In October 2022 President Joe Biden launched the new National Security Strategy, which warned that the world was at an “inflection point” in which the “post-Cold War era is definitively over, and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next”. US leadership would be needed more than ever, the document declared, to define "the future of the international order" by marshalling its unparalleled economic, military and diplomatic resources to confront America’s geopolitical rivals.

While it is clearly premature to speak of the end of the liberal economic order, let alone the development of a multipolar international system, it is not too early to take stock of how these momentous changes, even if not spelling the end of globalization, might alter its historical trajectory, or point toward a new global geometry. And, from there to assess potential vulnerabilities and resistances from socialist movements with their historical demands for a democratic and egalitarian world order.

The 59th annual volume of the Socialist Register offers a careful political assessment of the organization and practices of the modern corporation that underpin the parameters of power in capitalist societies.

Original essays address the mythologies of 'stakeholder' governance beloved by liberal reformers, the renewal of financial capital since the great recession, the continued centrality of the oil and extractive sectors to the world market, and the global logistics coordinating the circulation of capital. The volume also looks at new forms of worker organizing to match the new ways value is being produced and circulated, notably in key firms like Amazon and in central zones of world capitalism in China, the US, and Brazil.

A special section honours and appraises the contribution of Leo Panitch to socialist analysis and strategy today.

The 58th annual volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge of exploring how the new polarizations relate to the contradictions that underlie them and how far ‘centrist’ politics can continue to contain them. Original essays examine the multiplication of antagonistic national, racial, generational, and other identities in the context of growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and the shifting parameters of great power rivalry. Where, how, and by what means can the left move forward?

As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population and the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic.

Connecting with and going beyond classical socialist themes, this volume of the Socialist Register combines analysis of the severe contradictions of neoliberal capitalism with plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented directions for alternative ways of living. Fourteen original essays locate such utopian visions and struggles in the dystopian present.

Since the Great Financial Crisis swept across the world in 2008, there have been few certainties regarding the trajectory of global capitalism, let alone the politics taking hold in individual states. This has now given way to palpable confusion regarding what sense to make of this world in a political conjuncture marked by Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ presidency of the United States, on the one hand, and, on the other, Xi Jinping’s ambitious agenda in consolidating his position as ‘core leader’ at the top of the Chinese state. Topics taken up in this collection include:

• Is a major redrawing of the map of global capitalism underway?
• Is an unwinding of globalization in train, or will it continue, but with closure to the mobility of labour?
• Is there a legitimacy crisis for neoliberalism even while neoliberal practices continue to form state policy?
• Are we witnessing an authoritarian mutation of liberal democracy in the 21st century?
• Should the strategic issues today be posed in terms of ‘socialism versus barbarism redux’?