For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy? | more…
One hundred years ago, “October 1917” galvanized leftists and oppressed peoples around the globe, and became the lodestar for 20th century politics. Today, the left needs to reckon with this legacy—and transcend it. Social change, as it was understood in the 20th century, appears now to be as impossible as revolution, leaving the left to rethink the relationship between capitalist crises, as well as the conceptual tension between revolution and reform. | more…
This fifty-second edition of the Socialist Register explores right-wing political forces and parties around the globe, bringing to bear the Register’s reputation for detailed scholarship and passionate engagement on some of the most troubling developments in world politics today. Contributors examine mobilizations of the right in a variety of countries by analyzing their social bases, their relationships with state institutions, and the reach of their influence on mainstream parties and opinion. This volume also addresses the historical transition from right-wing nationalism to ethnicism, the question of resurgent fascism, and how left parties should respond to challenges from the far right. | more…
This 51st annual Socialist Register completes the investigation of class formation and class strategies on a global scale begun with last year’s volume. Deploying an understanding of class as an historical social process—rather than an abstract sociological category or statistical artifact—the essays here investigate the concrete ways that working classes are being made and remade in the struggles against neoliberalism, austerity, and authoritarian governments. Taking stock of the changing balance of class forces as well as old and new forms of workplace, household and political organization, they uncover the class strategies being debated and adapted in different zones of the world. | more…
For fifty years, the Socialist Register has brought together some of the world’s leading radical thinkers to address the most pressing issues of the day. Independent, searching, and erudite analysis is the hallmark of the Socialist Register, and this fiftieth-anniversary issue is no exception. Contributors to Registering Class examine some of our assumptions about class in the light of the global economic crisis and the many forms of resistance it has produced. | more…
Socialist Register 2013 seeks to explore and clarify strategy for the Left in the light of new challenges and new opportunities. Socialists today have to confront two realities: that they cannot avoid the question of reforms and a gradualist path out of capitalism, and that the organizational vehicles for socialism will most likely have to abide by different structures and principles than those that dominated left politics in the 20th century. Though solutions are not obvious, Socialist Register 2013 interrogates these dilemmas and critiques some unhelpful radical thinking that obstructs the reconsideration of socialist strategy for the 21st century. It asks, how have the occupations of public squares around the world changed the political scene? What are the most useful forms of political organization in the new conjuncture? Which features of past organizational models should be retained, and which discarded? | more…
The global economic crisis that closed the first decade of the 21st century has demonstrated that the contradictions of capitalism cannot be overcome. The challenge for socialist analysis is to reveal both the nature of these contradictions in the neo-liberal era of globalized finance, and their consequences in our time. This volume, a companion to The Crisis This Time: Socialist Register 2011, examines the response of the international Left and asks, how has the Left responded and can it offer an alternative to faltering capitalism? | more…
The global economic crisis that closed the first decade of the 21st century has demonstrated that the contradictions of capitalism cannot be overcome. The challenge for socialist analysis is to reveal both the nature of these contradictions in the neo-liberal era of globalized finance, and their consequences in our time. Crises need to be understood as turning points that open up opportunities. How to facilitate this is the sharpest challenge posed to socialists by the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s. | more…
Morbid Symptoms sees health as a major field of political economy, one that focuses on the struggle between commercial forces seeking to make it into a field of profit, and popular forces fighting to keep it — or make it — a public service with equal access for all. | more…
Given the extent and extremity of violence today, even in the absence of world war, and two decades after the end of actually-existing socialism, it is hard not feel that we are living in another age of barbarism. The scale and pervasiveness of violence today calls urgently for serious analysis—from “the war on terror” and counter-insurgencies, from terror and counter-terror, suicide bombings and torture, civil wars and anarchy, entailing human tragedies on a scale comparable to those of the two world wars, not to mention urban gang warfare, or the persistence of chronic violence against women. That the nirvana of global capitalism finds millions of people once again just “wishing (a) not to be killed, (b) for a good warm coat” (as Stendhal is said to have put it in a different era) is, when fully contemplated, appalling. | more…
Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism examines the distinguishing features of neoliberalism today as well as the prospects for the left in the Islamic world, in Latin America, and in the capitalist North. | more…
Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007 examines whether capitalism can come to terms with today’s ecological challenges and whether socialist thought has developed sufficiently to help us do so. Topics include: the ecological contradictions of capitalist accumulation and the growing social conflicts they create; the relationship between imperialism, markets, oil politics, and renewable energy; the significance of the impasse over the Kyoto protocol; and how technology can overcome the “limits to growth” and yet preserve the biosphere. | more…
Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Telling the Truth: Socialist Register 2006 examines how contemporary social and political debate is structured, how ideas and ideologies come to inform policy making, research, education, and our conceptions of truth more generally. | more…
Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. This volume examines the new U.S.-led imperialist project that is currently transforming the global order, its impact on different regions of the world, and on gender, media, and popular culture. | more…
For forty years, the annual Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Contributors to this volume consider what imperialism means in the new century by examining the U.S.-led imperialist project currently transforming relations of global power. | more…
Why do racial, religious, ethnic and national identities have such purchase on the lives of so many people, and why are they still at the center of so many major conflicts at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What form is racism taking amidst the inequalities, refugees and mass migrations of today’s global capitalism? How does the American state—as both the manager of the world capitalist order and as the embodiment of an all-too-often chauvinist national identity—fit into the picture of ‘Fighting Identities’? | more…
Radical politics have been defined in modern times—and distinguished from earlier traditions of protest—by the idea that economic, social and political structures are contradictory. Systems of exploitation creates not only wealth and prosperity for the powerful, but at the same time bring into being the forces which ensure their own eventual downfall. But it is a large step from the general assertion that social forms contain their own contradictions to analysis of the specific contradictions which occur in a given historical context, their interaction and movement, and their possible historical outcomes. | more…
Socialist Register 2001 examines the challenges faced by workers and the labor movement under global capitalism in the new century. This collection of twenty timely and original essays lay the groundwork for a much-needed revival of class analysis. A broad range of working-class issues are addressed including knowledge work and the “cybertariat” in the new economy, feminism and unions, migrant labor, peasant struggles, internationalism, and the impact of unstable, casual, and contingent employment. Other essays examine critically important regional experiences in India, Iran, Russia, Brazil, Southern Africa, and East Asia, as well as Europe and North America. Contributors to this volume reveal new and exciting possibilities for change that transcend the limits of old forms of class organization and politics. | more…
This volume of the SOCIALIST REGISTER points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this volume reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination aimed at creating saner ways of living and more rational ways of organizing society. Topics covered include work and its structure, democracy and the state, and technology and its social uses. Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias makes the case that a socialist vision of the the future remains both possible and necessary. | more…
“Globalization” has come to define our age. Stock market fluctuations, the fortunes of political administrations, and conditions for working people—all rise and fall with the tide of global capital flow. | more…
