Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living

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.

Contents

• Stephen Maher, Sam Gindin & Leo Panitch: Class politics, socialist policies, capitalist constraints
• Barbara Harriss-White: Making the world a better place: restitution and restoration
• Amy Bartholomew & Hilary Wainwright: Beyond the ‘barbed-wire labyrinth’: migrant spaces of radical democracy
• Katharyne Mitchell & Key MacFarlane:  Beyond the educational dystopia: new ways of learning through remembering
• Birgit Mahnkopf: The future of work in the era of ‘digital capitalism’
• Michelle Chen: A new world of workers: confronting the gig economy
• Yu Chunsen: All workers are precarious: the ‘dangerous class’ in China’s labour regime
• Ursula Huws: Social reproduction in twenty-first century capitalism
• Alyssa Battistoni:  Ways of making a living: revaluing the work of social and ecological reproduction
• Nancy Holmstrom: For a sustainable future: the centrality of public goods
• Karl Beitel: The affordable housing crisis: its capitalist roots and the socialist alternative
• Roger Keil: Communism in the suburbs?
• Owen Hatherley: The retroactive utopia of the socialist city
• Nancy Fraser: What should socialism mean in the twenty-first century?

Leo Panitch and Greg Albo are professors in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto.