Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living

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.

Contents:

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

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