John Bellamy Foster points to “Beyond Leviathan” by István Mészáros for insights into the ancient origins of the state and nature of its evolution over thousands of years, the necessity to move beyond the state and how to meet that challenge.

John Bellamy Foster explains the capitalist ‘solution’ master-minded by global finance to resolve the imminent environmental crisis: create a multi-quadrillion dollars worth of assets on the back of everything nature does and expropriate it from the global commons to make a profit. Worse still: it is already happening.

Prabhat Patnaik shows that as capital is relocated, real wages do not rise, inequality widens, and global demand is suppressed. The system remains in protracted crisis; Keynesianism in the North alone is no solution. The struggle is everywhere.

Imperialism which existed in the colonial era persists to this day and the system cannot do without it.

Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. Today’s guest is Prabhat Patnaik. He is talking about his read on the history of capitalism that he breaks up into 5 periods from colonialism into the present.