Will the present crisis issue in a new phase of accumulation, or a growthless ‘stationary state’? Gopal Balakrishnan charts epochal trends in world capitalism, and their imbrication with the debt-fuelled imbalances of the long downturn.

Can emancipatory social science provide a framework for rethinking paths forward from capitalism? Erik Olin Wright on the navigational tools that might orient a route towards a non-statist socialism; and on the necessary preconditions for transformative theory. Throughout most of the twentieth century.

War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process