REVIEWS 289 Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living, edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo. Socialist Register, 2020. New York/London/Toronto: Monthly Re- view Press/Merlin Press/Fernwood Publishing, 2019. $68.99; paper, $29.00. Pp. xii, 294. This is the 56th volume of the Socialist Register, an annual that doubles as an edited book and a periodical, and has come to reflect a wide range of views on the (mostly) academic, (mostly) Western, and (mostly) Anglophone left. This latest edition has 18 contributors and 14 chapters, following a short “Preface” by the Editors. The chapters are all substantial, with each contain- ing its own references in the form of endnotes. Topics range from general issues in socialist theory and philosophy — well represented by the lead essay, “Class Politics, Socialist Policies, Capitalist Constraints,” by Stephen Maher, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch — to a variety of narrower themes: “migrant spaces,” “educational dystopia,” digital capitalism, China’s labor regime, the affordable housing crisis, the gig economy, social reproduction,“communism in the suburbs,” and others. (I apologize for not being able to list, let alone discuss, each of the contributions in this short review.) Many of the chapters provide detailed accounts of the present-day move- ments and organizations active in the areas they cover, and this provides an excellent index — or “register” — of the vast depth of the active left. I come away with a sense that, despite the pessimism that infects us and the seemingly all-powerful reach of “TINA” (“there is no alternative”) and the hegemony of capitalist power, the left is stronger than it thinks it is. This is an important contribution of the book, and of its predecessors in the Socialist Register series. Can anything be said about a general left position or philosophy that emerges from the book? Is there a “Socialist Register School,” either in existence or in formation? These are tricky questions; I would not want to attribute ideas to the individual authors apart from their own words. Clues are provided, however, in both the title and the subtitle of the book. The title: “Beyond Market Dystopia.” This raises the question of the relation of the market form of social relations to capitalism — a term that is employed by the editors and most contributors, but is in fact used in a variety of ways. What the reader will not find here is a systematic study of the relation of “the market” — in classical Marxist terms, the commodity form, or the law of value — to the core exploitative nature of the capitalist system. In fact, and given the vast empirical sweep of the book’s concerns, one might ask: Are we indeed confronting a system, whose central reality must be the organizing principle for thinking about all of the manifestations of economic, social and ecological crisis? The authors of the lead essay raise the need for democratic planning and development of planning institutions beyond the “firm-based struggle G4912.indd 289 2/16/2021 3:32:59 PM 290 SCIENCE & SOCIETY for democracy” (14). This, however, segues into a recounting of concepts on the current political horizon, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ “Green New Deal” in the USA, and the “green industrial revolution” of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the UK. The book does not address the nature of capital as such, or develop a systematic view of the capitalist ruling class; more attention to this level of general theory might suggest eventual but necessary unification of progressive struggles into a working-class political movement that would have to assume a revolutionary role. The subtitle, in turn, is: “New Ways of Living.” Here again we find a weakness, one that is very common throughout the Anglophone left in the post-Soviet decades: a deep hesitation to embrace system-wide democratic plan- ning as the cornerstone of a mature socialist economy, however that corner- stone may be surrounded in any given historical period by layer upon layer of alternatives: cooperatives, small-scale markets (especially in agriculture, crafts and services), traditional public or state-sector production, capitalist and precapitalist survivals, and so on. In her chapter “What Should Socialism Mean in the 21st Century?,” the final and (in a sense) capstone essay in the book, Nancy Fraser proposes an “expanded view” of capitalism (285ff), beyond the “overly narrow” “tra- ditional Marxian” view based solely on the “hidden abode” of production. Fraser’s expanded view includes unwaged labor, “wealth expropriated from subject peoples,” the role of “free gifts” of inputs from non-human nature, and the existence of a “‘non-economic’” fund of public goods that makes private accumulation possible. All this leads to a similarly expanded view of socialism: “The project of rethinking socialism” — we always seem to need to be “rethinking” — “for the 21st century” — a century that clearly stands strongly apart from its hapless predecessors — is “far too big for a single per- son or even a single group of persons . . .” (290). We must, Fraser argues, drop the rigid boundaries between “spheres” (“the economy,” social reproduction, non-human nature); drop the notion that the economy has priority over the others; and “democratize the very process of setting and revising institutional boundaries” (291). All of this leads to a call to “democratize control over social surplus,” and to eliminate “markets” (that reified concept again) at the “top” (where social surplus is allocated) and the “bottom” (the basic needs of the population). “But what about the in-between? . . . I imagine the in-between as a space for experimentation with a mix of different possibilities . . .” (294). And so the matter is left, in a more-or-less indeterminate state. This reviewer suggests instead a structured approach: a systemic–socialist model of iterative democratic planning, which can only be the outcome of a long period of experimental development combining multiple institutional forms in ways that indeed reflect a given country’s historical and cultural specifics. That old “20th-century” (and, to be sure, “19th-century”) notion G4912.indd 290 2/16/2021 3:32:59 PM REVIEWS 291 of socialism — a qualitatively distinct structure of social relations that pro- gressively establishes its superiority to capitalism while drawing on the rich variety of institutional forms that evolve both within and in resistance to capitalism — still seems to hold its own against the fashionable eclecticism of proposals for a “fresh start” in the century presently unfolding. A “register” of socialist thinking and practice in the present must surely reflect the desire for a “new beginning,” against the background of “the demise of the Communist institutional tradition amidst the impasse of the Social Democratic one” (Mayer, Gindin and Panitch, 2) — and this volume in the Socialist Register series certainly does that. However, the voices among us might also be registered that see much to be valued in, and much to be recuperated from, those earlier periods of working-class struggle and achieve- ment. This is not a mere matter of accurate historical scholarship: the earlier experiences of the working-class movement are the necessary foundation for the new offensive that we anticipate and hope to build. The venerable Marxist slogan applies: Preserve and create. David Laibman c/o Science & Society 95 Montague Street, Room 1454 Brooklyn, NY 11201 dlaibman@scienceandsociety.com G4912.indd 291 2/16/2021 3:32:59 PM
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