No one really doubts that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. On top of widespread famine, disease, degredation, and other tortures that have haunted people for thousands of years, the twentieth century ushered in literal threats to human survival: environmental catastrophe and nuclear holocaust, among other things.

Daily relations are likewise unbearable. Culture is pre-packaged, homogenized. Bosses are assholes. We all have too many bills and not enough cash. Food is crappy, or at least the stuff you can afford is. When it's not being done by overpaid elites, all the empowering, constructive work is only possible in our spare time. The only reason many of us are still alive is because corporations need employees. If you can call that living. Unemployment. Declining labor standards. Longer work hours. No healthcare. Orwell once wrote that, if you wanted a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever. Sounds about right.

All of these institutional failures and assaults on human survival are either magnified or accelerated by advanced capitalism and transnational corporations, which are the hallmark of advanced capitalism. We know this well enough by now. Historically, the problem runs deeper. The division between rich and poor, strong and weak, oppressor and oppressed is at the root of many social and environmental disasters.

For activists and others willing to confront the division between rich and poor, merely pointing out the problems, analyzing them, discussing them with others, and protesting against them isn't enough. People want solutions to the problems, not mountains upon mountains of left-wing analysis and criticism. Moreover, they want alternatives to capitalism and corporate globalization. They ask, "What do you want instead of all this wasted, graft, corruption, and oppression? What could replace capitalism? Or corporate globalization? What would a just world look like?" It's a fair question to ask, and it's not too early for radicals to start answering it.