PREFACE

In the last two or three years people everywhere have become more aware of, anxious about, and hostile to the scale and complexity of contemporary capitalism -- its scope, its reach into daily life, and the nature and speed of the changes that are now driven by global market forces. The costs involved for the vast majority in the global ‘south’, and for growing numbers in the ‘north’, who are victims of the drastic aggravation of injustice and inequality that globalization is producing, have become more and more clear. Also becoming clearer are the problems the neoliberal order itself faces: yet another decade beginning with the threat of an economic recession, a classic crisis of overproduction in the ‘leading-edge’ global telecommunications sector, increasing evidence of financial instability in ‘key emerging markets’, and growing nervousness from Wall Street to Tokyo as the stock market heads downwards. Capitalism is also now beset by highly visible problems in both services and accumulation resulting from the privatization of the public sphere in such areas as electricity supply (California), rail transportation (UK), water supply (Canada), etc.

The increasingly powerful ‘anti-corporate’ movements, spearheaded by young people, are both an expression of and a reaction to these developments. The counterpart to the widespread disillusion with electoral politics, as all political parties both embrace and surrender to global market forces (witness the astonishing collapse of voter participation in the British general election in June 2001), is a huge range of extra-party activism. This occurs around dozens of major issues, from the environment to racism, which are increasingly understood to be insoluble without -- at a minimum -- a collective challenge to, and assertion of democratic control over, capital: so that more and more activists now define themselves as, precisely, ‘anti-capitalist’.

The Socialist Register has consistently focussed on the processes driving globalization, as well as its costs -- from our much-cited 1994 volume, Between Globalism and Nationalism, to our 1999 volume, Global Capitalism versus Democracy. In the present volume we have sought to take this a step further. The task of resubordinating the market forces that now control the world depends not only on understanding them, but on understanding them in their contradictoriness: seeing how they depend on structural relationships that produce problems and vulnerabilities, incoherence and conflict. The energy and commitment that brought so many tens of thousands of people to Seattle and Québec City -- not to mention the thousands of movements evolving in every city and many rural areas of the world, from Soweto to Chiapas -- need to be backed by careful analysis of the way that capitalism’s contradictions are now manifested on a global terrain.

This task is the primary focus of the 38th annual volume of the Register now in your hands. Our concept of contradiction has not been mechanical or theological. We were not looking for ‘primary contradictions’, let alone the primary contradiction. Still less do we mean to suggest that there are contradictions that will bring down capitalism of their own accord. On the other hand, we have been concerned with systemic contradictions as opposed to just tensions, conflicts, mere paradoxes, ‘ironies’ and the like; i.e., our focus is on structural relations inherent in capitalism which at the same time constitute or give rise to obstacles to its smooth or even continued expansion, and which offer opportunities for effective socialist practice.

The continued importance of Marx’s fundamental concept for understanding the world today was ironically illustrated for us, as we were writing this Preface, by the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to grapple with the consequences of its turn to capitalism. This came in the shape of a front-page article in the New York Times of June 3, 2001 about a Central Committee Report entitled ‘Studies of Contradictions Among the People Under New Conditions’. It is not clear whether the Central Committee’s understanding of the concept of contradiction has progressed significantly from the time when the Party still offered advice to the people, based on the maxims of Mao, on such subjects as ‘Solving the Principal Contradictions of Onions’. In contrast with all misuse and abuse of Marx’s fundamental concept, Ellen Wood’s concluding essay to this volume (from which we have purloined the above gem) lucidly sums up the theoretical strength and explanatory power of the concept when it is employed as Marx meant it. The essays that precede hers use contradiction in this way to: anatomize the central dynamics of neoliberalism; analyze the way contradictions manifest themselves in such diverse fields as culture, communications and crime; dissect the strategies and structures used by the managers of global ‘governance’ to try to contain conflict and cope with contradiction; reveal how those who suffer, materially and psychologically, under contemporary capitalism, themselves try to cope with and negotiate their deprivation, alienation and marginalization; and, not least, probe the possibilities -- and the limits -- of the new movements of protest and resistance.

Among the contributors, Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and a columnist for The Globe and Mail and The Guardian; and André Drainville teaches political science at Laval University in Québec City. Gérard Duménil and Dominque Lévy are researchers in Paris at MODEM-CNRS and CEPREMAP-CNRS. Elmar Altvater is Professor of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin; and David Harvey has recently taken up a professorship in geography at the Graduate School of the City University of New York; Graham Murdock and Peter Golding both teach media studies at Loughborough University in England. Reg Whitaker and Guglielmo Carchedi have recently retired from teaching political science and economics, respectively, at York University, Toronto and the University of Amsterdam. Susanne Soederberg teaches political science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton; and Paul Cammack, a contributing editor to the Register, teaches in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester in England. Marta Russell, a Los Angeles-based journalist, is the author of Beyond Ramps, and Ravi Malhotra, an Ottawa-based disability rights activist, is currently pursuing graduate studies at the Harvard Law School. Michael Kidron is an independent writer working in London; and David Miller, a member of the Media Research Institute at Stirling University in Scotland, wrote his essay while a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley. Pablo González Casanova is head of the Instituto de Investigaciones Social at UNAM in Mexico City, and Ellen Wood, York University professor emeritus of political science, currently lives and writes in London.

We want to thank all our contributors, while reminding the reader that neither they nor the editors necessarily agree with everything in the volume. We are also grateful to Martijn Konings for his highly efficient work since taking over as editorial assistant from Marsha Niemeijer, who continues to give invaluable assistance in looking after our website (www.yorku.ca/socreg). We continue to be indebted to Tony Zurbrugg and Adrian Howe at the Merlin Press for their creative and committed work in producing the Register.

In conclusion, we are happy to report the return of John Saul as a contributing editor of the Register; but we are very sad to have to note the passing of a long-term comrade and contributor to the Register, Daniel Singer. No one showed greater dedication to keeping the spirit of revolution alive through the dark decade of the 1990s.

June 2001

L.P

C.L.