Titres dans Classes sociales et disparité économique

L’Établi, ce titre désigne les quelques centaines de militants intellectuels qui, à partir de 1967, s’embauchaient, s’établissaient dans les usines ou les docks. Robert Linhart fût l’un de ceux-là. Après une année comme ouvrier dans l’usine Citroën de Choisy, il décide, dix ans plus tard, délivrer son témoignage. Poignant et précis, ce récit nous permet de saisir le rapport que les hommes entretiennent entre eux par l’intermédiaire des objets.

Parasite : nom masculin. « Organisme qui se nourrit strictement aux dépens d’un organisme hôte d’une espèce différente ». Les parasites ne sont pas ceux que l’on croit. La véritable classe parasite est celle qui est située au sommet du corps social, cette classe bourgeoise qui a envahi la société tout entière, rachetant ses médias, finançant ses hommes politiques, exploitant ses travailleurs au plus bas prix possible. En retour, cette classe ne nous apporte rien. Pire, elle nous coûte bien plus cher qu’elle ne nous rapporte. Elle nuit plus qu’elle brille.

« Les hommes sont plus riches que les femmes. Dès l’enfance, les garçons reçoivent plus d’argent de poche que les filles. Adultes, à poste égal, les femmes sont moins bien payées que les hommes. Et le couple accentue encore les inégalités : au cours de la vie à deux, l’écart ne cesse de se creuser, sans que ni l’une ni l’autre ne s’en rende compte. Ou bien préfère l’ignorer. Chaque fois, il y a des explications et une combinaison de “bonnes raisons” mais le tableau général est accablant. J’écris depuis des années sur les violences sexuelles, le travail domestique, l’invisibilisation des femmes.

Changer de regard sur la jeunesse. Les jeunes seraient « paresseux », « incultes », voire « égoïstes et individualistes ». J’ai entendu mille fois ces accusations à l’égard de la jeunesse : dans des dîners de famille, à la volée chez un commerçant ou portées par des éditorialistes remontés à la télévision. Ces jugements négatifs sont non seulement infondés, mais aussi délétères pour toute la société. Entre chômage, dégradation de la situation économique, pandémie et urgence écologique, les jeunes doivent composer avec des paramètres inédits.

"Ils subissent un éloignement géographique, social, politique et culturel. Ils sont la majorité. Ils sont à l'origine de toutes les contestations actuelles, qui ne ressemblent à aucun des mouvements sociaux des siècles passés. Ils sont les dépossédés." Dans ce nouvel essai, Christophe Guilluy montre comment les classes populaires répondent magistralement à leur disparition programmée, en imposant une alternative à un modèle condamné.

The United States is the richest country on earth, yet has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. One in seven Americans live below the poverty line, a line which hasn't shifted over the last fifty years, despite the efforts of successive governments and extensive relief programs. Why is there so much scarcity in this land of dollars? In Poverty, by America, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond examines the nature of American poverty today and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

Der Traum einer Gesellschaft, in der jeder die gleichen Chancen hat und ohne materielle Sorgen sein Glück suchen kann, ist vorbei. Die Schere zwischen Arm und Reich klafft in Deutschland immer weiter auseinander. Die breite Mittelschicht, die einst unser Land gekennzeichnet und unsere Gesellschaft getragen hat, erodiert. Die Krisen der letzten Jahre haben diesen Trend verstärkt und die Politik will oder kann nicht gegensteuern.

Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an "American society" - one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy's winners and losers in today's France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on "the periphery".

Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, the rich and the super-rich have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis.

The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future - now. One recent estimate predicts 13 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next seven years - jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant.

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilisations and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste.

Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as the most influential thinker of our time, but never before has he devoted a major book to one topic: income inequality. Requiem for the American Dream is not an essay collection but an entire work of some 70,000 words, based on four years of interviews with Chomsky by the editors. It is a book that makes Chomsky's breadth and depth accessible and at the same time gives us his most powerful political ideas with unprecedented, breathtaking directness.

It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal - that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding - reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream.

Imagine it is now 2025 and that years earlier, in the wake of the world financial crisis of 2008, a new post-capitalist society had been born. In this ingenious book, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis draws on the greatest thinkers in European culture from Plato to Marx to offer us a dramatic and tantalising glimpse of this brave new world, where the principles of democracy, equality and justice are truly served.

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show in this book, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past 30 years. 

A sociologist and former fashion model takes listeners inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of men.   

The world-renowned philosopher and author of the best-selling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgment it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life.