Steve Clark

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 2011, I published Digging Out: Global Crisis and the Search for a New Social Contract (with my brother Charles). In May 2015, adopting the pen name V.I. Lenin, I updated and refocused Marxist theory for 21st century class struggle in What Is To Be Done? In 2022, I published American Socialism Lacks Vision: Post-Marxist Social Science Can Help.

Bottom line, I’ve always practiced that old Boomer mantra: Change the World!

Sooner, now, than later, as our consciousness and interconnections increasingly demand, the people of earth will rise up in coordinated social revolution and compel an accountable, new social contract from the corporate elite, one that puts the interests of the whole ahead of the parts. Can you imagine our world in another 50 years if we don't?

Website: http://www.localglobalnexus.net
Twitter: @steveclark855
Facebook: Facebook profile
Blog: http://globalprojects.typepad.com/globaltalk/

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anthropology    antiimperialism    class struggle    corporate accountability    cultural revolution    ecology    geopolitics    global affairs    global crisis    global politicis    green new deal    marxism    mmt    monetary theory    nongovernment organization    revolution    service economy    social ecology    social justice    socialism    sociology