The word 'polarization' is on the lips of every commentator today, from mainstream journalists to the left, but the significance of this widely recognised phenomenon needs far more scrutiny than it has had. The 58th volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge of exploring how the new polarisations relate to the contradictions that underlie them, and how far 'centrist' politics can continue to contain them. Original essays examine the multiplication of polarised national, racial, generational and other identities in the context of growing inequality in income and wealth, new forms of regional and urban antagonism, 'vaccine nationalism', and the shifting parameters of great power rivalry.

The word 'polarization' is on the lips of every commentator today, from mainstream journalists to the left, but the significance of this widely recognised phenomenon needs far more scrutiny than it has had. The 58th volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge of exploring how the new polarisations relate to the contradictions that underlie them, and how far 'centrist' politics can continue to contain them. Original essays examine the multiplication of polarised national, racial, generational and other identities in the context of growing inequality in income and wealth, new forms of regional and urban antagonism, 'vaccine nationalism', and the shifting parameters of great power rivalry.

Amidst the carnage of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg posed a stark choice for humanity: socialism or barbarism. Violence Today asks if current patterns mark a decent into the barbarism that Luxemburg feared and if a just society, one capable of transcending the endemic violence of the neoliberal order, is possible in the new century.

This powerful and provocative new collection explores the roots of violence -- military, terrorist, criminal, and casual -- in contemporary society. It analyzes the social context, history, and structure of modern violence, casting light on patterns and practices from America's inner cities and prisons to "failed states" like Afghanistan. Violence Today also gives special attention to debate within the Left about violence, including a controversial defense of armed struggle.

Contributors: John Berger, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Peter Thomas, Vivek Chibber, Christian Parenti, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Georgi Derluguian, Sofiri Joab-Peterside, Ulrich Oslender, Achin Vanaik, Barabara Harriss-White, Lynne Segal, Joe Sim and Steve Tombs, Dennis Rodgers, Avishai Erlich, Philip Green, Garance Upham, Mary des Chenes and Stephen Mikesell, Samir Amin.

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.

It also discusses the role of the state in intellectual life and the media, and the role of think-tanks, foundations, political parties and global institutions such as the World Bank in the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. Such questions are not always at the center of public debate, but are essential to establishing freedom for critical thought and reflection, and for the formation of a new generation of intellectuals.

Contributors include Terry Eagleton, Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, Doug Henwood, Robert McChesney, and Michael Burawoy.

Since 1964, the "Socialist Register" has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. This issue 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.

Contributors and essays include:

The workplace has been changed in recent decades by the rise of digital technologies. Parts of a single labor process can be moved around the world, with implications not only for individual workplaces, but for the working class as a whole.

Within advanced capitalist countries, the workplace has been made more flexible through cell phones, e-mail, freelancing, and outsourcing. The process often makes the situation of the workers more precarious, as they are forced to pay for the tools of their trade, are expected to be constantly accessible to workplace demands, and are isolated from their fellow workers.

Huws' The Making of a Cybertariat examines this process from a number of perspectives, including those of women in the workplace and at home. It explores changing categories of employment and modes of organization, and how new divisions of race and gender are created in the process. It questions how the virtual workforce can identify their common interests and stand together to struggle for them.

The Making of a Cybertariat is both a testament to the author's remarkable record in the politics of technology over several decades and a vital resource for grasping ongoing debates and controversies in this field.

Jeremy Corbyn's rapid ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party, driven by a groundswell of popular support particularly among the young, was met at the time by a baffled media. Just where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? In Searching for Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys argue that it is only by understanding Corbyn's roots in the Bennite Labour New Left's long struggle to transcend the limits of 'parliamentary socialism' and democratise the party, as a precondition for democratising the state, can you understand his surge to become leader of the party. Closely analyzing the forces inside the party aligned against Corbyn's leadership, Panitch and Leys explain what happened between the validation of the Corbyn project in the 2017 election, while advancing an ambitious programme of democratic socialist measures unmatched anywhere since the 1970s, and the electoral defeat amidst the Brexit conjuncture of 2019. They argue that while this defeat marked the farthest point to which the generation formed in the 1970s was able to carry the Labour new left project, it seems unlikely that the new generation of activists will quickly see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party, so as to fundamentally change it. In the face of the contradictions being generated by twenty-first-century capitalism, and the need for discovering and developing new political forms adequate to addressing them, this book is required reading for democratic socialists, not just in Britain but everywhere.

These essays look at recent reactions to neoliberalism and imperialism elsewhere in Eastern Europe, France and in the heart of the empire - The United States.

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 create 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.

This collection of essays examines social contradictions in the age of globalization in which old antagonisms often appear to be overcome, and new cracks are emerging in the facade of capitalist progress. Where do they occur? Where can they be expected to appear in future? How can they be grasped in a spirit of sober radicalism, which neither accepts the limits of the present nor overcomes them through wishful thinking alone? What possibilities do they offer for mobilizing resistance? These issues define an agenda which is critical for socialism in our time.

Contributors to this volume are especially concerned with capitalism as a global system today, dependent on the strength of the U.S. economy and currency and on global financial institutions such as the World Bank capable of carrying out the capitalist agenda. They provide a timely and critical analysis of what big corporations want and of the problems their agenda creates for their own continued dominance and prosperity.

Contributors include: Jim O'Connor, Ellen Wood, Gerard Dumenil, Aijaz Ahmad, Naomi Klein, Mino Carchedi, Reg Whitaker, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock, Mike Kidron, David Harvey, Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova, Elmar Altvater, Paul Cammack.

"The intellectual lodestone for the international Left since 1964."
"--Mike Davis"

"Compulsory reading."
"--Daniel Singer"

Socialist Register 2001 examines the concept and the reality of class as it affects workers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Theoretical contributions explore today's old and new working classes, workers "north" and "south," peasants and workers, gender and the working class, as well as migrant and knowledge workers. Other essays examine critically important regional experiences in East Asia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Europe and North America.

Contributions include: Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Henry Bernstein, Peter Kwong, Eric Mann, Ursula Huws, Andree Levesque, Pat & Hugh Armstrong, Rosemary, Brigitte Young, Rohini Banaji, Gerard Greenfield, Barbara Harriss-White & Nandini Gooptu, Patrick Bond, Darlene Miller, Greg Ruiter, Huw Beynon & Jose Ramalho, Justin Paulson, Haideh Moghissi, Saeed Rahnema, David Mandel, Michael Goldfield, and Steve Jeffreys.

"He has this wonderful and rare capacity to delineate the most complex of arguments in the most limpid prose. He never takes refuge in jargon. He demolishes pretentiousness. He is disarmingly honest. He hits you between the eyes. He is not afraid to be a lone voice as, increasingly, nowadays he is, the still small voice of humane sanity in an increasingly barbarous and market-oriented world. He makes immediate sense to anybody voting marginally to the left of Genghis Khan, Mrs. Thatcher or Newt Gingrich." John Lonsdale, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

This book is a "stock-taking" of development theory at the end of the 20th century. It argues that the assumptions on which development theory has rested since the 1950s no longer hold. The postcolonial "third world" for which development theory was originally developed has fractured into increasingly diverse regions, while the end of the postwar regime of regulated international trade and capital movements has drastically curtailed the scope for state economic intervention. A much broader based, more historical and more explicitly political theoretical effort is now called for."

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 whether market forces and technology can overcome the "limits to growth" while preserving the biosphere.

These essays also analyze how deeply consumerism affects working class politics and the shortcomings of Green parties and "green commerce." In addition, they address the necessity to redefine standards of living chiefly in the countries of the North in order to allow for the global redistribution of wealth and income that are critical for development in the South.

The international roster of contributors includes Mike Davis and Neil Smith, Enrique Leff, Joan Martinez-Alier, Elmar Altvater, and Michael Lowy.

Global Flashpoints critically examines today's neoliberal order and the new resistance movements which it has sparked across the globe. This timely and panoramic work offers penetrating historical analysis of the role of politics, religion and imperialism in shaping the contemporary crisis in the Middle East and of the prospects for the Left throughout the Islamic world. Global Flashpoints also explores the present state of resistance movements in Europe and the United States and highlights developments in Latin America, including Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, the recent uprising in Oaxaca, indigenous agrarian movements in Bolivia, and Brazil's landless movement. Global Flashpoints offers a uniquely powerful and provocative account of the worldwide struggle against imperialism and neoliberalism in the new century.

Contributors: Aijaz Ahmad, Gilbert Achcar, Asef Bayat, Sabbah Alnasseri, Bashir Abu-Manneh, Yildiz Atasoy, Hidayat Greenfield, Ana Esther Cecena, Margarita Lopez Maya, Jack Hammond, William Robinson, Wes Enzinna, Joao Pedro Stedile & Atilio Boron, Richard Roman & Edur Velasco Arregui, G.M. Tamas, Raghu Krishnan & Adrien Thomas, Peter Burnham, Kim Moody, Alfredo Saad Filho, Elmar Altvater & Greg Albo.

Universal, comprehensive health care, equally available to all and disconnected from income and the ability to pay, was the goal of the founders of the National Health Service. This book, by one of the NHS's most eloquent and passionate defenders, tells the story of how that ideal has been progressively eroded, and how the clock is being turned back to pre-NHS days, when health care was a commodity, fully available only to those with money. How this has come about-to the point where even the shrinking core of free NHS hospital services is being handed over to private providers at the taxpayers' expense-is still not widely understood, hidden behind slogans like "care in the community," "diversity" and "local ownership." Allyson Pollock demystifies these terms, and in doing so presents a clear and powerful analysis of the transition from a comprehensive and universal service to New Labour's "mixed economy of health care," in which hospitals with foundation status, loosely supervised by an independent regulator, will be run on largely market principles. The NHS remains popular, Pollock argues, precisely because it created the "freedom from fear" that its founders promised, and because its integrated, non-commercial character meant low costs and good medical practice. Restoring these values in today's health service has become an urgent necessity, and this book will be a key resource for everyone wishing to to bring this about.

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 create 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.

This collection of essays examines social contradictions in the age of globalization in which old antagonisms often appear to be overcome, and new cracks are emerging in the facade of capitalist progress. Where do they occur? Where can they be expected to appear in future? How can they be grasped in a spirit of sober radicalism, which neither accepts the limits of the present nor overcomes them through wishful thinking alone? What possibilities do they offer for mobilizing resistance? These issues define an agenda which is critical for socialism in our time.

Contributors to this volume are especially concerned with capitalism as a global system today, dependent on the strength of the U.S. economy and currency and on global financial institutions such as the World Bank capable of carrying out the capitalist agenda. They provide a timely and critical analysis of what big corporations want and of the problems their agenda creates for their own continued dominance and prosperity.

Contributors include: Jim O'Connor, Ellen Wood, Gerard Dumenil, Aijaz Ahmad, Naomi Klein, Mino Carchedi, Reg Whitaker, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock, Mike Kidron, David Harvey, Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova, Elmar Altvater, Paul Cammack.

Originally published in 1969, this work gathers together essays on Third World development by nine social scientists with diverse academic interests. These contributions are united by a relative uncertainty in relation to development, derived from the broader critical reappraisal of the area which was occurring at the time, together with a need to create fresh methodologies for the advancement of their respective fields. The text is edited with an introduction by political scientist Colin Leys. This is a consummately researched collection, ambitious in scope, that will be of value to anyone with an interest in political science and theories of development.

With the globalisation of the capitalist economy the economic role of national governments is now largely confined to controlling inflation and facilitating home-grown market performance. This represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between politics and economics; it has been particularly marked in Britain, but is relevant to many other contexts. Market-Driven Politics is a multi-level study, moving between an analysis of global economic forces through national politics to the changes occurring week by week in two fields of public life that are both fundamentally important and familiar to everyone.television broadcasting and health care. Public services like these play an important role, because they both affect the legitimacy of the government and are targets for global capital. This book provides an original analysis of the key processes of commodification of public services, the conversion of public-service workforces into employees motivated to generate profit, and the role of the state in absorbing risk. Understanding the dynamics of each of these trends becomes critical not just for the analysis of market-driven politics but also for the longer-term defence of democracy and the collective values on which it depends.

This trenchant account of the last twenty-five years of the British Labour Party argues that Tony Blair's modernizing tendency was profoundly mistaken in asserting that the only alternative to traditional social democracy and narrow parliamentarianism was an acceptance of neo-liberalism. In blaming the Labour left, rather than the social-democratic right for the party's years in the electoral wilderness, the modernizers rejected the creativity and energy which the party's New Left had mobilized, and without which their own professed aim of democratic renewal was unlikely to be realized. In this new edition, the authors, in collaboration with David Coates, review the debate in light of the Blair government's first three years in office.

When Namibia gained its independence in 1990 after 23 years of war, most of the eleven Namibians whose life histories make up this book were in their mid-thirties. To that point their whole adult lives had been lived in the struggle, more than half of them in exile. Few of them owned anything. None held prominent jobs. Most had endured hardship, hunger, sickness and fear, and witnessed terrible cruelty and suffering. All had lost family members or friends. Yet their outlook was triumphant and optimistic and their stories are full of enthusiasm, energy, determination and purpose. When you read their stories you are not surprised that they have since become well known in their chosen fields. Yet when they told these stories most of them were not well known. They just happened to be people we came to know and like in the course of our work (Brown as a journalist and development consultant, Leys as a social science researcher) and whom we asked if they would tell us their stories. They tell a story of a country as a whole during those years, a story of how a whole generation matured in the struggle, becoming skilled, disciplined, cosmopolitan and tough.