REWORKING THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIALIST PROGNOSIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY: MID-RANGE CONTINGENCY AND A COUNTER-HEGEMONIC MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT
REWORKING THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIALIST PROGNOSIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY: MID-RANGE CONTINGENCY AND A COUNTER-HEGEMONIC MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT

Summary/Abstract: The original scientific socialist prognosis provides a powerful point of departure for re-thinking socialism in the 21st century. However, from its 19th century vantage-point, it falls short of predicting capitalism’s final stages and decisively underestimates the contingency of social change. This essay reworks the classic prognosis to address these flaws. It focuses, first, on examining how the neoliberal model of development’s global unleashing of capital has generated unevenly colliding crisis trajectories, centrally including a growing surplus population and ecological destruction. Second, socialism is recast as a contingent counter-hegemonic project to transform neoliberal global capitalism and its crisis trajectory. Discussion of this project is focused on outlining a mid-range counter-hegemonic blueprint or model of development.

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