If there’s one thing to be said for our otherwise desolate historical juncture, it’s that the question of how we should organise society appears to be back in play. A climate catastrophe of unknowable dimensions is taking shape on the horizon. Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to obliterate vast sections of the employment economy. The internet, for all its benefits, has led to an epistemological crisis of unprecedented scale, facilitating the international rise of demagogues and reactionary populists. For a generation of Europeans and Americans, the constitutive elements of a decent life – stable employment, affordable rent, the prospect of one day owning a home – are receding as rapidly as the ice caps. Capitalism’s failures and iniquities, in other words, have rarely been so palpable, and it seems more reasonable than ever to ask how this social arrangement might be overcome, and with what it might be replaced.
Two new books that explore those questions in very different ways are Clear Bright Future, by the NS contributing writer and former Channel 4 News economics editor Paul Mason, and This Life by Martin Hägglund, a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale. Both books proceed from an understanding of capitalism as an unjust system that limits rather than maximises human freedom, and both propose versions of democratic socialism – as distinct from social democracy – that arise from deep, critical and lively engagements with the writing of Karl Marx. In terms of style, pacing and basic intellectual approach, the similarities end more or less there.
Content from our partners
