Cyclical versus Secular Movements in Employment Creation and Destruction (original) (raw)
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Economic Cycles and Social Movements
Routledge eBooks, 2020
Economic Cycles and Social Movements: Past, Present and Future offers diverse perspectives on the complex interrelationship between social challenges and economic crises in the Modern World System. Written with a balance of quantitative, qualitative and theoretical contributions and insights, this volume provides a great opportunity to reflect upon the ongoing conceptual and empirical challenges when confronting the complex interrelations of various economic cycles and social movements. By engaging wide-ranging ideas and theoretical points of view from different disciplines, different countries and different perspectives, this study breaks new ground and offers novel insights into the way the capitalist world economy functions as well as the way social and political movements react to these constraints. Different chapters in this volume bring about novel interdisciplinary approaches to study business cycles, economic changes and social as well as political movements, offer new interpretations and, while examining the complexity of socioeconomic cycles in the long run, present epistemological challenges and a wide variety of empiri cal data that will increase our understanding of these complex interactions.
Reflections on the radicalism of the unemployed during the Great Depression
If all goes well, I'll be publishing a book in the not-too-distant future, perhaps titled something like Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression. Below is the draft of its Introduction, based on the longer and more diffuse Introduction to my PhD thesis. I'd be happy to receive any critiques from readers. *** Capitalism and mass unemployment are inseparable. Ever since the destruction of the English handloom weavers following the introduction of the power loom in the early nineteenth century, the presence of a "reserve army of the unemployed" has been a permanent feature of capitalist society. Through perpetual structural change and business cycles, capitalism has manufactured unemployment no less reliably than industrial innovation, environmental degradation, and class conflict. The subject of this book is the collective suffering and struggles of the long-term unemployed during one of the great upheavals in American history, the Great Depression. Unemployment during the Depression is hardly a novel subject of historical inquiry, so the question immediately arises, why return to a topic that has already been studied by historians? Can anything new be said? In part, my interest in this old topic has been motivated by ominous parallels between the political economy of the present-day United States and the political economy that eventuated in the Depression. The most obvious parallel, for example, is the extreme income and wealth inequality of the two eras. "U.S. wealth concentration," the economist Gabriel Zucman
Labour Economics, 1997
creation and destruction (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), pp. 260, ISBN 0-262-04152-9, £23.50, $ 27.50.