Colin Leys
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The Socialist Register 2002
A World of Contradictions
The contributors, from many countries, discuss the contradictions that exist world wide and the resulting human suffering and misery that emerges. Contrary to the idyllic picture being painted by the promoters of globalization, we learn that workers are without work, that cultural, political, gender and racial conflicts abound, and that contradictions between countries and regions lead to an ever widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots‘“as health care and social services erode.
The Socialist Register 2001
Working Classes, Global Realities
Managers want new workers who can be used casually-people scared and disciplined by lacking a secure job. Restricting workers’ skills and depriving workers of opportunities to learn and to organize makes for a more dependent and docile work force. Unions are not welcome. Blairs, Clintons and Schroeders may believe that their policies are working, and that opportunities are growing for ‘everyone’ but class exploitation and oppression remain facts of life in the new century. Socialist Register 2001 examines the concept and the reality of class as it effects workers at the beginning of the 21st Century. Theoretical contributions explore: today’s old and new working classes, workers ‘north’ and ‘south’, peasants and workers, gender and the working class, migrant workers, tele-working. Other essays examine critically important regional experiences in East Asia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Europe and North America.
The Socialist Register 2000
Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias
When mainstream commentators talk about the future, they tend to predict dire doomsday scenarios or spin wild techno-fantasies. In spite of their radically hi-tech edge, these futuristic scenarios usually assume that current social structures will persist. Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this book reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination, one aimed at saner ways of living and organizing society.
The Socialist Register 1998
The Communist Manifesto Now
The 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto provides the occasion for a powerful set of essays that draw on the Manifesto’s legacy to analyse working class responses today to the growing exhaustion of neo-liberalism and that contribute to setting a left agenda for the new millenium. The volume also features brilliant essays on the making of the Manifesto, plus a reprint of the Manifesto and a reproachful letter to Marx from a socialist-feminist.