The 2007 Daniel Singer Millennium Prize

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize ($5,000) will be awarded for an original
essay of not more than 5,000 words which explores the question: “What major
breakthrough in socialist theory is necessary in order to move the practical
struggle forward?”

Essays may be submitted in English, Spanish and French and will be judged by
an international panel of distinguished scholars and activists. The winner
will be announced in December 2007.

Submissions must be received no later than August 31, 2007. Essays can be
mailed to:

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation
P.O. Box 2371, El Cerrito, CA 94530 USA
www.danielsinger.org
Essays can also be emailed to: ffried7159@alamedanet.net

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation annually recognizes an
original essay which 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 U.S. magazine The Nation.
Singer was the author of Whose Millennium (1999), a polemic against market
fundamentalism and the rule of capital, The Road to Gdansk (1981), about the
Polish workers’ struggle for real socialism, and Prelude to Revolution
(1970), about the May-June 1968 revolt in France.

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, and 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.