American Socialism Lacks Vision and Plan: Post-Marxist Social Science Can Help

Like Boomers worldwide, I came of age in the turbulent Sixties. I was compelled by the hypocrisy of mainstream American politics and culture to join the struggles against the war in Viet Nam and for civil rights and women's liberation.

In 1973, after a stint at the Air Force Academy, graduation from Georgetown University (economics) and a go at law school, I "dropped out" to launch a non-profit, community-based, worker-managed, grocery cooperative (Stone Soup) in Washington, DC. After President Nixon labeled me and other anti-war protestors "communists," I studied Marxism and, eventually, took an active part uniting leftwing activists nationwide into the Communist Workers Party that survived into the 1980s. Through the Party and various other organizations, I worked for most of two decades as a community organizer. In the 1990s, I earned a master's degree in education (George Washington University) and taught high school. In the last phase of my career, I was a communications professional and health writer on the union side of the construction industry.

Though our party-building experience had exposed fallacies in socialist theory and practice, everything else in life confirmed my early conclusion that revolutionary struggle is necessary to hold corporate capitalism to social and ecological account and build a better world. To this end, I maintained a constant interest in learning and summarizing what was lacking in Marxism by investigating the realities of contemporary, real-world social change.

In this I found that my appreciation for the inevitability of global revolution was confirmed by many insights of modern social science – particularly the work of the Alvin and Heidi Toffler (The Third Wave), anthropologists Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings) and Helen Fisher (Anatomy of Love), partners Neil Howe and William Strauss (The Fourth Turning) and socioecologist Sing Chew (Recurring Dark Ages). In recent years, I've focused on the economic and financial insight of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

Beyond theory, intensifying hardship and struggle worldwide compelled continued allegiance to revolutionary aspirations. After 9/11 and the global financial crisis of 2008, it was clear to me that the world's people and its corporate elite are now at a decisive crossroads.

Wishing not just to understand but, more, to help change our world, I launched GlobalTalk, a blog for global revolutionaries, in 2004. In 2...