Socioecology

Thoroughly Modern Marx
Marx foresaw many factors that would give rise to today´s global economic crisis. Contradictions, inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production,and financial speculation.
Era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. Hecalled the “most revolutionary party” played in human history by the bourgeoisie. Marx put it in “The Communist Manifesto”, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instrumentsof production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society… in one word, it creates a world after its own image”.
He understood “the need for a constantlyexpanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”. He saw through the political illusions of those who would argue such crises could be permanently preventedthrough incremental reform.
Marx wanted to see the old order overthrown in his lifetime. He would see how modern developments in finance, such as securitization and derivatives, have allowed markets tospread the risks of global economic integration.
Global financial system contributed to overall economic growth in recent decades. Produced a series of inevitable financial bubbles. That bubble hadsuch a profound impact around the globe precisely because of its centrality to sustaining both U.S. consumer demand and international financial markets.
Marx would have no illusions that economiccatastrophe would itself bring about change, he knew very capitalism, breeds and fosters social isolation. He thought that unions and workers’ parties were a step forward.
In the United States, somerecent attention getting proposals have been derided as “socialist”, but only appear to be radical because the go beyond what the left of the Democratic Party is now prepared to advocate.
One of the...