Statement of Principles

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.