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The Socialist Register 2012

The Socialist Register 2012

The Crisis and The Left

edited by Greg Albo, Vivek Chibber and Leo Panitch

As the crisis continues to bite deeper into the lives of people around the world, The Socialist Register 2012: The Crisis and the Left considers how the Left has responded and asks if it can offer a viable alternative. Examining the crisis in a variety of geographic areas including Africa, Latin America, Europe and China, contributors explore many themes of crisis from finance to climate, oil and auto to poverty and over-accumulation.

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About the book

This, the 48th volume of the Register, was conceived as a companion to last year’s volume on ‘The Crisis This Time’. We observed there that economic crises can be turning points which present political opportunities, and pointed to the fact that, so far, it was the ruling classes that were taking advantage of the political opening, not the Left. This volume deepens that analysis in range a ways, not only in terms of broader regional coverage that extends from Latin America to the Middle East to China to Europe, but also by probing the place of the city in capitalist crises, and the new accumulation strategies that feed on both the public sector crisis and the climate crisis, while still portending a new age of austerity. It also takes better measure of the state of the Left in the crisis, not least by a way of a symposium of three essays on what the Left’s response should be to the Eurozone crisis. The next volume will take up the challenge of developing socialist strategies for the 21st century. Article Details

Capitalism & Alternatives

Authors

Greg Albo

Greg Albo teaches political economy at the Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto. He is currently co-editor of the Socialist Register. He is also on the editorial boards of Studies in Political Economy, Relay, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Canadian Dimension, The Bullet and Historical Materialism (England). Co-editor of A Different Kind of State: Popular Power and Democratic Administration and author of numerous articles in journals such as Studies in Political Economy, Socialist Register, Canadian Dimension, and Monthly Review.

Vivek Chibber

Vivek Chibber is Professor of Sociology at New York University.

Leo Panitch

Leo Panitch was a Distinguished Research Professor, renowned political economist, Marxist theorist and editor of the Socialist Register. He received a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba in 1967 and a M.Sc.(Hons.) and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1968 and 1974, respectively. He was a Lecturer, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor at Carleton University between 1972 and 1984. He was a Professor of Political Science at York University since 1984. He was the Chair of the Department of Political Science at York from 1988-1994. He was the General Co-editor of State and Economic Life series, U. of T. Press, from 1979 to 1995 and is the Co-founder and a Board Member of Studies in Political Economy. He was also the author of numerous articles and books dealing with political science including The End of Parliamentary Socialism (1997). He was a member of the Movement for an Independent and Socialist Canada, 1973-1975, the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action, 1975-1984, the Canadian Political Science Association, the Committee of Socialist Studies, the Marxist Institute and the Royal Society of Canada. He was an ardent supporter of the Socialist Project.

Preface
The Urban Roots of Financial Crises: Reclaiming the City for Anti-capitalist Struggle
Slump, Austerity and Resistance
Crisis as Capitalist Opportunity: New Accumulation through Public Service Commodification
Financialization, Commodification and Carbon: The Contradictions of Neoliberal Climate Policy
The New American Poor Law
A Tale of Two Crises: Labour, Capital and Restructuring in the US Auto Industry
Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and its Analytical Discontents
Finance Oil and the Arab Uprisings: The Global Crisis and the Gulf States