Violence Today : Actually Existing Barbarism

Is this a new age of barbarism? The scale and pervasiveness of violence today calls urgently for serious analysis of:

the 'war on terror' and counter-insurgencies
terror and counter-terror
suicide bombing and torture
urban gang warfare and
the persistence of chronic violence against women.

Such violence entails human tragedies on a scale comparable to those of the two world wars. The fact that millions of people are living in fear of violent death is an appalling indictment of the nirvana of global capitalism that now prevails.

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 analyse the nature and roots of paradigmatic cases of violence 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.