The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications

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Abstract
The resurgence of extreme poverty and destitution, ethnoracial divisions (linked to the colonial past) and public violence, and their accumulation in the same distressed urban areas, suggest that the metropolis is the site and fount of novel forms of exclusionary social closure in advanced societies. This paper essays an ideal-typical characterization of this new, rising regime of urban marginality by contrasting it with selected features of urban poverty in the postwar era of Fordist growth. Six distinctive features of advanced marginality are proposed: the growing internal heterogeneity and desocialization of labor, the functional disconnection of neighborhood conditions from macro-economic trends; territorial fixation and stigmatization; spatial alienation and the dissolution of place; the loss of a viable hinterland; and the symbolic fragmentation of marginalized populations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the rise of advanced marginality for social analysis and policy, including the need to break out of the market-and-state paradigm and to sever the link between work and subsistence via the institution of a citizen's wage.

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