Socialist Register 2022: New Polarizations and Old Contradictions: The Crisis of Centrism

The live event for this volume of the Socialist Register, MR Conversations: Pandemic Polarizations, featured Walden Bello, Jayati Ghosh, and Vishwas Satgar. You can find the recording here and you can find short excerpts here.

“Polarization” is a word commonly used by everyone from mainstream journalists to the person in the street, whatever their political stripe. But this widely recognized phenomenon deserves scrutiny. The 58th volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge, asking such questions as: Are the current tendencies towards polarization new, and if so, what is their significance? What underlying contradictions—between race, class, income, gender, and geopolitics—do the latest polarization trends expose? And to what extent can “centrist” politics continue to hold and contain these internal contradictions? This volume’s original essays examine the escalating polarization of national, racial, generational, and other identities, all in the context of growing economic inequality, new forms of regional and urban antagonism, “vaccine nationalism,” and the shifting parameters of rivalry between the “Great Powers.”

With contributions from:

Walden Bello, Bill Fletcher Jr., Virginia Fontes, Samir Gandesha, Ana Garcia, Jayati Ghosh, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Sam Gindin, David Harvey, Rejane Hoeveler, Ilya Matveev, Simon Mohun, Adolph Reed Jr. and Touré F. Reed, Vishwas Satgar, James Schneider, Ingar Solty, Samir Sonti, Hilary Wainwright, and Oleg Zhuravlev.

Greg Albo is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. Colin Leys is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.