These castaway categories—unemployed youth left adrift, the beggars and the homeless, aimless nomads and drug addicts, postcolonial immigrants without documents or support—have become salient in public space, their presence undesirable and their doings intolerable, because they are the living and threatening incarnation of the generalized social insecurity produced by the erosion of stable and homogenous wage work (promoted to the rank of paradigm of employment during the decades of Fordist expansion in 1945-75) and by the decomposition of the solidarities of class and culture it underpinned within a clearly circumscribed national framework.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:23:12 +0000