The Socialist Register

The Socialist Register, the intellectual lodestone of the international left since 1964, was founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville in London as an annual survey of movements and ideas in the particular historical context of the British New Left. Currently edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, with each annual volume constructed around a particular topical theme, it has consistently been committed to developing an independent relation to Marxism, free from sectarian and dogmatic positions.

From the 2008 edition - out now!

ISLAM, ISLAMISMS AND THE WEST
by Aijaz Ahmad

Identity politics in the widest sense is now quite the norm, and it comes to us in many guises, in the actual conduct of politics as well as in political theories and analyses, from the right, the left, the liberal centre. Culturalism, or the view that culture is the primary and determining instance of social existence, is a by-product of this identitarianism, and wherever politics and religion come to inflame each other, religion itself becomes synonymous with culture, and culture with religion, so that, for example, a constitutive difference between Islam and Christianity, as regards the scope for egalitar¬ian politics in their respective zones, can be posited from the left, while the most hard-nosed geopolitical prescriptions can come to us from the right, in the guise of a discourse on religion, culture and civilization. read more

THE CLASS STRUGGLES IN BRAZIL: THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MST
by JOÃO PEDRO STÉDILE

Atilio Boron (AB): The Socialist Register has long had a great appreciation of the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil and of your role as a leader of the MST. We feel it is very important for readers of the Register in particular to learn more about the MST strategies and tactics to resist neoliberalism’s encroachments, so we want to focus this interview on how the MST has re¬acted to the neoliberal policies carried out in Brazil by the Cardoso and Lula governments. But perhaps we should start by asking you for a panoramic overview of the evolution of class struggles in contemporary Brazil, in order to put this in an adequate historical perspective. João Pedro Stédile (JP): The MST and Via Campesina have developed a common understanding, a common reading, of the historical evolution of capitalism in Brazil.1 We had four centuries of what might be called the ‘agro-export model’, which was inaugurated by colonial capitalism. Industrial capitalism was not really implanted until 1930, and as Florestan Fernandes said, it was a model of dependent industrialization, because it was so highly dependent on foreign capital. It was not the result of local accumulation. It lasted until the early 1980s, and was quite successful insofar as in those fifty years the Brazilian economy grew at an annual average rate of 7.5 per cent. But by the early ’80s it fell into a crisis – part of the general crisis of that model. read more

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Selections from the archives...

The archives of Socialist Register are now avaiable online HERE.

GUERILLAS IN LATIN AMERICA

E.J. Hobsbawm, SR 1970

AMONG the questions which both Basil Davidson's Liberation of Guink and Victor Kiernan's article on peasant revolution raise, is the vexed one of Latin American guerilla warfare in the 1960s and the theories associated with the names of Rkgis Dkbray and Che Guevara. The subject is obscure and confused, and a few notes on it may be useful. They are formulated in a rather apodictic manner for the sake of brevity. One might call them : Twelve common errors about guerilla warfare in Latin--or more exactly South America, for I know too little about the central American scene to discuss it profitably.

Avishai Ehrlich, SR 1992

More than a year ago I was involved in a campaign in Israel against the impending war in the Gulf. Considering the mood of Israelis it was an impossible task. One of our difficulties was to convince people that the war might really happen. We felt that behind the pervasive dismissive attitude lay a great fear. The media played a double game: it reported repeatedly about the availability of various weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's arsenal, but it always allayed people's fears by playing down the danger, creating a nerve racking see-saw between alarming and calming. There was also the fear of Israeli retaliation, fuelled by some carefully placed nuclear remarks by government members. Some of us felt that below the serenity lay deep terror.

Hamza Alavi, SR 1971

The cyclonic fury with which the Pakistan Amy struck against the people of East Bengal exactly two years to the day on which the regime of President Ayub Khan had fallen and General Yahya Khan assumed power under Martial Law, marked a new stage in the deepening crisis of Pakistan. It is a crisis of national identity. It is also a crisis of the challenges which are being posed by the rising democratic forces in the country to the ruling bureaucratic-military oligarchy.

Ioan Davies and Shakuntala de Miranda, SR 1967

THE failure of Latin American labour to create effective radical (not to say revolutionary) movements has been commented on often enough,l but at the same time a certain euphoria has often accompanied discussions of their revolutionary potential. Now that the optimistic signs of the past ten years have been followed by reaction, with military coups replacing centre-left governments in all states except Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay, Mexico and Cuba, it is useful to take stock and examine both the theories advanced to account for the Latin American labour situation and certain basic facts relevant to them.

PETER GILL, SR 1996

For fifty years a central concern of the Left has been the development of 'national security states' defined in terms of their political domination by military and security elites and consequent repression of democratic rights.' More recently, however, the focus has shifted to the increase in surveillance and accompanying 'disciplinary' measures employed by both state and non-state organizations, variously described as the rise of' ‘surveillance' or 'maximum-security' societies. Surveillance practices have developed over centuries within specific institutions - the prison, the factory - but it is only during the last few decades that they have extended from sites of confinement and production to those of consumption.

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