Beyond market dystopia : new ways of living

This 56th volume of the Socialist Register is motivated by wanting to This look beyond-while still taking into account the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism that have so far dominated political and economic life in the twenty-first century. These contradictions amount to something of a register of the dislocations and distortions of capitalist markets over the last several decades: the gross income and wealth inequalities of class and nation; the massive global credit expansion in volume and complexity underpinning economic growth; the intricate interconnections between financial markets and global value chains; the ever more limited capacities of states to control economic crises; the breaching of greenhouse gas emission targets under the relentless acceleration of the circulation and accumulation of capital still thoroughly dependent upon fossil fuel energy supplies; and the massive void that now exists between liberal democratic politics deploying policies of social inclusion and the material sources of social polarisation and class divisions. In the Preface to last year's volume, A World Turned Upside Down?, we suggested that these developments 'increasingly raise the stark question of whether we should once again be thinking of the options facing the world in terms of "socialism versus barbarism"... In a world overturning old certainties, soberly expressing the prospects for a way forward for the left requires setting out new left agendas for confronting the corporate powers of capital, and indentifying new hopeful organizational dynamics that could lead to state transformations.

To look beyond the restricted horizons disciplining the range of acceptable political options today requires overcoming the current limits of vision as well that would allow for other possible political choices. In the past as practice that wou yean, we have seen a multiplication of writings on 'alternatives post-capitalium but most remain cast in terms of still working wing to most often accommodating and actually reflect rather than transcend the coming capitalism. They too often contradictions entailed in, for instance, the promise of abundance from automation but aho a severe intensification and degradation of work, or in the imperative to address ecological limits in tranformation of the socio-economic system but a seeming inability to reverse the waste economy or climate change; or the sickening over housing of the few alongside a desperate need to address homelessness, social housing and the new global slums. All this recalls the warning with which Colin Leys, our former co-editor of the Socialist Register, persuasively closed his essential text, Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest (2001):

A strong non-market domain, providing various core services, as the common sense of a civilised and democratic society may sound far o fetched in an era of market-driven politics. But it is debatable whether anoit is really as far-fetched - as hard to imagine or as absurd - as the world towards which market-driven politics is tending, in which more and gmore of the workforce is absorbed in ever-intensified competition for Tever higher output and consumption, while the collective services for which democracy depends gradually decay