New Polarizations and Old Contradictions: The Crisis of Centrism

New Polarizations and Old Contradictions: The Crisis of Centrism
Author: Greg Albo
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-12-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583679375

The 58th annual volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge of exploring how the new polarizations relate to the contradictions that underlie them and how far 'centrist' politics can continue to contain them. Original essays examine the multiplication of antagonistic national, racial, generational, and other identities in the context of growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and the shifting parameters of great power rivalry. Where, how, and by what means can the left move forward?

Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living

Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living
Author: Leo Panitch
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583678832

Essays that explore new ways of living with technological change Every year since 1964, the Socialist Register has offered a fascinating survey of movements and ideas from the independent new left. This year's edition asks readers to explore just how we need to live with new technologies. Essays in this 57th Socialist Register reveal the contradictions and dislocations of technological change in the twenty-first century. And they explore alternative ways of living: from artificial intelligence (AI) to the arts, from transportation to fashion, from environmental science to economic planning. Greg Albo - Post-capitalism: Alternatives or detours? Nicole Aschoff and Pankaj Mahta - AI-deology: Science, capitalism and the dream of a ‘people’s AI’ Hugo Radice - There is nothing artificial about AI: Labour, class, utopia, socialism Larry Lohman - Interpretation machines: Contradictions of digital mechanization in twenty-first century capitalism Robin Hahnel - Democratic socialist planning: Against, with and beyond the new technologies Tanner Mirrlees - Platform socialists in the age of digital capitalism Derek Hrynyshyn – Imagining information socialism Bryan Palmer - Capitalism and the clock: Time’s meaning in the struggle for socialism Sean Sweeney and John Treat - Shifting gears: Labour strategies for low-carbon public transit mobility Adam Greenfield - Smart cities, technological traps, democratic possibilities Christoph Hermann - The consequences of commodification: Contours of a post-capitalist society Joan Sangster – The surveillance of service labour: Conditions and possibilities of resistance Jeronimo Montero Bressan - Beyond neoliberal fashion: Imagining clothing production as a human need Massimiliano Mollona - Art/Commons: Art collectives and the post-capitalist imagination Ingar Solty – The world of tomorrow: Scenarios for our future between demise and hope

Trump and the Deeper Crisis

Trump and the Deeper Crisis
Author: Kevin A. Young
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-12-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1804555126

As far-right forces cement their hold on the Republican Party, and as the Democratic Party appears unable to stop them, what lies ahead? The authors argue that confronting Trumpism requires a frontal attack on the conditions that incubated the monster.

Capital and Politics

Capital and Politics
Author: Greg Albo
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2022-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583679863

The 59th annual volume of the Socialist Register examines the growth of corporate power and other important organizational trends in global capitalism. Rejecting such notions as “stakeholder capitalism,” it reviews the organization and strategies of unions and the left as it searches for new routes to socialism.

Revolution and Disenchantment

Revolution and Disenchantment
Author: Fadi A. Bardawil
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2020-04-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478007583

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

Epistemologies of the South

Epistemologies of the South
Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317260341

This book explores the concept of 'cognitive injustice': the failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos shows why global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Santos argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalised knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. She contends that today it is imperative to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Epistemologies of the South outlines a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism, in which conviviality, solidarity and life triumph against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism.

A Different Kind of State?

A Different Kind of State?
Author: Gregory Albo
Publisher: Oxford University Press Canada
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1993
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The organization of the public sphere has become the central political problem of the 1990s. Neither the centralized bureaucracies of Eastern Europe nor the liberal/pluralist states of the West have been able to cope as their citizens demand more public services and greater democratic accountability. Increased competitiveness within a free market cannot satisfy these needs; if anything, it generates more victims dependent on government help. This book introduces the possibilities for democratic administration - reforming the system of government so as to enhance public participation, improve the design of programmes and the delivery of services, and to ensure a better working environment within the public sector.

David Harvey

David Harvey
Author: Noel Castree
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2022-12-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429643039

David Harvey is among the most influential Marxist thinkers of the last half century. This book offers a lucid and authoritative introduction to his work, with a structure designed to reflect the enduring topics and insights that serve to unify Harvey’s writings over a long period of time. Harvey’s writings have exerted huge influence within the social sciences and the humanities. In addition, his work now commands a global readership among Left political activists and those interested in current world affairs. Harvey’s central preoccupation is capitalism and the impacts of its growth-obsessed, contradictory dynamics. His name is synonymous with key analytical concepts like ‘the spatial fix’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This critical introduction to his thought is an essential companion for both new and more experienced readers. The critique of capitalism is one of the most important undertakings of our time, and Harvey’s work offers powerful tools to help us see why a ‘softer’ capitalism is insufficient and a post-capitalist future is necessary. This book is an important resource for scholars and graduate students in geography, politics and many other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.

Global Media Dialogues

Global Media Dialogues
Author: Lee Artz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2023-07-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000914178

This book, the first of its kind, brings together leading scholars from multiple perspectives in a serious dialogue about continuity and change in global media production and content. Looking at a wide swath of the world, these authors show the emergence of transnational collaboration in global television and film production across national borders that seem to transcend national cultures and identities. At the same time, traditional class analysis of such phenomena is reframed within the rise of myriad social movements for equality, democracy, human rights, and defense of the environment. What are the effects of media, local or global? Does the West continue to dominate or is cultural imperialism waning? With original chapters written by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in global media communication, cultural studies, and international political economy.