The Age of Crisis

It is over-production of crisis by the present world system: The Great Financial Crisis, The Great Hunger – the present food and agriculture crisis, the ecological crisis, the energy crisis. The centuries-old fundamental questions related to democracy and distribution of resources carry the seeds of crises that are now spreading to countries crossing continents. The crises are connected to each other through many functions, and thus deepening and widening the magnitude and increasing the sufferings of humanity. Capitalism has produced all these and thus fails to get rid of the contradictions that it hoped for, the blissful hope that made its audacious claim: “end of history”. The contradictions demolish the imagined claim of putting an end to history. The competitions and contradictions conceived by the capitalist world system are pushing the system to its historical destiny by creating newer chapter of history: its demise, not today, but tomorrow. Has ever the centuries-old world system stood haplessly amidst so many catastrophic crises that have appeared on the world stage almost simultaneously? The monopoly-finance capital intensified class war while got engaged with speculation and brought in crisis in the lives of millions in countries across the globe. The crisis in democracy in the present world system is not discussed by the mainstream. The energy crisis is not only the unresolved contradiction between the dwindling supply and increasing demand in the metropolis and semi-metropolis of the world system, but also the unresolved contradiction between providing easily accessible better energy to the billions of energy-poor and higher accumulation by capital. One of the major issues in the present political discourse is: is the Empire in decline? Essays in this book present the issues with this perspective and with reference to a country in the periphery.