Even at the height of Hollywood’s political consciousness, which ended in the notorious Cold War repression of the Hollywood Ten and many others in the industry, American movies usually rendered their politics in code. But there’s nothing coded or coy about Bulworth. Whether you like the movie or not, whether you like its humor or not, its politics is definitely in your face. And, as far as it goes, that politics is much more left than anything we’ve seen in the U.S. for a very long time. | more…
Socialist feminist theorizing is flourishing today. This collection is intended to shows its strengths and resources and convey a sense of it as an ongoing project. Not every contribution to that project bears the same theoretical label, but the writings collected here share a broad aim of understanding women’s subordination in a way which integrates class and gender—as well as aspects of women’s identity such as race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—with the aim of liberating women. | more…
I’ve probably read the Communist Manifesto a dozen times, more or less. But it never struck me as old hat. It was always worth reading again. So I thought that in preparation for this panel, I should read it once more, this time with special attention to insights and formulations that seem particularly relevant to the problems we face in the world as the twenty-first century approaches | more…
Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view. | more…
“Today we are in a position to return to Althusser’s work in a new way, and make a new assessment of it,” writes Fredric Jameson in his Introduction to this new edition of Louis Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy. | more…
István Mészáros’s bold new study analyzes the historical choices facing us at the outset of the new millennium. Drawing on the theoretical arguments of his monumental and widely-acclaimed Beyond Capital, Mészáros shows that the economic boom of the 1990s was built not only on the foundation of new, digital technologies but also on a new social and ethical basis. In the global quest for profit, capitalism has abandoned its claims to serve a larger historical cause. Even in the wealthiest capitalist economies, unemployment has become structural and conditions of life have become more onerous for most of the population. | more…
The fall of the Soviet empire was greeted not only as the funeral of socialism. It was also described as marking the final dead end for all revolutionary roads. The practitioners of revolution—Robespierre and Cromwell—as well as its theoreticians—Luxemburg and Marx—were lumped together in retrospective condemnation. Logically, such an offensive against the very idea of radical transformation should have been coupled with praise for gradualism, for Fabian tactics, for progressive change. To use two cliches at once, the “col- lapse of communism” could have been combined with the “triumph of social democracy.” Actually, nothing of the kind happened. On the contrary, the disintegration of the neo-stalinist system has been followed by a major crisis of social-democracy, taken here in its very narrow current definition-the reformist management of capitalist society. | more…
This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights and Black Power and anti-war movements. | more…
In Beyond Capital, the internationally esteemed Marxist philosopher István Mész´ros provides a major contribution to the task of reassessing the socialist alternative and the conditions for its realization in the light of twentieth-century developments and disappointments. Mészáros brings original Marxist thinking to bear on the most fundamental issue facing the left: how to move theoretically Beyond Capital—beyond the project that Marx began and which he articulated under a specific form of commodity capitalism, as well as beyond the power of capital itself. | more…
Women and the Politics of Class engages many crucial contemporary feminist issues—abortion, reproductive technology, comparable worth, the impoverishment of women, the crisis in care-giving, and the shredding of the social safety net through welfare reform and budget cuts. These problems, Brenner argues, must be set in the political and economic context of a state and society dominated by the imperatives of capital accumulation. Drawing on historical explorations of the labor movement and working-class politics, Brenner provides a fresh materialist approach to one of the most important issues of feminist theory today: the intersection of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. | more…
Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx’s neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. | more…
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. | more…
