Colin Leys
- Affiliation: Queen’s
Colin Leys is an emeritus professor at Queen’s University Canada and an honorary professor at Goldsmiths College London. His most recent books are The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Market-Driven Politics, and Total Capitalism. He has been studying and writing about the NHS since the late 1990s.
Books by Colin Leys
The Socialist Register 2010
Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Health care rights are fought over between commercial forces that seek to make health into a commodity (for those who can pay), and popular forces that seek to reduce gross inequalities and try to make (or keep) health as a public service. These essays analyze the global health industry: the corporations that sell pharmaceuticals and insurance and push to expand the consumption of goods and services, making health care everywhere a field of capital accumulation. (more information)
The Socialist Register 2009
Violence Today Actually Existing Barbarism
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Violence in every possible form dominates current headlines and people’s fears. Understanding it has never been more urgently needed. This volume offers an insight into contemporary violence that the mainstream media — and even mainstream cinema — shrinks from providing on state violence, on violence in inner cities and prisons, and on the violence committed almost everywhere by men against women. In this book, consideration is given to the sources of imperialism and globalized… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2008
Global Flashpoints Reactions to Imperialism
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Socialist Register 2008 takes a look at the forces at work in opposition to the American Empire and analyzes their nature—are they reactionary or progressive? Further, what are the prospects for the Left, in the Islamic world, in Latin America and in the capitalist north? The contributors seek to identify the distinguishing features of neoliberalism today and point out its emerging contradictions. (more information)
The Socialist Register 2007
Coming toTerms with Nature
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Can capitalism come to terms with the environment? Can market forces and technology overcome the ‘limits to growth’ and yet preserve the biosphere? What is the nature of oil politics today? Can capitalism do without nuclear power, or make it safe? What is the significance of the impasse over the Kyoto protocol? How far has socialist thought developed to help us understand the environmental dilemma? Has it even begun to provide answers to it? Does socialist internationalism imply accelerated… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2006
Telling the Truth
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
How do people acquire knowledge and understanding of the world they are in? Who has access to the resources and maps facilitating research and debate? How is power mobilised to shape ideas and ideologies? Socialist Register 2006 considers contemporary debate, policy-making, research, education, and scientific practice generally as it relates to the role of the state in intellectual life, the press and the media. It investigates the management of scientific publications, the Internet, the… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2005
The Empire Reloaded
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
In the Socialist Register 2005, the contributors examine, through a multitude of lenses, how the American Empire works. They take a comprehensive look at who holds the balance of power and how this affects stability. What is most interesting is the way these essays look at the impact that the new American Empire has had and is having throughout the world. The topics discussed include how the shift in global political relations has influenced gender relations, the media and popular culture. (more information)
The Socialist Register 2004
The New Imperial Challenge
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
The essays in this fortieth volume of The Socialist Register analyze the unique nature of the new U.S. empire and challenge the left to develop a better theory of imperialism and its relation to globalized capitalism. Other essays examine the limits and contradictions of “Americanization” as a dimension of U.S. global power; the facts and myths surrounding U.S. strategic interests in Iraq and the “war on terror”; ecological imperialism, and the significance of international… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2003
Fighting Identities–Race, Religion and Ethno-Nationalism
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
September the 11th has forced many challenges upon the Western world. The recent attempts to impose preventative measures disguise the true involvement governments have in these conflicts and overshadow any real understanding of what this means to other parts of the world. Fighting Identities tackles the language and how groups are represented. Some of the questions the contributors set out to answer include: What are the roots of “fundamentalism”? Why have ethnic and religious conflict… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2002
A World of Contradictions
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
The contributors, from many countries, discuss the contradictions that exist world wide and the resulting human suffering and misery that emerges. Contrary to the idyllic picture being painted by the promoters of globalization, we learn that workers are without work, that cultural, political, gender and racial conflicts abound, and that contradictions between countries and regions lead to an ever widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots’”as health care and… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2001
Working Classes, Global Realities
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Managers want new workers who can be used casually-people scared and disciplined by lacking a secure job. Restricting workers’ skills and depriving workers of opportunities to learn and to organize makes for a more dependent and docile work force. Unions are not welcome. Blairs, Clintons and Schroeders may believe that their policies are working, and that opportunities are growing for ‘everyone’ but class exploitation and oppression remain facts of life in the new century. Socialist… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2000
Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
When mainstream commentators talk about the future, they tend to predict dire doomsday scenarios or spin wild techno-fantasies. In spite of their radically hi-tech edge, these futuristic scenarios usually assume that current social structures will persist. Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this book reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination, one aimed at saner ways of living… (more information)
The Socialist Register 1998
The Communist Manifesto Now
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
The 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto provides the occasion for a powerful set of essays that draw on the Manifesto’s legacy to analyse working class responses today to the growing exhaustion of neo-liberalism and that contribute to setting a left agenda for the new millenium. The volume also features brilliant essays on the making of the Manifesto, plus a reprint of the Manifesto and a reproachful letter to Marx from a socialist-feminist. (more information)
The Globalisation Decade
A Critical Reader
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Over the past decade the contributors to The Socialist Register have been widely recognised as providing the Left’s most distinctive investigations on the contradictions of globalisation, the internationalisation of the state, progressive competitiveness, the new imperialism and mobilisations against it. Providing political and economic analyses, this anthology looks at the cultural contradictions of globalisation. It includes a set of readings on the role of states—especially that… (more information)
Socialist Register 2010
Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Health care rights are fought over between commercial forces that seek to make health into a commodity (for those who can pay), and popular forces that seek to reduce gross inequalities and try to make (or keep) health as a public service. These essays analyze the global health industry: the corporations that sell pharmaceuticals and insurance and push to expand the consumption of goods and services, making health care everywhere a field of capital accumulation. (more information)
Plot Against the NHS, The
Colin Leys, Stewart Player
Revealing the British coalition government’s plans, this examination demonstrates how a small “policy community” inside and outside the department of health have schemed for 10 years to replace the National Health Service (NHS) with a U.S.-style health care market without informing parliament or the public. While ex-ministers, officials, and the like profit from lucrative positions in private health companies, the population must cope with the increasing health care costs… (more information)