Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class

For fifty years, the Socialist Register has brought together some of the world’s leading radical thinkers to address the most pressing issues of the day. Independent, searching, and erudite analysis is the hallmark of the Socialist Register, and this fiftieth-anniversary issue is no exception. Contributors to Registering Class examine some of our assumptions about class in the light of the global economic crisis and the many forms of resistance it has produced. Furthermore, they address how capitalist classes are reorganizing to respond to the economic turmoil and how the structure and composition of working classes in the twenty-first century are also changing. This volume captures the essence of the Socialist Register project and is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the shifting realities of class and class struggle today.

Contents:

Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, & Vivek Chibber: Preface

Arun Gupta: The Walmart Working Class

Bryan Palmer: Reconsiderations of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianization

Vivek Chibber: Capitalism, Class and Universalism: Escaping the Cul-de-sac of Postcolonial Theory

Ursula Huws: The Underpinnings of Class in the Digital Age: Living, Labour and Value

Colin Leys: The British Ruling Class

Claude Serfati: The New Configuration of the Capitalist Class

William Carroll: Whither the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Bastiaan van Apeldoorn: The European Capitalist Class and the Crisis of its Hegemonic Project

Virginia Fontes & Ana Garcia: Brazil’s New Imperial Capitalism

Alfredo Saad-Filho & Lecio Morais: Mass Protests: Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Malaise?

Ian MacDonald: Beyond the Labour of Sisyphus: Unions and the City

Andrew Murray: Left Unity or Class Unity? Working-class Politics in Britain

Madeleine Davis: Rethinking Class: The Lineage of the Socialist Register

Leo Panitch: Registering Class and Politics: Fifty Years of the Socialist Register

Leo Panitch and Greg Albo are Professors in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto; Vivek Chibber is Professor of Sociology at New York University.