
The Socialist Register 2014
Registering Class
The fiftieth volume of the Socialist Register is dedicated to the theme of “registering class,” in light of the spread and deepening of capitalist social relations around the globe. Today’s economic crisis has been deployed to extend the class struggle from above while many resistances have been explicitly cast in terms of class struggles from below.
About the book
The preface to the first volume of the Socialist Register in 1964, in announcing ‘a series of annual volumes of socialist analysis and discussion’, expressed the belief that ‘the possibility of fruitful discussions is now greater than for a long time past. It is now better realized among socialists that dogmatic reiteration cannot, any more than crass empiricism, provide answers to the problems of the present.’ It is in the same spirit that we have conceived this volume, the Register’s fiftieth. Our decision to focus on the theme of class not only reflects an abiding concern of the Register since the beginning, but also the fact that the spread and deepening of capitalist social relations around the globe has been increasingly marked by growing social inequality. And as the global economic crisis that capitalism has spawned in the early twentyfirst century has been deployed to extend the class struggle from above so determinedly waged in the neoliberal era, so have the many resistances that have arisen been explicitly cast in terms of class struggles from below.
Contents
- Class and Politics: From the 20th to the 21st Century (Leo Panitch)
- Rethinking Class: The Lineage of the Socialist Register (Madeleine Davis)
- Reconsiderations of Class: The Precariat as Proletariat (Bryan Palmer)
- Class Analysis Beyond Postcolonial Distractions (Vivek Chibber)
- Class in the Digital Age: Living, Labour and Value (Ursula Huws)
- The Walmart Working Class (Arun Gupta)
- Labour in the Contemporary City (Ian Macdonald)
- Reorganizing Class: India’s New Trade Union Initiative (Guatam Mody)
- Whither the Transnational Capitalist Class? (William Carroll)
- Change and Continuity in Capitalist Ruling Classes (Claude Serfati)
- The European Capitalist Class (Bastiaan van Apeldoorn)
- The British Ruling Class Today (Colin Leys)
- Money in Politics: The Donor Class and the 2012 U.S. Election (Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgenson & Jie Chen)
- Transformation, Crisis and Class in Eastern Europe (Jane Hardy)
- Brazil’s New Imperial Capitalism (Virginia Fontes & Ana Garcia)
- Class Relations, Neoliberalism and the Egyptian “Revolution” (Sabah Alnasseri)