Postwar steelworkers and contemporary healthcare workers inhabited strikingly different economic circumstances. Yet in both eras, courts allocated to companies various powers they could use to impose market discipline on workers, thereby facilitating the degradation of work.
What happens when the factory is gone and the working class has been rendered dispersed and invisible? In this post, Gabriel Winant kicks off a symposium on his recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.
Raúl Carrillo interviews Darrick Hamilton about the Fed’s approach to unemployment, the racialized harms of shifting the burden of price stability onto workers, and the long struggle for fair and full employment.
In the United States, the rule of law has always had property rights as its lodestar, with private property serving as the central legal interest that requires protection. Attending to our history reveals the dangers and paradoxical nature of this property-first conception of the rule of law.
Industrial agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, as well as a source of exploitation across the globe. Any just transition from fossil fuels must radically rethink current systems of food production and work towards reaching food sovereignty.
A just transition for probation officers will never appeal to everyone. Nevertheless, it provides a potentially powerful framework for people who have experienced the dehumanizing mental and physical toll of working in the carceral state.
Recent attacks on CRT often claim that the US, since its founding, has been committed to principles of liberty and equality. This strategic use of American universalism, along with an explicit focus on public education, has a long history in rightwing politics: for the better part of a century, it has been perhaps the dominant way of articulating white resistance to racial reform.
Recent attacks on CRT must be understood as part of a long-term battle to privatize education. For economic conservatives, a “free market” has the capacity to satisfy all “tastes” in racial education.
When public education is seen as a property entitlement, there is an inevitable contestation over who controls this valuable resource and to what end.
Muscles and arteries. Hammers and parasites. Addictions and complexes. Destin Jenkins concludes our Bonds of Inequality symposium by reflecting on the political implications of the metaphors we use to describe municipal debt.
To ensure support for its Global War on Terror, the United States has exploited the Pakistani government’s reliance on foreign credit to guarantee cooperation in US counterinsurgency operations. In leveraging its role as a lender to provide Pakistan with short-term financial relief, the United States has deepened Pakistan’s economic dependency, undermined the nation’s chance for a more equal domestic political and economic arrangement, and consolidated the power of its domestic military elite.
Municipal financing schemes have often distributed the benefits of spending along race and class lines, yet federal programs have a similarly mixed track record. How, then, can we safeguard public investment to secure just outcomes? The answer may reside in the details of agency and program design.
Can public things meaningfully protect us from capitalism’s bottom line? If not, is our hope in them as a lever of progressive politics misplaced?
The Fair Housing Act, as written, provides several tools to challenge inequitable urban development. Yet the courts have been reluctant to enforce the law.
Elite white capital created housing for middle-class whites built by working-class whites. Nowhere in this process, nor in the profit of lending, the employment of housing construction, or the long-term appreciation of white homeownership, was there a meaningful place for African Americans to bridge racial economic inequality.
