Digging Out: Global Crisis and the Search for a New Social Contract

by Steve Clark, Charles Clark

Overview

In hard times, dissention mounts.
The old social contract flounders and cannot be revived.
Reaction asserts itself.
Rising forces seek liberation.
Danger and risk intensify.
Opportunity beckons.

Such is our time. In Digging Out—Global Crisis and the Search for a New Social Contract, two brothers from the social and environmental justice movements open the debate over the next social contract, identifying its strategic aims and political agenda. Theirs is a revolutionary proposal rooted in the power dynamics of the world’s rising service-based economy.
The brothers provide a theoretical framework to reinterpret and address festering world problems through local-global initiative. They urge cultural invigoration to redeploy our skills and innovation in service to others—and, therein, to ourselves as well. Their proposal confirms the leading role of civil society. They call for a global commercial transactions fee to curb financial speculation while adequately and permanently funding global problem-solving for everyone.
Digging Out proposes a new social contract to advance economic security, social justice and ecological restoration worldwide. It is a clarion call, urging us to unite and demand the changes necessary for a better tomorrow.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164196806
Publisher:	Steve Clark
Publication date:	01/09/2020
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	389 KB

About the Author

V.I. Lenin is the pen name of 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 wrong in Marxism by discovering the true 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).

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) and opened LocalGlobalNexus.net to promote the book and its assessment. 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?

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?

Environmental sociologist and activist. Ph.D. University of New Mexico in Latin American Sociology; M.S. University of Montana, Environmental Studies in forest water quality; M.A. University of Montana, Sociology of Rural Change.

Academic studies:
(1) Agricultural Incursions into the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, San Antonio, Belize.
(2) Collective Proprty Regimes in Peten, Guatemala, Fulbright Scholarship
(3) Maya Customary Cultivation Rights, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico
(4) Timber Cost/Productivity in Relationship to Environmental Regulations, Kootenai National Forest
(5) Alternative 10, Yaak Environmental Impact Statement
(6) Co-authored DIGGING OUT, 2008, book on socioecological implications of 2008 economic crisis

Employment: manager of food cooperative, organic farmer, migrant fruit picker, tree planter, construction, sociology professor