The challenge and burden of historical time : socialism in the twenty-first century / István Mészáros ; foreword by John Bellamy Foster.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mészáros, István, 1930-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Capitalism.

Imperialism.

Socialism.

Physical Description:

479 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Monthly Review Press, [2008]

Contents:

Introduction

The tyranny of capital's time imperative

The time of the individuals and the time of humanity

Human beings reduced to "time's carcase"

The loss of historical time consciousness

Free time and emancipation

The uncontrollability and destructiveness of globalizing capital

The extraction of surplus-labor in capital's "organic system"

Unreformability, uncontrollability and destructiveness

The system's threefold internal fracture

Capital's failure to create its global state formation

Chronic insufficiency of "extraneous help" by the state

Marxism, the capital system and social revolution

The global view of capital

Historical limits of the labour theory of value

Ongoing proletarianization and its wishful denials

The necessary renewal of Marxian conceptions

The objective possibility of socialism?

Political and social revolution

Downward equalization of the differential rate of exploitation

Socialism or barbarism: from the "American century" to the crossroads

Foreword

Capital : the living contradiction

The potentially deadliest phase of imperialism

Historical challenges facing the socialist movement

Conclusion

Postscript: militarism and the coming wars

Unemployment and "flexible casualization"

The globalization of unemployment

The myth of "flexibility" and the reality of precarization

From the tyranny of "necessary labor-time to emancipation through "disposable time"

Economic theory and politics-beyond capital

Alternative economic approaches

The need for comprehensive planning

Capital's hierarchical command structure

From predictions based on "economic laws working behind the backs of the individuals" to anticipations of a controllable future

Objective preconditions for the creation of non-deterministic economic theory

Socialist accountancy and emancipatory politics

The challenge of sustainable development and the culture of substantive equality

Farewell to "liberty-fraternity-equality"

The failure of "modernization and development"

Structural domination and the culture of substantive inequality

Education-beyond capital

Capital's incorrigible logic and its impact on education

Remedies cannot be just formal; they must be essential

"Learning is our very life, from youth to old age"

Education as the "positive transcendence of labor's self-alienation"

Socialism in the twenty-first century

Irreversibility: the imperative of a sustainable alternative order

Participation: the progressive transfer of decision making to the associated producers

Substantive equality: the absolute condition of sustainability

Planning: the necessity to overcome capital's abuse of time

Qualitative growth in utilization: The only viable economy

The national and the international: Their dialectical complementarity in our time

Alternative to parliamentarism: unifying the material reproductive and the political sphere

Education: the ongoing development of socialist consciousness

Why socialism? Historical time and the actuality of radical change

Conflicting determinations of time

Why capitalist globalization cannot work?

The structural crisis of politics

New challenges on our horizon and the urgency of time

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [439]-467) and index.

ISBN:

9781583671696

1583671692

9781583671702

1583671706

OCLC:

182529038