Socialist Register 2012 Preface

Four years after the collapse of 2007-08, it is fair to say that crisis has become the new normal for hundreds of millions of people. Not only have jobs been hard to find, they increasingly fail to provide the income and security that workers had come to expect from employment during the postwar era. Added to the huge numbers of the unemployed is the ‘precariat’, the growing segment of the working population in jobs that are temporary, low-wage, and without benefits or protection. Conditions that were once associated with the informal sector in the developing world are now becoming truly global. Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk in the media that we are in the midst of an economic recovery. There is something to this. Banks are flush with cash, profits in manufacturing are on the upswing, and no one can fail to notice that the stock market has bounced back. But while profits are flowing again, the traditional signs of a new cycle of accumulation are hard to find. It isn’t entirely surprising, then, that every little bit of bad news sends the markets into a temporary panic – as if everyone is waiting for the proverbial axe to fall. This, the 48th volume of the Register, was conceived as a companion to last year’s volume on ‘The Crisis This Time’. We observed there that economic crises can be turning points which present political opportunities, and pointed to the fact that, so far, it was the ruling classes that were taking advantage of the political opening, not the Left. This volume deepens that analysis in range a ways, not only in terms of broader regional coverage that extends from Latin America to the Middle East to China to Europe, but also by probing the place of the city in capitalist crises, and the new accumulation strategies that feed on both the public sector crisis and the climate crisis, while still portending a new age of austerity. It also takes better measure of the state of the Left in the crisis, not least by a way of a symposium of three essays on what the Left’s response should be to the Eurozone crisis. The next volume will take up the challenge of developing socialist strategies for the 21st century.