Daniel Singer Millennium Essay 2009

Annual prize for best essay on a selected topic

By Muriel Strand

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation annually recognizes an original essay that helps further socialist ideas in the tradition of Daniel Singer. Singer, a writer and journalist who passed away in 2000, was for many years the European correspondent for the US magazine The Nation. Singer’s last book was Whose Millennium? (1999), a polemic against market fundamentalism and the rule of capital.

Daniel Singer’s ideas can summarized as follows:

First:

By radically transforming the production process, capitalism created the potential for meeting the basic needs of humankind. However, the capitalist system is unable to fulfill that potential because the satisfaction of human needs conflicts with the relentless search for maximum profits by a privileged propertied elite.

Second:

Against a society based on the market and regulated by the profit motive, socialists pose a planned economy based on the socialization and collective ownership of production, distribution and communication.

Third:

Only the working people and their allies can themselves bring about this transformation, beginning with their assumption of state power and their active participation at the head of this process. The transformation of society is only possible on the basis of full democratic participation of the working people in the political, economic, and social arenas, as well as the spread of this transformation throughout the world.

Fourth:

The discredited and now-defunct regimes of "actually existing socialism" were mere caricatures of socialism, the result of the absence of democracy, underdevelopment, and the failure of socialism to spread to the advanced capitalist countries.

Fifth:

Because society will be able to meet basic human needs and gradually reduce the time required to be devoted to work, socialism will lead to the flowering of human potential.

These principles will guide the judges in weighing prize entries. The 2009 prize will be $2500 and will be awarded for the best essay, of no more than 5000 words, exploring the question: "The global economic crisis has revealed capitalism’s inability to meet the needs of the vast majority of the world’s population. Given the experience of the last century, how can a case for socialism be made?"

Essays may be submitted in English, Spanish or French and will be judged by an international panel of distinguished scholars and activists. The winner will be announced in December 2009.

Submissions must be received by July 31, 2009. Essays can be mailed to:

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation

P.O. Box 2371, El Cerrito, CA 94530

Essays can also be e-mailed.

Links to the 2008 winners and other information can also be found on the website:

www.danielsinger.org/.