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A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
Part of the ideal of the ‘flexible worker’ is that he or she should go where the jobs are. The fact that this breaks up families, because wives and mothers are also economically active and must display ‘flexibility’, is studiously avoided by those who are apologists for both market and family.
The Brave New World of Work
Ulrich Beck
Social insurance thrives when there is a roughly equal probability of upward and downward mobility, of making gains and making losses. In a society in which the precariat is growing, and in which social mobility is limited and declining, social insurance cannot flourish.
The Precariat
Guy Standing
In historical materialism, the relations between people determine how they relate to matter; more specifically, relations of production are the hands that forge and select productive forces as their hammers. Therefore, we learn, this ‘is not in any meaningful sense a materialism. Rather, we could think of it as something like a “socialism”’, in the sense not of a programme for socialising the means of production, but of a theory privileging the social as the dynamo of development.5 A real – new – materialism must accord that role to matter qua matter. Marxists treat matter as an ‘outcome’, a ‘medium’, an ‘obstacle’, and that is outright unfair. Matter is what ‘makes things happen; it has’ – the shibboleth – ‘agency’.
The Progress of This Storm
Andreas Malm
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