Socialist Register 2004 Preface

Abstract

This, the 40th volume of the Socialist Register, was originally planned in the spring of 2001, well before September 11, 2001, let alone the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It seemed to us that an increasingly serious limitation of contemporary socialist thought was its lack of conceptual tools capable of analyzing the nature of imperialism today, rather than recycling theories developed in a much earlier era. Our aim was to produce a volume that would help make socialist theory and analysis realistic, and socialist activism focused and coherent, in the opening years of a new century marked by US-led globalization and a new and more overt form of US imperialism.