Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the precarization of work and life for aviation workers worldwide, with airline closures, workforce cuts, and dismissals fostering a disciplinary climate amid uncertainty. In Argentina, the case of LATAM Airways highlights how cabin crew workers organized resistance during the 2020 lockdown and travel bans. Union tradition was reinterpreted as workers, especially women and feminist unionists, drew on past struggles and collective identifications to confront corporate strategies. The dismissals of key activist groups reveal critical dynamics shaping future labor relations in aviation. The state’s role in reconfiguring the postpandemic sector—through regulatory changes enabling intensified exploitation—emerges as central to understanding the conflict’s broader implications. These developments blur the boundaries of trade union institutionality and underscore the state’s co-constitutive role in labor relations and the deepening of labor intensification. Recognizing laboring bodies as socially and historically produced challenges perspectives that overlook worker agency. Moreover, postpandemic regulatory shifts have exacerbated working conditions, contributing to the wearing down of laboring bodies and highlighting their struggles over health and safety. This analysis contributes to social reproduction theory by bridging production and reproduction, and showing how aesthetics and symbols play a key role in resisting the precarization of life.

Abstract Increasingly, dystopian visions of the future seem to be dominating political discourses, having a particular purchase in a world defined by the catastrophic effects of global climate change, the devastation of wars and the militarization of global life, and the extensive and intensive neoliberal practices of “primitive accumulation” and exploitation. Given the current context, what is the role of utopias and utopian thinking in bringing about radical changes within our global context which can further democracy, difference, and justice? In what way, if at all, does the utopian disposition (which is the deep discursive positioning that places utopian figuration within the context of political action) provide an important angle through which to understand the tasks of critical political science? Utopias and the utopian disposition are fundamentally necessary to political action, and central to the nature of radicalism. Once we reconstruct the imperatives of the utopian disposition more clearly through the work of Miguel Abensour and others, we can see how important and central this is to the tasks of critical political science. If critical political science is attuned to its primary conceptual and practical imperatives, it will be unabashedly utopian in a way that promotes alterity, openness, and radical transformation.

This article presents an alternative general model of democracy to traditional minimalist (electoral and liberal) and deliberative theories by drawing from critical realist philosophical thought. Realist or real democracy is proposed as a societal system where preconditions exist to fully empower all citizens to realize their individual capabilities. This includes empowerment opportunities at the ballot box - but also other preconditions such as health, educational and living standards. Real democracy also separates democratic preconditions from democratic outcomes. Democratic outcomes require the absence of inequalities in power as result from the contingent interaction preconditions and human agency. The new approach is argued to provide a more holistic and dynamic concept of democracy which is also more grounded in the everyday experience of the citizen compared to traditional approaches. It reconnects democracy with theories of human development and enables a new classification of political regimes and conception of democratic politics. An initial empirical mapping of patterns of global real democracy shows evidence of rising preconditions since 1990 – but stagnation since 2010 and some signs of decline. Democratic outcomes by socio-economic position saw the most notable decline.

This article contextualizes Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement that emerged in the fall of 2014. We argue that first, the Umbrella Movement was not merely about democracy but must be understood in the context of widening inequality and an ongoing housing and wage crisis; second, that it is part of a broader epoch of contention informed by, third, a distinct “rhizomatic movement logic” that is defined by a diversity of actors and struggles, use of social media, leaderless and grassroots mobilizing, distrust of institutional actors. Fueled by shifts in capital accumulation and changes in communication technologies, the currently dominant movement logic is distinct from previous movement politics. Since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994, it has informed movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, and more recently the Gilets Jaunes as well as the Umbrella Movement. To be sure, we are not claiming that all these struggles are the same. We stress the similarities exhibited by these movements’ “deep grammar,” so to speak, while recognizing that each must be understood in its particularities. We thus specify the context of Hong Kong and provide illustrations of how this logic has impacted the Umbrella Movement’s actors, organizing, and movement-building dynamics.