2000: Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias
(Leo Panitch & Colin Leys, eds.)

What is Utopia?
An economy that provides everyone's needs?
A society which empowers all people?
A healthy, peaceful and supportive environment?

The contributors to this SOCIALIST REGISTER are not looking for miraculous solutions. What is presented here are their contributions to a movement which believes that better worlds are both necessary and possible.

Contents (available below):

Preface
Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination
by Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

‘American imperialism… has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic.’

Harold Innis, 19481

The American empire is no longer concealed. In March 1999, the cover of the New York Times Magazine displayed a giant clenched fist painted in the stars and stripes of the US flag above the words: ‘What The World Needs Now: For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is’. Thus was featured Thomas Friedman’s ‘Manifesto for a Fast World’, which urged the United States to embrace its role as enforcer of the capitalist global order: ‘…the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist…. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’ Four years later, in January 2003, when there was no longer any point in pretending the fist was hidden, the Magazine featured an essay by Michael Ignatieff entitled ‘The Burden’: ‘…[W]hat word but “empire” describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? …Being an imperial power… means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest.’[2] The words, ‘The American Empire: (Get Used To It)’, took up the whole cover of the Magazine.Of course, the American state’s geopolitical strategists had already taken this tack. Among those closest to the Democratic Party wing of the state, Zbigniew Brzezinski did not mince words in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, asserting that ‘the three great imperatives of geo-political strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence amongst the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.’[3] In the same year the Republican intellectuals who eventually would write the Bush White House’s National Security Strategy founded the Project for a New American Century, with the goal of making imperial statecraft the explicit guiding principle of American policy.[4]Most of what passes more generally for serious analysis in justifying the use of the term ‘empire’ in relation to the US today is really just an analogy, implicit or explicit, with imperial Rome. On the face of it, this is by no means absurd since, as an excellent recent book on the Roman Empire says, ‘Romanization’ could indeed be

2001: Working Classes: Global Realities
(Edited by Leo Panitch & Colin Leys, with Greg Albo & David Coates)
Order this issue

Noam Chomsky - 'I know the Register very well, and have found it extremely stimulating, often invaluable.'

Socialist Register 1999
1999: Global Capitalism vs. Democracy

Leo Panitch & Colin Leys, eds.

One of the hallmarks of The Socialist Register has been its critique of the illusions and contradictions that have attended capitalism's triumphal global march over the last two decades. This new volume, completed amidst general recognition that 'globalisation' has entered an era of global crisis, takes the Register's distinctive analysis further. The essays here not only examine the contradictions of both neo-liberalism and 'progressive competitiveness' amidst the changing contours of global capitalism at the end of the century, but demonstrate that no democracy worth the name can any longer be conceived except in terms of a fundamental break with it.

1998: The Communist Manifesto Now

Leo Panitch & Colin Leys, eds.

The 150th anniversary of the Cornrnunist Manifesto provides the occasion for a powerful set of essays that draw on the Manifesto's legacy to analyse working class responses today to the growing exhaustion of neo­liberalism and that contribute to setting a left agenda for the new millenium. The volume also features brilliant essays on the making of the Manifesto, plus a reprint of the Manifesto and a reproachful letter to Marx from a socialist­feminist.

Contents
(Essays available below)

Preface

Dear Dr.Marx: A Letter from a Socialist Feminist

Socialist Register 1997: Ruthless Criticism of all that Exists


Leo Panitch ed.


"But if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just a little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."-Marx, 1843

Contents
(Essays available below)

Preface

A World Market of Opportunities? Capitalist Obstacles and Left Economic Policy

Socialist Register 1996: Are There Alternatives?


Leo Panitch ed.

Contents
(Essays available below)

Preface

The British Labour Party's Transition from Socialist to Capitalism
by Colin Leys

Developing Resistance and Resisting 'Development': Reflections from the South African Struggle
by Patrick Bond & Mzwanele Mayekiso

The Use and Abuse of Japan as a Progressive Model
by Paul Burkett & Martin Hart-Landsberg

A Kinder Road to Hell? Labor and the Politics of Progressive Competitiveness in Australia
by John Wiseman

In Defence of Capital Controls
by Jim Crotty & Gerald Epstein

Socialist Register 1995: Why Not Capitalism?


Leo Panitch ed.

Contents
(Essays available below)

Preface

Ralph Miliband, Socialist Intellectual, 1924-1994
by Leo Panitch

A Chronology of the New Left and Its Successors, Or: Who's Old-Fashioned Now?
by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Saying No to Capitalism at the Millenium
by George Ross

Once More Moving On: Social Movements, Political Representation and the Left
by Hilary Wainwright

Globalizing Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics
by Frances Fox Piven

Europe In Search of a Future
by Daniel Singer

The Yeltsin Regime

Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism


Ralph Miliband & Leo Panitch, eds.

Contents
(Essays available below)

Preface

Thirty Years of The Socialist Register
by Ralph Miliband

Edward Thompson, The Communist Party and 1956
by John Saville

Richard Rorty and the Righteous Among the Nations
by Norman Geras

Globalisation and the State
by Leo Panitch

Capitalism and the Nation State in the Dog Days of the Twentieth Century
by Manfred Bienefeld

Globalisation and Stagnation
by Arthur MacEwan

'Competitive Austerity' and the Impasse of Capitalist Employment Policy

Socialist Register 1993: Real Problems, False Solutions


Ralph Miliband & Leo Panitch eds.

Contents
(Essays available below)

The Nature of Environment: Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change
by David Harvey

Old Themes for New Times: Basildon Revisited
by Christopher Norris

Illusions of Freedom: The Regressive Implications of Post-Modernism
by Marsha A. Hewitt

False Promises: Anti-Pornography Feminism
by Lynne Segal

The Rights Stuff
by John Griffith

Why Nationalism?
by Michael Löwy

Rethinking the Frelimo State
by John S. Saul

After Perestroika
by K. S. Karol