Excerpts from a Monthly Review interview with John Bellamy Foster. Whole article here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/foster101008.html
His assertion that the current financial crisis is a chance for building a grassroots "socialism of the 21st Century" seems sensible to me.
*********JBF: I don't think anyone knows how to "sort out" or stop this crisis. What we are seeing is a lot of improvising while the house is falling down around us. There is no possibility of avoiding a very severe world economic crisis at this point; the object has shifted to avoiding a deep debt deflation as in the 1930s. We are facing one of the great crises in the history of capitalism; nothing this bad has been seen in advanced capitalist world in eighty years, since the Great Depression itself.
My own view is that the sole object at this point -- though it is hard to imagine this in the United States at present due to the weakness of labor and of working-class organizations in general -- should be to reorganize social and economic priorities to meet the needs of those at the bottom. It is a fact that the U.S. economy over decades has drastically weakened the conditions of the wider population, which is at the root of the whole problem. So addressing those conditions is the real key. But even if that were not the case, the goal of those who identify with the great majority of the population, with the working class, the propertyless, the poor, should be clear: to put the employment, food, nutrition, housing, health, education, environmental conditions of those at base of society first. This is simple humanity and justice.
The truth is the advanced capitalist system has been dependent on a process of financialization (the increase in the financial superstructure relative to the "real economy") as the main means of combating the stagnation of production and investment for decades now -- beginning in the 1960s, but accelerating in the 1980s, and accelerating still more in the 1990s. It is the underlying tendency to stagnation rooted in exploitation and inequality that is the root problem. (This was brilliantly and relentlessly explained in a long series of articles by Monthly Review editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy from the 1960s to the 1990s.) Financialization, the blowing of one bubble after another (ideologically justified by neoliberalism), was offered as the solution to stagnation in the real economy. It was this that mainly spurred economic growth in the United States and elsewhere at the center of the system given the stagnation of investment in new productive capacity (held down by existing overcapacity). Ultimately, however, there was no "solution" other than the wiping out of capital: "the real barrier to capitalist production," Marx wrote, "is capital itself."
We are once again up against that real barrier. Hence the issue of regulation/deregulation/reregulation is, at this point, immaterial -- at least if one is talking about new restraints on capital as a solution to the immediate problem. Restabilization of capitalism requires what has always been the saving function of crises: a vast amount of existing capital must be extinguished to enable a smaller surviving amount to begin again the process of blind, crazed accumulation. But the real-world suffering that would accompany such a massive "devaluation of capital" -- the lost jobs, housing, self-respect, and the misery, even starvation, which would follow on a global scale today -- would mean the end of the U.S. model of capitalism, since the rest of the world would never accept such a result. What we need and must fight for is real regime change: that is a socialism for the 21st century.
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