To be radical, or to be a scientist, is the same thing; it is a question of trying to go to the root of the matter. For Marx, this meant trying to uncover the “economic laws of motion of modern society,” that is, first of all, seeing society as an organism in motion constantly changing and developing as it moves from its beginning to its end, and second, searching in the economy, i.e., in changing conditions of production and exchange, for the underlying basis of this motion.

In this chapter, I wish to follow Marx's approach by viewing the present conjuncture of international politics and economics in terms of the long-term growth and spread of capitalist social relations of production to a world level. More concretely, I want to try to relate the current crises in national and international politics to the world market created during the last twenty-five years by the American Empire, first by examining Keynes's 1933 warnings of the difficulties and dangers for the development of modern society posed by the world market, and second, by using Marx's analysis of the general law of capitalist accumulation, and, in particular, his theory of the reserve army to go deeper into the roots of our present difficulties.