Renewing Socialism : Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination

Contents: Preface.  Introduction. 1. Rethinking revolution and reform in capitalist democracies. 2. Observations on communisms demise. 3. Liberal democracy and social democracy. 4. The legacy of the Communist Manifesto in a global capitalism. 5. Globalisation and left strategies. 6. Bringing class back in: reflections on strategy for labour. 7. Transcending pessimism: rekindling socialist imagination. 8. Renewing socialism: an interview with Leo Panitch.

Intellectually and politically engaging, renewing Socialism examines the failures of socialism in the twentieth century and explores the nature of global capitalism, offering a vision of a reinvigorated socialism to ambitiously counter the current debilitating pessimism.

While democracy and equality remain the goals of socialism, new conditions require imaginative new strategies. Panitch stresses the need for refounding, reorganizing and redemocratizing labour movements and calls for a change of focus from the accumulation of capital to the accumulation of capacities: political, economic, social, environmental and human.