Essays which aim to create a world of agency and justice How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists such as Michelle Chin, Nancy Fraser, Arun Gupta, and Jeremy Brecher connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living.

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

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.

How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists such as Michelle Chen, Nancy Fraser, and Roger Keil connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living. Crafted with purposeful hope in an age of despair, each essay in this volume aims to create a world of agency and justice.

This edited volume focuses on the cultural production of knowledge in the academy as mediated or presented through film and television. This focus invites scrutiny of how the academy itself is viewed in popular culture from The Chair to Terry Pratchett's ‘Unseen University’ and Doctor Who's Time Lord Academy among others. Spanning a number of genres and key film and television series, the volume is also inherently interdisciplinary with perspectives from History, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, STEM, and more. This collection brings together leading experts in different disciplines and from different national backgrounds. It emphasises that even at a point of mass, global participation in higher education, the academy is still largely mediated by popular culture and understood through the tropes perpetuated via a multimedia landscape.

This book critically analyzes the current historical conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism with an eye to its emergent alternatives. Can democracy and capitalism thrive together? Is socialism a viable and a desirable alternative? What are the forms of emancipatory action and critical thought that can effectively chart a way forward? Focusing on nine “critical debates” it provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the tensions, contradictions, and latent emancipatory potential of contemporary global capitalism. The specific debates are as follows: capitalism’s relationship with democracy; privatization and governance of the commons; the financialization of capitalism; technology and the future of work; varieties of neoliberal capitalism; cosmopolitanism, international development, and human rights; feminist theory and social solidarity; sustainability and climate change; and theories of capitalist crisis.

This volume addresses the ‘impoverishment of state theory’ over the last decades and insists on the continued salience of class analysis to the study of capitalist states – neoliberal restructuring, the political architecture of imperialism, and the potentials for democratic transformation.

This book investigates the relation between Durkheim’s sociology, Critical Theory, and the philosophy of social sciences. The book is organized in four sections: confronting Durkheim and other critical traditions; inquiring his social and critical ontology; interrogating the relation between social practices and justice; and discussing his relevance in contemporary politics and political theory. An international group of philosophers, sociologists, and critical theorists contribute to show Durkheim’s reflection as an important complement—or an alternative—to the Hegelian-Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of social critique. In this way, the book intends to inaugurate a new reflection on social critique at the intersection between philosophy and sociological theory.

How Wall Street concocted a more volatile and dangerous capitalism The Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan’s vast empire to the rise of finance behemoth BlackRock. Contrary to what is taken for common sense by figures from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, Maher and Aquanno insist that financialization did not imply the hollowing out of the “real” economy or the retreat of the state. Rather, it served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, profits, and the exploitation of labor—with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.

How to build a movement to confront climate change The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.