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.
Articles
Socialist Register 2021 Preface
Leo Panitch, Greg Albo
Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitalization, Restructuring, and Mobilization in the Covid Crisis
Ursula Huws
The Time of our Lives: Reflections on Work and Capitalist Temporality
Bryan D. Palmer
Interpretation Machines: Contradictions of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in 21st-Century Capitalism
Larry Lohmann
The Political Economy of Datafication and Work: A New Digital Taylorism?
Matthew Cole, Hugo Radice, Charles Umney
The Big Tech Monopolies and the State
Grace Blakeley
Socialists on Social Media Platforms: Communicating within and Against Digital Capitalism
Tanner Mirrlees
Imagining Platform Socialism
Derek Hrynyshyn
Working-Class Cinema in the Age of Digital Capitalism
Massimiliano Mollona
The Surveillance of Service Labour: Conditions and Possibilities of Resistance
Joan Sangster
From Neoliberal Fashion to New Ways of Clothing
Jerónimo Montero Bressán
Shifting Gears: Labour Strategies for Low-Carbon Public Transit Mobility
Sean Sweeney, John Treat
Community Restaurants: Decommodifying Food as Socialist Strategy
Benjamin Selwyn
Start Early, Stay Late: Planning for Care in Old Age
Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong
Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine
Pritha Chandra, Pratyush Chandra
Life After the Pandemic: From Production for Profit to Provision for Need
Christoph Hermann
Democratic Socialist Planning: Back to the Future
Robin Hahnel
Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detours?
Greg Albo
LeftWord, New Delhi, 2020 Language: English 320 pages Price INR 650
