Inequalities


Sociology





Inequalities



Call for paper for the issue

Vol. 1 - Num. 1 - 2024



Closing date:31/12/2023



 



CALL FOR PAPERS: “Social polarisation across the world”. Inequalities, 1 | 2024



Although with slowing growth rates and huge differences between geographical areas and individual countries, the world economy has greatly expanded since the 1980s, partly due to an increase in the world population. Over the long term this global dynamic has led to relative convergence in development levels, with some large countries or areas in the Global South catching up with Western countries, thus reducing their historical “backwardness”.



But since the early 21st century, the process of expanding the production of goods on a global scale has come up against a series of stumbling blocks and serious disruptions, the most important of which were the great financial and production crisis of 2008-2009 and the subsequent monetary crisis, pandemic emergency, and energy crisis. The entire international order has been thrown into crisis, firstly with the rise of protectionist drives and policies, then with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and we have now entered, if not plunged into, an era of global uncertainty.



Just one phenomenon has managed to traverse, almost unscathed, the increasingly chaotic situation of the world economy and global politics in all its different phases and across its various geo-political areas: the process of social polarisation between the capitalist class and the working class who live off both formal and informal wage labour.



This process, which began almost half a century ago, has emerged in very different forms and at different levels of intensity depending on whether it is in Western countries, which are in more or less marked decline, or in emerging countries – it being understood that in all the principal countries the concentration of social wealth is accompanied by the centralisation of capital driven by global and national financial markets. There are three related but not identical social processes taking place on the same scale: mass expropriation from direct agricultural producers in the global South; the unprecedented expansion of the ‘reserve army’ of labour and of workers who are paid below the value of their labour-power; and the growth in the number of international migrations.



In Western countries, social polarisation has not only involved salaried workers, but also substantial sections of the middle classes and, through the increasingly extreme precarisation of labour, has also resulted in creeping mass impoverishment, partly covered by the huge indebtedness of working families and individual workers. And it is no longer possible to find exceptions to the rule, because – with different forms and at different levels of intensity – the intensification of social polarisation is affecting both traditionally liberal countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, and countries in which the welfare state was more widely extended, such as Germany, France, and even Sweden.



On the other hand, in the emerging economies, particularly in China, although hundreds of millions of people have left absolute poverty, and there has been an increase in the purchasing power of workers’ wages and an expansion of the middle classes, there has also been a strong centralisation of socially produced wealth, which can be measured by the trends of the Gini index and by relative wage indicators. India, Brazil and South Africa have experienced significant (in the former case) or considerable development in the last twenty years, but this growth has made these countries more unequal internally than they had been previously. Indeed, the inequalities inherited from colonialism have been joined by new inequalities produced by globalization in its current financial form, in particular by the globalisation of neo-liberal policies that have also involved emerging economies. And neither has Russia escaped this dynamic of social polarisation.



Since the 2008-2009 crisis, almost everywhere social inequalities have been reproduced in a more accelerated, extensive and acute manner, visibly changing the shape of the established class structure in many countries. Generally speaking, the boundaries between classes have become stronger towards the top and weaker towards the bottom, meaning that social inequalities are developing in a perpetual upward spiral motion. This seemingly irresistible force has clear structural roots and a multiplicity of effects on all spheres of the production and reproduction of social life, starting with political power and the production of culture.



The sharpening of social polarisation within individual countries is thus a truly worldwide phenomenon, which is differentiated while at the same time being unitary and global. It is grafted onto and combines with the polarisation inherited from previous capitalist development, without however leading, as some thought it would, to the emergence of new social classes. Rather, it results in the transformation of the relation between the two fundamental social classes – the working class and the capitalist class – which has always driven and continues to drive the historical movement of the contemporary world.



This first issue of Inequalities is dedicated to the fundamental and primary form of inequality, class inequality, with a focus on the sharpening of social polarisation within the various countries of the world. We accept contributions with a theoretical, analytical, and empirical slant that focus on the causes, forms, and consequences of social polarisation, on the specific aspects and internal dynamics of its intensification, and on the conflicts and social struggles that arise from it.