Launching the Socialist Register 2015: Transforming Classes

This 51st annual Socialist Register completes the investigation of class formation and class strategies on a global scale begun with last year’s volume. Deploying an understanding of class as an historical social process – rather than an abstract sociological category or statistical artifact – the essays here investigate the concrete ways that working classes are being made and remade in the struggles against neoliberalism, austerity and authoritarian governments. Taking stock of the changing balance of class forces as well as old and new forms of workplace, household and political organization, they uncover the class strategies being debated and adapted in different zones of the world.

Chaired by Leo Panitch. Panel discussion with contributors:

• David McNally and Sue Ferguson: Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social Reproduction of a Global Working Class
• Adolph Reed: The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States
• John McCullough: The Middle Class in Hollywood: Anxieties of the American Dream
• Greg Albo co-editor of Socialist Register

Recorded in Toronto, 15 January 2015.