>Hmmm. If memory serves, you championed the cause (which seems quite
>reasonable) that instead of doom-saying, a better way of criticising
>capitalism is that things could be soooo much better than the status quo.
>By implication, it is a call to extend privileges now enjoyed by the ruling
>class & its mignons to the working class. Has that changed?
It's pretty impossible to extend privileges to the masses by definition. What I think I've said and what I certainly meant are: 1) good times are better for the working class, and may well be better for radical political agitation, than bad times, or at least moderately bad times, and 2) the technology developed by capitalism gives humans the potential to feed, clothe, house, and care for the entire population, but the social arrangements of capitalism make that impossible; rhetorically, it strikes me as more promising to focus less on how awful things are and more on how much better they might be. But maybe I'm just turning into an optimistic old coot.
Doug