Socialist Register 2009, Violence Today

This powerful and provocative new collection explores the roots of violence — military, terrorist, criminal, and casual — in contemporary society. The opening essay offers an overview of the scale and variety of contemporary violence while also taking up once again the question of socialism versus barbarism. Other essays analyze the nature and roots of paradigmatic cases and types of violence today around the world. And several of the concluding essays deal, from various different standpoints, with the still important question of whether violence has any place in socialist strategy in the context of today’s actually-existing barbarism.