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

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.

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...