THis charming Keynesian utopia of a global factory does not ensure autonomy and freedom and the development of human abilities and power in the workplace; It does not ensure that people will be producing use values which meet human needs or that we won't produce ecological destruction (and where is Mark Jones whose posts I cherish?); It does not ensure that what what Marx called the realm of freedom will be expanded... And I don't believe a high rate of accumulation, leaving aside its desirability, can be ensured by money cranks. It seems that you have fetishized money (the real barrier to the productive forces is wage labor itself, not high interest rates) but, worse, you are spreading the illusion that the overcoming of crisis tendencies, as they manifest themselves, can be achieved by some income redistribution and the manipulation of the money supply by the EPI- and AFL/CIO- backed politicians, willing to tilt power from the Fed to a populist Congress. So in the next depression, what will it be? People praying to God and personal angels for good fortune, sparing dimes out of Christian charity to their poorer brethen and working every four years to get money cranks elected. Such a passive religious working class will not be one to take its destiny into its own hands, seize the means of production, and reorganize human society. Instead it will sit idly by until a desperate govt, in the midst of a crisis it does not understand, commands its participation in some untold barbarism (see Mattick's excellent essay on The Great Depression in Anti-Bolshevik Communism. ME Sharpe Press, 1977).
socialism or barbarism--that's how it still stands. best, rakesh