Email: steve.clark@localglobalnexus.net

I came of age in the Sixties, compelled by the hypocrisy of mainstream American politics and culture to join the struggles for civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam. I was stirred by the Sexual Revolution and nurtured by the women's movement.

After a stint at the U.S. 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 coop in Washington, DC (Stone Soup). A few years at this utopian socialist experiment -- in combination with an introduction to Marxism that was foisted on me by the state's strenuous effort to portray me and other American anitwar radicals as "communist sympathizers" -- convinced me that real socialism actually was the answer to society's many problems.

The embrace of the socialist dream led naturally to the need for a strategy for socialist revolution in the U.S. and the drive for a revolutionary party to organize the struggle. Eventually, I became a member of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), a multi-ethnic, grassroots organization of American radicals who drew primary inspiration from the insights of Marx, Lenin and Mao.

In 1979, five of our members were gunned down by a collection of Klan, Nazi and BATF infiltrators as they prepared for an anti-Klan protest in Greensboro, NC. Rejecting the option of going underground in response, the CWP instead pushed itself out into the mainstream of America life.

There, we gradually learned that the structures of American production and society had eclipsed the straightforward class relations of earlier times and other places. The power of the once-mighty working class, like the industrial system that created it, was clearly ebbing. Yet, justice for the masses remained elusive. On what basis would that struggle continue?

The CWP summed up the futility of its strategy and disbanded itself so that its members could be unleashed to pursue justice in whatever forms the new epoch might offer.

I ended up first a teacher and later a social marketing professional, but, also as an intellectual, I kept abreast of the latest insights of social science. I was intent on summarizing what was wrong in Marxism and socialism by discovering what was the truth about current, real-world social change.

I worked on this for many years and found that my evolving understanding of the inevitability of global revolution was confirmed both by unfolding events and by the insights of modern social science -- particularly the work of the Tofflers (The Third Wave), anthropologists Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings) and Helen Fisher (Anatomy of Love) and partners Neil Howe and William Strauss (The Fourth Turning).

Wishing not just to understand but, more, to try to help change our world in the best way that is possible, I launched GlobalTalk in 2004. In 2011, in a collaborative effort with my brother Charles, I published Digging Out: Global Crisis and the Search for a New Social Contract. Together, he and I opened a website to promote the book and its summation: www.localglobalnexus.net. Please visit the website to learn more about how you can help build a Global Consciousness Movement and demand social accountability from the world's financial services industry.M/p>

Hey, bottom line, I'm a Boomer and a generalist. Some say an idealist, too. Perhaps.

But someday, as our numbers and interconnections increasingly demand, the people of earth will find a way to address our common concerns not merely as individuals or nations, but as global citizens, too. We will learn to put the interests of the whole ahead of the parts. Can you imagine our world in another 100 years if we don't?

I say, let's get on with it. The time is now.