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 artefact — 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: The restructuring of class relations in key emerging zones of capitalism, including India, South Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil and Chile; The capitalist transformation of classes in China under the ruling Communist Party; European trade union solidarity in the eurozone crisis; Labour and the left in the USA; The crisis of the 'new middle class' in financialized capitalism; Hollywood's anxieties for the American Dream; The Olympic ruling class yesterday and today; Rethinking class analysis through the prism of labour migration and social reproduction; The importance of class theory, class discourse and class politics for the 21st century.