There are the many outward manifestations of the global crisis: raging wars, collapsing states, state and nonstate "terrorism" (such an ill-defined and ideologically charged term that, stripped of particular and competing political contents, is nearly useless as a social scientific concept), pandemics of crime and interpersonal violence, insecurity, social decay, and the degeneration of ecosystems everywhere. There are the alienation and mass pathologies brought on by the cultural banalities and extreme individualism of global capitalism - such as the fact that some thirty million people in the United States are prescribed antidepressants (the sheer number of people on these drugs should be alarming, as should the fact that the medical-pharmaceutical complex medicalizes a social pathology). There is the ever-throbbing crisis of hunger and poverty for billions of people, and so on. The immediate causes of these manifestations can be analyzed. In 2007 and 2008 food prices spiked around the world, for instance, triggering "food riots" in dozens of countries and pushing the number of people who suffered from chronic hunger beyond the one billion mark. The spike in prices was not due to any significant drop in world food production or to shortages in food stocks worldwide. Rather, financial investors moving hundreds of billions of dollars turned to frenzied speculation in global food and energy markets, especially futures markets, thereby encouraging hoarding and other practices that caused the price of food to climb beyond the reach of many people. In turn we can analyze the causes of escalating financial speculation in the global economy, as I will do in Chapter 4, and we can study the structure of the global food system - the increasing iron grip of transnational corporate control over the system, the displacement from the land of hundreds of millions of farmers, and so on, all processes associated with capitalist globalization.
Crisis Century and Global Issues
