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One current slogan is 'Another world is possible', but Marxists have written relatively little about what this new world might look like. Marx himself shied away from this topic as leading to utopias delivered by top-down saviors, whereas his vision of socialism would be built by the victorious working class in line with its needs and desires. This article, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It discusses objections people have to seeing socialism as possible, rooting this discussion not in a utopian vision but rather in thinking through the problems and struggles the working class will face when and if it succeeds in becoming the revolutionary-democratic rulers of the world. I think readers will agree that this is a vision of continued struggle – but also of a much better world to live in.

A review essay on a book by Alexander Saxton, Religion and the Human Prospect (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).

Game theory is a type of rational decisionmaking model. As such, it assumes well-defined actors who know they are in conflict, know their strategic options, and have stable evaluations of possible outcomes. Furthermore, it is ahistorical. These assumptions severely limit the theory, particularly in its application to labor conflict. Evidence is presented that labor conflict is an historically-shaped process in which sides are not always clearly defined, actors are often unaware that they are in a conflict, and in which many strategic options emerge and evaluations change in the course of struggle. Game theory assumptions are more likely to be met during periods of stable prosperity in which neither rank and file workers nor "outside" employers intervene in negotiations. When the assumptions are not met, resulting conflict types can be categorized by whether strategies and payoffs are known or emergent, and by the number of sides that are organized.