by LEO PANITCH & GREG ALBO
Abstract
This 56th volume of the Socialist Register is
motivated by wanting to look beyond – while still taking into account –
the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism that have so far
dominated political and economic life in the twenty-first century. These
contradictions amount to something of a register of the dislocations
and distortions of capitalist markets over the last several decades: the
gross income and wealth inequalities of class and nation; the massive
global credit expansion in volume and complexity underpinning economic
growth; the intricate interconnections between financial markets and
global value chains; the ever more limited capacities of states to
control economic crises; the breaching of greenhouse gas emission
targets under the relentless acceleration of the circulation and
accumulation of capital still thoroughly dependent upon fossil fuel
energy supplies; and the massive void that now exists between liberal
democratic politics deploying policies of social inclusion and the
material sources of social polarisation and class divisions. In the
Preface to last year’s volume, A World Turned Upside Down?, we
suggested that these developments ‘increasingly raise the stark question
of whether we should once again be thinking of the options facing the
world in terms of “socialism versus barbarism”… In a world overturning
old certainties, soberly expressing the prospects for a way forward for
the left requires setting out new left agendas for confronting the
corporate powers of capital, and indentifying new hopeful organizational
dynamics that could lead to state transformations.’
To look beyond the restricted horizons disciplining the range of
acceptable political options today requires overcoming the current
limits of vision as well as practice that would allow for other possible
political choices. In the past years, we have seen a multiplication of
writings on ‘alternatives’ speaking to ‘post-capitalism’ but most remain
cast in terms of still working within – and most often accommodating –
actually-existing capitalism. They too often reflect rather than
transcend the contradictions entailed in, for instance, the promise of
abundance from automation but also a severe intensification and
degradation of work; or in the imperative to address ecological limits
in a transformation of the socio-economic system but a seeming inability
to reverse the waste economy or climate change; or the sickening
overhousing of the few alongside a desperate need to address
homelessness, social housing and the new global slums.
By challenging our contributors to address what are the actual and possible ways of living in this century, we saw this as way of probing how to get beyond the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. We did not want contributors to conceive their remit as future-oriented per se, but rather to see their mandate as locating utopic visions and struggles for alternate ways of living in the dystopic present. To this end, a number of the essays interrogate central dimensions of ‘how we live’ and ‘how we might live’ in terms of educating our children, housing and urbanism, accommodation of refugees and the displaced, and (to lean on that all too common phrase) the competitive time pressures for ‘work-life balance’.
Social Register for more