A defining feature of the American economy has been surging pay inequality, but far worse for many working families has been declining pay quality : the material living standard made possible by a full-time job. Well-established basic-needs budget calculators by family type offer highly credible estimates of the full-time wage necessary for sustaining a minimally decent living standard—the living wage—which can serve as the anchor for other thresholds that together define tiers of the wage distribution. Pay quality is then measured by the incidence of employment in each of these tiers. This approach is illustrated with dual (low-pay and decent-pay) and tripartite (poverty-pay, middle-pay, good-pay) job structures, echoing earlier labor market segmentation perspectives. We document large and persistent declines in paycheck-based living standards for most age-education-gender-race groups between 1979 and 2019, most dramatically for young less-educated men. JEL Classifications: J31, D63, E24, I31.
Activists and academics are increasingly investing in “real utopias,” in projects that exist in the “here and now” that can push beyond capitalism. While there is a vast and growing related literature, a key voice in this debate remains the late Erik Olin Wright, whose “Real Utopias” project brought together scholars to explore the transformative potential of such alternatives. As outlined in his book, Envisioning Real Utopias , Wright contends that workers’ cooperative firms hold particular transformative potential as they sit as ideal typical vehicles for enabling “interstitial transformation.” Such an “interstitial” approach speaks to the development of political-economic organizations within the “cracks” of the capitalist system. While Wright’s work offers important sketches of how such a transformative project may occur, many questions remained unaddressed, while new questions arise with emergent technologies. This article develops Wright’s theory by bringing it into dialogue with wider literature from cooperative studies and recent works on platform cooperatives. JEL Classification : J54, B51, P13
David M. Gordon’s contributions to Marxist theory are identified through a close study of his early research. In making this theory relevant to contemporary events, Gordon introduced important innovations incrementally in his research leading to social structure of accumulation theory. The applied and diverse nature of his work can make it challenging to identify these innovations. The article traces two important themes in this research: the distinction between “quantitative” and “qualitative” production efficiency and Gordon’s insistence that capitalist development needs to be understood through endogenous class struggle and political-economic relations rather than through exogenous or autonomous forces. Finding in Gordon’s early publications a sequence of progressive stages, the article situates his contributions within the larger development of modern Marxian political economy. JEL Classification: B24, B51, J42, J15
David Gordon and his cohort of radical political economists identified labor market segmentation as a functional process made possible by the emergence of monopoly capitalism. Gordon, Reich, and Edwards in particular viewed racial segregation as one of several strategies used by monopolistic capitalists to maintain labor market segmentation in a “divide and conquer” strategy that served to weaken the working class as a whole. This article argues that while Gordon’s analysis offers a welcome alternative to neoclassical analyses of racial division in the labor market, it is still insufficient. A more compelling analysis would use the insights of stratification economics and real competition theory, much of which was developed at Gordon’s home institution—the New School for Social Research. Racial stratification in labor and ownership in the United States precedes the consolidation period of monopolistic capitalism and has always incorporated mechanisms of maintenance that go beyond the firm; white supremacy could be considered a fundamental part of the “social structure of accumulation” within the United States. Identity-based stratification is functional within and beyond labor markets, and its goals of hierarchy and population maintenance are consistent with capitalists’ goals of maintaining profitability over both the short and long term. JEL Classification : Z13, J42
In the agrarian political economy, the analysis of social classes and their interrelations is essential to understanding the economic phenomena that shapes nations. These dynamics largely determine capital reproduction, particularly in the agricultural sector, and the shifting balance of social dynamics over time. Accordingly, in this project we use Marxist dependency school to examine rural class structures, specifically the agro-industrial bourgeoisie, landowners, peasants, the rural petite bourgeoisie, and the agrarian proletariat. This study is framed within the context of successive food regimes in the economic development of Latin America, with a special emphasis on Ecuador.JEL Classification: Q15, P16, N56
