prioritization of low-income debtors. This politics complements the repolitization of the neoliberal state beyond populism. </jats:p>