Beyond Digital Capitalism: SR21 Launch and Tribute to Leo Panitch (3 May 1945 – 19 December 2020)

The North American launch of Socialist Register 21: Beyond Digital Capitalism, with presentations by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, Bryan Palmer, Joan Sangster, Stephen Maher, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Tanner Mirrlees, and Derek Hrynyshyn, and short tributes to the life and work of Leo Panitch (1945-2020).

0:00 Intro

0:20 Stephen Maher – Remembering Leo Panitch/Introducing the Launch

4:55 Leo Panitch, in debate at the Institute of Art and Ideas, 2019

8:35​ Leo Panitch. interviewed by Taxi Cab Artists, The World Transformed, 2019

10:37 Sam Gindin “Living Socialism Today: Remembering Leo Panitch”

19:50 Greg Albo – Remembering Leo Panitch/Introducing Socialist Register 21

29:05 Bryan Palmer – “The Time of Our Lives: Reflections on Work and Capitalist Temporality”

41:25 Joan Sangster – “The Surveillance of Service Labour”

56:08​ Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong – “Stay Early, State Late: Planning for Care in Old Age”

1:06:08 Tanner Mirrlees – “Socialists on Social Media Platforms”

1:10:35 Derek Hrynyshyn – “Imagining Platform Socialism”

1:30:00 Greg Albo – Synthesis 1:35:00 Stephen Maher – Closing Remarks

1:35:43 Leo Panitch, from “Still a Marxist After All”, Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ot4U…)

Outro 1:44:44

As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population and the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic.

Recorded online, 10 February 2021. Edited by Tanner Mirrlees.