>>> Doug Henwood wrote:
Why? If you define Marxism as a theory of an inevitable terminal crisis of capitalism - which I think is always the point of the whole value-theorizing tradition, though they've gotten shy about admitting it in the late 1990s - yes, it is. But if you define Marxism as a theory of capitalism as a social system based on exploitation, which is unstable, polarizing, and destructive by its very nature, then Marxism has lot of life left in it.
__________ Charles: I agree with Doug that Marxism is not dead because capitalism recovers from cyclical crises. Capitalism has always been cyclically recovering as well as crashing. Marxism points out , and it is still a fact, that in the recovery and boom part of the cycle there is enormous economic crisis for millions of working class people. This merely increases in busts.
Also, in the Marxist-Leninist model, the "terminal crisis of capitalism" is not some entirely objective process of "self-destruction". Capitalism's terminal crisis only occurs by the hand of the working class which is subjective. The capitalists' do not "self-destruct" in the Marxist idea of revolution. The revolution is not some ultimate cyclical crisis.
Charles Brown
Workers of the West, it's our turn.