Academic Articles
La pandemia de COVID-19 y la lucha de clases
La pandemia de COVID-19 y la lucha de clases
por Dario Azzellini, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, México
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Class Struggle
Crises under capitalism tend to increase existing inequalities. This is also a consequence of the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global labor income decreased by an estimated 10.7 % (or US$3.5 trillion) in the first nine months of 2020 compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, the total combined wealth of the more than 2,200 official billionaires worldwide grew from $9.5 trillion on December 31, 2019 to an estimated US$11.4 trillion a year later.
Global Dialogue, GD 12.1 - April 2022
Editorial
Universities and science are undergoing far-reaching changes as a result of their marketization or quasi-marketization under neoliberal governance. In this issue of Global Dialogue we take up this topic in our section ‘Talking Sociology.’ Jill Blackmore has been studying the profound restructuring experienced by Australian universities over the last decades. In this interview she elaborates on these restructurings, the forces that drove them, and the effects they have on academic knowledge production and epistemic justice.
Class Struggle from Above and from Below during the COVID-19 pandemic
Crises under capitalism, as historical analysis proves, tend to entail a transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Inequalities between poor and wealthy, between people of color and white people, between North and South and between genders are increasing. Most scholars will agree that this is also happening on a global level as a consequence of the handling of the covid-19 pandemic. However, there is a lot of disagreement regarding the evaluation of workers’ resistance.
Digitalization and marketization in live music
Limits of the platform economy
Online platforms have disrupted parts of the capitalist economy, with allegedly severe consequences in the world of work. This study examines live music in Germany and the UK, where online platforms do not dominate, despite considerable digitalization of market intermediaries. The analysis shows that, as the degree of digitalization increases, matching services tend to work less as a workers representative which is traditionally the case for live music agents and more as a force of marketization that disciplines workers by orchestrating price-based competition.
Why haven’t platforms taken over live music?
The limits of the “platform economy”
It is often assumed that the “platform economy” is in the ascendancy, and is taking over more and more economic sectors. Because of this, much research on the matter has focused on characterising and evaluating this change: what are the relative advantages and disadvantages of this kind of work compared to more “traditional” jobs? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about it? Hence, most current research has looked at the experience of workers in industries which are already highly “platformised” (such as ride sharing, food delivery, or clickwork).
Entrevista a Darío Azzellini
“La guerra ha llegado a ser la forma de hacer economía y no la interrupción de la economía”
Quisiera comenzar la entrevista con algunas referencias relativas a su formación y a su trayectoria intelectual.
Book Review
Living on the Margins: Undocumented Migrants in a Global City by Alice Bloch and Sonia McKay
"The book offers interesting insight into the everyday life of undocumented migrants without portraying them as helpless victims. Ample quotations from the interviews underline their agency and the complex and contradictory conditions they experience in the ethnic enclaves they are forced to rely on. Bloch and McKay shed light on the circumstances, motivations, and conditions of ethnic enclave employers, who, in most of the literature on undocumented migration, are not a subject of research.
