Given the extent and extremity of violence today, even in the absence of world war, and two decades after the end of actually-existing socialism, it is hard not feel that we are living in another age of barbarism. The scale and pervasiveness of violence today calls urgently for serious analysis—from “the war on terror” and counter-insurgencies, from terror and counter-terror, suicide bombings and torture, civil wars and anarchy, entailing human tragedies on a scale comparable to those of the two world wars, not to mention urban gang warfare, or the persistence of chronic violence against women. That the nirvana of global capitalism finds millions of people once again just “wishing (a) not to be killed, (b) for a good warm coat” (as Stendhal is said to have put it in a different era) is, when fully contemplated, appalling.

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 analyze the nature and roots of paradigmatic cases and types of violence today 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.