The Socialist Register 2012
The Crisis and The Left
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.
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
Contents
- 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