Professor of sociology and editor of Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster, talks about the triple crises in the economy, the environment, and the imperial wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond..

Excerpt from John Bellamy Foster: "What I'm trying to suggest here is that we're facing something else. It isn't simply a crisis in capitalism; it's a crisis of capitalism. We're in the midst of a structural crisis of our entire civilisation, which begain, I would say, in the mid-1970s. We are in the middle of it; we are not at the end by any means. But the whole set of problems is getting worse and worse.

"I think that this is crucial to understand. The problems of empire, the problems of ecology and the problems of economy are all related to this crisis of capitalism, the crisis of our civilisation as it exists. The system that we know of as capitalism -- and we are forced back to the term `capitalism', nobody really talks about `the free market' anymore, that metaphor is gone, and we're forced back to the reality of the society in which we live -- is facing both internal and external limits at this point, and we have to try to understand what these are."

This talk was delivered at Econvergence: Northwest Regional Gathering on the Economimc and Ecological Crises on October 2, 2009.