I was impressed when I read it last year, and even more so when I heard him lecture at MIT last week. And he is not “just” an academic, but is working very hard of getting progressive ideas/practices (like worker & community ownership of companies & capital) put into action TODAY. check out the site and the many links as there are lots of tangible actions for everyone from students to teachers to voters and more.

I disagree with this point. It’s not homo sapiens’ economic imperative to hurt nature, but it’s a consequence of our biological imperative. Even without capitalism, we must still ultimately eat another organism to ensure the survival of our own.

Capitalism is a social structure peculiar to homo sapiens. No other mammal adapted itself to operate within an elaborate framework of trade and currency.

Biologically, homo sapiens cannot exempt itself from the laws of nature. As for economics, a discipline unique to the intraspecies interactions of homo sapiens, it is ultimately a construct built to serve our own needs, one that can be destroyed just as it was built over time.

Capitalism, in the sphere of economic history, was a brief and recent creation. Adam Smith did not invent the economy, he wrote a history of human behavior. His magnum opus was several hundred pages long, and the wealthy fetishize only the few pages Smith devoted that justifies their status. We suppress the fact that Smith, like Marx, warned that capitalism must be controlled lest it become a monster that destroys its own creator. Both, for instance, point out that the most privileged capitalists would regress to the mean of rent-seeking, or making money without a corresponding labor input. Rent would be the capitalists’ equivalent of the extraction of tribute.

Of course, that doesn’t help with the meaningful job quest ;)