The Socialist Register 2021

Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living

Edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo  

Paperback $36.00

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As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it refashioned both our ways of working and our ways of consuming, as well as our ways of communicating. And as the Covid-19 pandemic coursed through the world’s population, adding tens of billions of dollars to the profits of high-tech corporations, its impact revealed grotesque class and racial inequalities and the gross lack of public investment, planning and preparation which lay behind the scandalously slow and inadequate responses of so many states.

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— Noam Chomsky

The Socialist Register has been the intellectual lodestar for the international left since 1964.

— Mike Davis

This book is an instructive read even for those who do not share a socialist vision. If one wants to develop a sophisticated understanding of the politics of the left in the United States or elsewhere, it is incumbent upon the analyst to have a solid sense of the different projects and strategies animating the left beyond the mainstream analytical nostrums of “more state/less state,” and “individualism/collectivism.” It also allows analysts to track the distinct differences between revolutionary socialist and social democratic traditions. Moreover, the book goes someway to allowing the reader to evaluate the success and failures of the various socialist challenges from São Paulo and Caracas to London and Athens.

— Travis William Fast, Industrial Relations – 76-1, 2021

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Contents

  • Reaping the whirlwind: Digitalization, restructuring, and mobilization in the Covid crisis (Ursula Huws)
  • The time of our lives: Reflections on work and capitalist temporality (Bryan D. Palmer)
  • Interpretation machines: Contradictions of ‘artificial intelligence’ in 21st century capitalism (Larry Lohmann)
  • The political economy of datafication and work: A new digital Taylorism? (Matthew Cole, Hugo Radice & Charles Umney)
  • The big tech monopolies and the state (Grace Blakeley)
  • Socialists on social media platforms: Communicating within and against digital capitalism (Tanner Mirrlees)
  • Imagining platform socialism; Massimiliano Mollona: Working-class cinema in the age of digital capitalism (Derek Hrynyshyn)
  • The surveillance of service labour: Conditions and possibilities of resistance (Joan Sangster)
  • From neoliberal fashion to new ways of clothing (Jerónimo Montero Bressán)
  • Shifting gears: Labour strategies for low-carbon public transit mobility (Sean Sweeney & John Treat)
  • Community restaurants: Decommodifying food as socialist strategy (Benjamin Selwyn)
  • Start early, stay late: Planning for care in old age (Pat Armstrong & Huw Armstrong)
  • Health care, technology, and socialized medicine (Pritha Chandra & Pratyush Chandra)
  • Life after the pandemic: From production for profit to provision for need (Christoph Hermann)
  • Democratic socialist planning: Back to the future (Robin Hahnel)
  • Postcapitalism: Alternatives or detours? (Greg Albo)

Authors

  • Leo Panitch

    York University

    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.

  • Greg Albo

    York University

    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.

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Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program.