Socialist Register 2000: Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias

This volume of the Socialist Register points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this volume reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination aimed at creating saner ways of living and more rational ways of organizing society. Topics covered include work and its structure, democracy and the state, and technology and its social uses. Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias makes the case that a socialist vision of the the future remains both possible and necessary.

Contents

Preface

• Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
• Minimum Utopia: Ten Theses, Norman Geras
• Utopia and its Opposites, Terry Eagleton
• On the Necessity of Conceiving the Utopian in a Feminist Fashion, Frigga Haug
• Socialized Markets, Not Market Socialism, Diane Elson
• The Chimera of the Third Way, Alan Zuege
• Other Pleasures: The Attractions of Post-Consumerism, Kate Soper
• Utopian Families, Johanna Brenner
• Outbreaks of Democracy, Ricardo Blaug
• Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left Judith, Adler Hellman
• The Centrality of Agriculture: History, Ecology and Feasible Socialism, Colin Duncan
• Democratise or Perish: The Health Sciences as a Path for Social Change Julian, Tudor Hart
• The Dystopia of Our Times: Genetic Technology and Other Afflictions, Varda Burstyn
• Warrior Nightmares: Reactionary Populism at the Millennium, Carl Boggs
• The Real Meaning of the War Over Kosovo, Peter Gowan

Leo Panitch is professor of political science at York University in Toronto. Colin Leys was for many years professor of political science at Queen’s University in Canada.