>with huge swathes of India and Africa (to
>take two non-random examples) yet un- or under-proletarianized, it's hard
to
>see how capital might have reached its zenith or to be significantly more
at
>risk as a system now than, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
I would presume that at least part of capital's fragility would have to do with rates of return on investment: so long as the investors are getting enough money back on their investments to keep them happy (not to mention ploughing back into more investments), capitalism will hang around. In order to develop those areas you mention on a scale sufficient enough to satisfy the world's prominent capitalists, one hell of a lot of money would have to be pooled, and it would have to pay off enough to interest them in the first place. Presumably, over time, "small" capitalists would work away at developing those areas in some manner until they either entered the "big leagues" or got bought out by the "bigger capitalists". As a side question, isn't there some sort of rate of diminishing returns on investment?
Todd