Such questions are provoked not merely by the turn of the calendar but by the sense that society is passing through an immense transformation, which is going to shape events for generations to come. The vast changes in production processes over the past two decades associated with the globalisation of all aspects of economic life, changes which come at an accelerating rate, have swept aside all the old political and economic certainties. Masses of people all over the world find themselves caught up in some kind of a whirlpool, in a situation where they are turned this way and that by forces they do not control and which no one appears to control. And hanging over the whole world is the threat of a major financial crisis, the warning signs of which have been seen in the financial storms that have ripped through the global capitalist economy in the past decade. In ancient times, men consulted the stars to seek some guidance for their actions, or looked for signs in the natural world to see if the gods were looking kindly upon them.
Modern man dismisses such activity.
While this sense of uncertainty has developed on a vast scale, it is not new. In fact the present situation is the outcome of processes inherent in the development of the global capitalist system from its very birth. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. According to some, however, such an analysis is not necessary.