The Socialist Register 2001 looks at class realities and the lives of workers in the new century. Twenty original and wide ranging essays lay the ground for a much needed revival of class analysis, exploring such themes as the making of a 'cybertariat', the spread of unstable, casual and contingent employment, the changes women have wrought in thw working classes, the relationship between workers 'north' and 'south', the persistence of 'peasantries', the growing significance of migrant workers, and new strategies for change which can transcend the limits of old forms of class organization and politics. There is also a focus on issues for workers in India, Southern Africa, East Asia, Russia and Brazil.
Socialist renewal remains, in our minds, inextricably linked with working class emancipation.
But the authors of this literature have too often accepted capitalist markets as the necessary organizing principle of modern economic and political life, or been too speculative and too minimally reformist in propounding ways in which capitalist markets might be managed, through taxes on financial speculation or international labour standards, for example. Such a truncation of political horizons was, perhaps, inevitable after the ignominious collapse of communism and social democracy's embrace of 'third wayism', but seems to us profoundly misguided. Against these intellectual and political currents it seemed to us important to devote the present volume to the state of the global proletariat at the beginning of the new millennium, since any serious reconstruction of the socialist movement must begin by confronting the realignment of class structures and the impasse of working class politics that have taken place over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Class analysis as a mode of intellectual discourse, and social class as the pivotal axis of political mobilization, have both suffered marginalization, although certainly not complete collapse, in the face of the casualization of work, trade union decline and the fracturing of socialist political formations, not to mention the impact of neoliberal and postmodernist ideas. This has undoubtedly been the case in the advanced capitalist countries, and it is hard to avoid drawing similar conclusions for other parts of the world as well.