Capitalism Forever?

[Justin Schwartz]

>
>Assuming the complete victory of imperial liberalism, which
>now seems assured, I expect there to be a considerable shift
>in capitalism (meaning the economic and social system).  In
>the future, for instance, the ruling classes, now at peace
>with themselves and cohered into a single entity, may be much
>more interested in stability than acceleration of production
>and accumulation.  Hence strong regulation of markets and
>other capitalist sacred cows, and the establishment of a
>universal Welfare/police state could be anticipated, along
>with a generous degree of Byzantine decadence appropriate
>to nearly uncontested dominanace.
>

I don't think so. There is considerable evidence that relatively generous 
social provisions in the Fordist era were due to three things: (a) 
competition with the Soviet bloc, (b) the threat of social unrest at home, 
and (c) the long boom from 1945 through 1973. One sided class war doesn't 
diminish when these three things are absent. Moreover, capitalists are NEVEr 
at peace with themselves; in a capitalist economy, economics is the pursuit 
of war by other means--granted these are often better than military 
action!--and right now the world economy is in crisis. I don't mean the 
current recession. The long boom is over, and there's no particular reason 
to think that the crisis of overproduction Brenner decribes is over. 
Moreover, the IS economy is in a secular decline, diminsihing increases in 
lots of key variables. When capitalism comes back, bet on Asia, not the US; 
in these circumstances, we can expect plenty of decadence, but also plenry 
of labor discipline, cost-cutting, cutbacks, concessions, and incresaes in 
the aboslute and relative rate of exploitation. I'd love to be proved wrong. 
I don'ts ee it. Doug, you know more than I about this stuff, whaddaya think?

jks

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