New Polarizations and Old Contradictions: The Crisis of Centrism

Socialist Register 2022

Greg Albo, Colin Leys

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781583679395
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Takes the buzzword "polarization" as its point of departure to describe the vast, and ever-growing economic inequality worldwide

"Polarization" is a word commonly used by everyone from mainstream journalists to the person in the street, whatever their political stripe. But this widely recognized phenomenon deserves scrutiny. The 58th volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge, asking such questions as: Are the current tendencies towards polarization new, and if so, what is their significance? What underlying contradictions—between race, class, income, gender, and geopolitics—do the latest polarization trends expose? And to what extent can "centrist" politics continue to hold and contain these internal contradictions? This volume's original essays examine the escalating polarization of national, racial, generational, and other identities, all in the context of growing economic inequality, new forms of regional and urban antagonism, "vaccine nationalism," and the shifting parameters of rivalry between the "Great Powers."

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• A portrait of contemporary neoliberalism: The rise and economic consequences of the one per cent
• At the summit of global capitalism: Accommodation, rivalry, or confrontation between the US and China
• Market polarization means political polarization: Liberal democracy’s eroding centre
• The rattle on the tail of the rattlesnake: Trump and the danger of right-wing populism in the US
• What is wrong with social media? An anti-capitalist critique
• The evolution of ‘race’ and racial justice under neoliberalism
• The crisis of US labour, past and present
• American workers and the left after Trump: Polarized options
• Pandemic polarizations and the contradictions of Indian capitalism
• Epidemiological neoliberalism in South Africa
• Loft offices and factory towns: Social sources of political polarization in Russia
• Fictitious polarizations: The far right, corporate power, and social struggles in Brazil
• Identity crisis: The politics of false concreteness
• The double consciousness of capital
• Finding a way forward: Lessons from the Corbyn project in the UK