Coming to Terms with Nature
(edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
with Barbara Harriss-White, Elmar Altvater and Greg Albo)

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What is in the 2007 Volume:
Preface (below)
Brenda Longfellow - Weather Report: Images from the Environmental Crisis
Neil Smith - Nature as Accumulation Strategy

THE TRUTH ABOUT CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY
ATILIO A. BORON
(a downloadable file will be available soon)

Not long ago the celebration of capitalist democracies, as if they constituted the crowning achievement of every democratic aspiration, found legions of adepts in Latin America, where the phrase was pronounced with a solemnity usually reserved for the greater achievements of mankind. But now that more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the beginnings of the process of re-democratization in Latin America, the time seems appropriate to look at its shortcomings and unfulfilled promises. Do capitalist democracies deserve the respect so widely accorded them? In the following pages we intend to explore what democracy means, and then, on the basis of some reflections on the limits of democratization in a capitalist society, go on to examine the performance of ‘actually existing’ democracies in Latin America, looking behind external appearances to see their narrow scope and limits.

THE CYNICAL STATE
COLIN LEYS
‘Mendacity is a system that we live in’.
(Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

Governments have always lied. They naturally deny it, even long after it is abundantly clear that they have lied, trailing multiple red herrings, dismissing inconvenient evidence, implying that there is counter-evidence they are not free to produce. When a lie can no longer be credibly denied it is justified, usually by an appeal to the national interest. Governments of modern representative democracies are no different, even if they are more liable than dictators to be exposed. Half-truths and outright lies are routinely told. Facts are routinely concealed. Files are unaccountably lost. Tapes are mysteriously erased. Democratic checks and balances are rarely effective and the public’s collective memory is short.

Telling the Truth

(Edited by Leo Panitch & Colin Leys)

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What is in the 2006 Volume

Preface (below)

Colin Leys - The cynical state
Atilio A. Boron - The truth about capitalist democracy
Doug Henwood - The ‘business community’
Frances Fox Piven & Barbara Ehrenreich - The truth about welfare reform
Loic Wacquant - The ‘scholarly myths’ of the new law and order doxa

THE ART OF RENT: GLOBALIZATION, MONOPOLY AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF CULTURE

David Harvey

That culture has become a commodity of some sort is undeniable. Yet there is also a widespread belief that there is something so special about certain cultural products and events (be they in the arts, theatre, music, cinema, architecture or more broadly in localized ways of life, heritage, collective memories and affective communities) as to set them apart from ordinary commodities like shirts and shoes. While the boundary between the two sorts of commodities is highly porous (perhaps increasingly so) there are still grounds for maintaining an analytic separation. It may be, of course, that we distinguish cultural artefacts and events because we cannot bear to think of them as anything other than authentically different, existing on some higher plane of human creativity and meaning than that located in the factories of mass production and consumption. But even when we strip away all residues of wishful thinking (often backed by powerful ideologies) we are still left with something very special about those products designated as ‘cultural’. How, then, can the commodity status of so many of these phenomena be reconciled with their special character?

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.

PREFACE

We decided to devote this, the 39th volume of the Socialist Register, to the theme of ‘fighting identities’ in mid-2000, a year before September 11, 2001. The volume is thus not about terrorism, or the ‘war on terrorism’, but it is about the conflicts and contradictions of which the attacks on New York and Washington DC were epiphanic. It is surely clear that the dangerous possibilities that flow from those terrible events can only be averted if the underlying relationships that gave rise to them are fore-grounded and understood.

The ‘fighting identities’ we are concerned with reflect two closely linked global realities. One is the dual role of the American state as both the manager of a world capitalist order (a role it alone can play) and as the embodiment of the American national interest -- and an all too often chauvinist identity. The other reality is the way particularist and exclusivist identities are so often a response to something universal, i.e. the pain felt by victims of oppression and exploitation everywhere. Even reactionary fundamentalist identities may be seen as distorted and perverse responses of this kind, in the vacuum created by the defeat of rational and progressive alternatives.

Preface

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 analysing 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 focussed 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.

2002: A World of Contradictions
(Edited by Leo Panitch & Colin Leys)
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This issue of the Socialist Register 2002 contains timely new analyses of the intensifying contradictions global capitalism is creating, and which market-driven governments are unable to resolve, such as the obsession with growth and its consequences; the unsustainable dominance of financial capital; the limits and possibilities of anti-capitalist protest movements; globalised media and the erosion of democracy; cities, disability, poverty, global crime; and, illness and madness - the psychological price. A crucial guide for those concerned to build a world beyond the constraints of markets and the profit motive.

2003: Fighting Identities.
Race, Religion and Ethno-Nationalism
(Edited by Leo Panitch & Colin Leys)
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* Why do racial, religious, ethnic and national identities have such purchase on the lives of so many people, and why are they still at the center of so many major conflicts at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
* What form is racism taking amidst the inequalities, refugees and mass migrations of today's global capitalism?
* How does the American state - as both the manager of the world capitalist order and as the embodiment of an all-too-often chauvinist national identity - fit into the picture of 'Fighting Identities'?