Things can’t go on like this. I mean the whole thing – this global economy. It’s all up-side-down in its values and drivers. Just thinking about it threatens to make me wordless and hopeless. Eventually – because I have to get up every morning – I will start to nibble at it in my little corner of the world, do what I can, but inevitably my nibbles seem so insignificant when compared to the size of the problem. It’s such a very large and multi-faceted problem.

A shortlist I’ve been mulling over this weekend:

• Most people on the planet have given their decision-making power away to governments who do not serve them
• Capitalism (as it is) is reaching its sell-by date. The planet is running out of the basic resources to sustain a linear production-consumption system
• The gestures business and governments make to global ecological conservation and alleviation of global poverty are not helping enough
• There are too many people on the planet to allow for quality of life for most of us – our population projections tell us that we have already exceeded the planet’s capacity to sustain us all
• Primary resources (like water) have been centralised to governmental or big business distributors which lock people into relationships in which they have no power
• People in power have been corrupted by greed, people in positions of powerlessness have been corrupted by hopelessness.
• Media (the bulk of the  content of our global communications) is largely driven by consumerist messaging and sensationalist drama

Is it possible to fix a super-system that is just so sick? At times I would like to say that I wish we could all just stop and begin again. Chances are, we might get that opportunity – though not on our terms if Mother Nature is left to organise it.

With a sigh I look about me to see who’s doing something about all this. Doing seems like the best response, both practically and psychologically. Locally, Lead SA looks like a good idea: an opportunity for South Africans to roll their eyes at ineffective governance and get on with the job themselves.

Not-doing is another alternative. This means, not doing what we normally do, not defaulting to the easiest behaviours, not continuing to give energy to systems that have run their course and are no longer useful.

But I began with the title, “What would Marxists do?” If there is good one out there, let’s have a detailed critique which can lead us to some workable solution. Something that sees us clearly as the contradictory humans we are with an opportunity to turn a huge problem into something Truly Great.