Simon Huxtable wrote:
>
> [clip]
>
> I was talking to Slavoj Zizek after a talk he gave
> yesterday, and he said that he believes that there
> will come a point in fifteen years time when
> capitalism will not be able to reproduce itself.
Well, Zizek is among the single-taxers and followers of Madame Blatavsky. Mao said it perfectly, "If you don't hit it, it won't fall." Capitalism is a phoenix; it constantly destroys itself in the process of reproducing itself. I don't think any serous leftist would believe such glop as the automatic dissolution of capitalism. (I believe in the first quarter of the 20th c. there were some serious arguments along this line, but not since then.)
Of course whenever political activity (i.e., mass oppositonist struggle) rises to a certain height one acts _as if_ triumph were not far away -- but that doesn't enter into one's serious analysis. The movements in Central America all proclaimed some version of "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." Of course that isn't true (and of course "the people" are _never_ wholly united), but under circumstances of rising level of struggle it's a reasonble sort of cry. I would assume that this is the wort of thing Gramsci had in mind when he linked pessimism of the mind to optimism of the will.
Carrol