Just kidding. I read the article, although I suspect if I had posted it, great fun would have been had with one of the authors of an article on economics being a crop and soil professor. The other author is a full-bore Marxist, of course, but at least that has something to do with economics.

A couple of minor comments:

--In their historical factors for the prosperity of the 50s and 60s (under "Back to the Real Economy: The Stagnation Problem") they miss what I think is the most significant one: a complete lack of international competition for industrial production.

--It doesn't make much sense to complain about "redistribution of income and wealth" to the upper sectors if the rest of the thesis declares that none of that wealth was real anyway.

(Unfortunately, their publication "Irreversible Crisis" is not online, and I'd have to pay to read it. I'd be interested to see how their specific predictions made back in 1988 panned out.)

The big windup:

In the 1930s Keynes decried the growing dominance of financial capital, which threatened to reduce the real economy to "a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation," and recommended the "euthanasia of the rentier." However, financialization is so essential to the monopoly-finance capital of today, that such a "euthanasia of the rentier" cannot be achieved—in contravention of Keynes's dream of a more rational capitalism—without moving beyond the system itself.

In this sense we are clearly at a global turning point, where the world will perhaps finally be ready to take the step, as Keynes also envisioned, of repudiating an alienated moral code of "fair is foul and foul is fair"—used to justify the greed and exploitation necessary for the accumulation of capital—turning it inside-out to create a more rational social order. To do this, though, it is necessary for the population to seize control of their political economy, replacing the present system of capitalism with something amounting to a real political and economic democracy; what the present rulers of the world fear and decry most—as "socialism."

Oooh, BIG surprise.

From Foster here:

Fortunately, there are other movements and forces in the world that are raising the issue of a change in the rules of the game, and indeed the question of The World We Wish to See--to refer to the title of Samir Amin's latest book, published by Monthly Review Press. These include revolutions and revolutionary movements in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nepal. Cuba (now approaching its 50th year since the revolution) has made great ecological strides. And, as James Gustave Speth, former head of the United Nations Human Development Programme has recently stated, there is now an "international social movement for change," which refers to itself as "the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism."

Foster overlooks*--as he must to maintain his own existence as a leftist academic--the history of consistently-applied socialist/Marxist ideas to the economic welfare of a nation. Foster's little list speaks for itself, and anyone can go down the history of the 20th century to see the wreckage left behind by collectivist economics across the planet. Poverty-stricken totalitarian states where "the population" mostly suffers. And no, they're not talking frigging Sweden or the Netherlands, either. Spend some time on the "Monthly Review" website.

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*To use a very mild term for the amount of intellectual self-annihilation required to avoid this reality in one's own mind.