Socialist Register – serie

As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it refashioned both our ways of working and our ways of consuming, as well as our ways of communicating. And as the Covid-19 pandemic coursed through the world’s population, adding tens of billions of dollars to the profits of high-tech corporations, its impact revealed grotesque class and racial inequalities and the gross lack of public investment, planning and preparation which lay behind the scandalously slow and inadequate responses of so many states.

As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it refashioned both our ways of working and our ways of consuming, as well as our ways of communicating. And as the Covid-19 pandemic coursed through the world’s population, adding tens of billions of dollars to the profits of high-tech corporations, its impact revealed grotesque class and racial inequalities and the gross lack of public investment, planning and preparation which lay behind the scandalously slow and inadequate responses of so many states.

The current matrix of capitalaccumulation is shifting, but what is coming?New terms abound – plutocratic plunder, political capitalism, techno-feudalism,techno-futurism, etc. Some see a new ‘habitation economy’ of post-industrialismin which the provisioning of non-standardized services replaces commodityproduction. Others foresee an unstable interregnum of increasinglyauthoritarian states fusing with far-right movements. The common imagery is ofa capitalist class barricaded off in securitized enclaves from the disruptivestorms of climate change and the anger of dislocated and hyper-stressed workingclasses. It is important to untangle thesecontending themes and identify key social trends, contradictions, andlongstanding as well as emerging social conflicts in this ‘late-stagecapitalism’.  In what ways does the return of Donald Trump to the Americanpresidency represent this  new phase of capitalism? How are these changesbeing registered in state economic apparatuses, in institutional powers, and innew economic and political practices? How is the uneven insertion of statesinto the US empire and world market being reproduced and challenged in terms ofgeopolitical and military primacy and through  trade wars redrawingeconomic zones? And where is the left scratching out new political spacesamidst the economic ruins? These are the many questions the essays  inthis volume take on.