Socialist Register 2015: Transforming Classes

This 51st annual Socialist Register completes the investigation of class formation and class strategies on a global scale begun with last year’s volume. Deploying an understanding of class as an historical social process—rather than an abstract sociological category or statistical artifact—the essays here investigate the concrete ways that working classes are being made and remade in the struggles against neoliberalism, austerity, and authoritarian governments. Taking stock of the changing balance of class forces as well as old and new forms of workplace, household and political organization, they uncover the class strategies being debated and adapted in different zones of the world:

• The restructuring of class relations in key emerging zones of capitalism, including India, South Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil and Chile;
• The capitalist transformation of classes in China under the ruling Communist Party;
• European trade union solidarity in the eurozone crisis;
• Labour and the left in the USA;
• The crisis of the ‘new middle class’ in financialized capitalism;
• Hollywood’s anxieties for the American Dream;
• The Olympic ruling class yesterday and today;
• Rethinking class analysis through the prism of labour migration and social reproduction;
• The importance of class theory, class discourse and class politics for the 21st century.

Click here to read the preface to Transforming Classes, by editors Leo Panitch and Gregory Albo.

Table of Contents

• Leo Panitch & Gregory Albo, “Preface”
• Susan Ferguson & David McNally, “Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race And The Social Reproduction Of A Global Working Class”
• Lin Chun, “The Language Of Class In China”
• Achin Vanaik, “India’s Landmark Election”
• Supriya Roy Chowdhury, “Bringing Class Back In: Informality In Bangalore”
• Samantha Ashman & Nicolas Pons-Vignon, “NUMSA, The Working Class and Socialist Politics In South Africa”
• Fuat Ercan & Şebnem Oğuz, “From Gezi Resistance To Soma Massacre: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle In Turkey”
• Joel Beinin & Marie Duboc, “The Egyptian Workers’ Movement Before and After The 2011 Popular Uprising”
• Andreas Bieler & Roland Erne, “Transnational Solidarity? The European Working Class In The Eurozone Crisis”
• Ricardo Antunes, “The New Morphology Of The Working Class In Contemporary Brazil”
• Timothy David Clark, “Class Transformations In Chile’s Capitalist Revolution”
• George Wright, “The Olympic Ruling Class”
• John McCullough, “The Middle Class In Hollywood”
• Randy Martin, “What Has Become Of The Professional Managerial Class?”
• Hugo Radice, “Class Theory And Class Politics Today”
• Kim Moody & Charles Post, “The Politics Of US Labor: Paralysis And Possibilities”
• Jane McAlevey, “Forging New Class Solidarities: Organizing Hospital Workers”
• Steve Williams & Rishi Awatramani, “New Working Class Organization And The Social Movement Left”
• Mark Dudzic & Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Crisis Of Labor And The Left In The United States”

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