VIOLENCE TODAY: Actually existing barbarism
edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys

Order this issue

What is in the 2009 Volume:

Preface - Colin Leys and Leo Panitch

Henry Bernstein, Colin Leys, Leo Panitch - Reflections on violence today

Vivek Chibber - American militarism and the US political establishment: the real lessons of the invasion of Iraq

Philip Green - On-screen barbarism: violence in US visual culture

The American invasion of Iraq has been a catastrophe of epic proportions
for the Iraqi population – apart from the massive loss of Iraqi lives, the

THE CASE FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY
Fossil energy underwrites and saturates capitalist social organisation. The energetics of capitalist production have involved ever more aggregate matter and energy which results in ever more physical waste and dissipated, useless forms of energy, social defences against the effects of which require ever increasing costs. While the building of an ecological capitalism is being imagined, the recreation of any kind of ‘re-humanised nature’ under capitalism cannot be achieved without an increase in entropy. The physical engine of capital relentlessly destroys carbon and methane sinks releasing greenhouse gases. It wreaks havoc with ecosystems, biodiversity and human wellbeing. ‘An enormous chemical experiment’ said Adair Turner of Merrill Lynch in 2003. By early 2006, some expert climate change modellers had estimated that the global CO2 concentration level above which dangerous climate change is unstoppable had been reached. Development as a process of catch-up is now well understood to be a thermodynamic impossibility which would destroy human life. Indeed the ubiquitous and persistent petty commodity forms of capitalism associated with poverty make sense in part as one means by which capital polices its ecological limits : poor people tread with small ecological footprints.

What can be said about a political culture in search of ‘infinite prosperity’ that is dependent on a perpetual enemy who must always be fought but can never be vanquished?

This, the 45th volume of the Socialist Register, takes up a question that has preoccupied socialists for over a century – the likelihood that if capitalism is allowed to persist it will be characterised by increasing violence. When Rosa Luxemburg in 1916 quoted Engels’ famous statement that ‘Capitalist society faces a dilemma: either an advance to socialism, or a reversion to barbarism’, she asked: ‘What does a “reversion to barbarism” mean at the present stage of European civilisation?