Doug Henwood wrote:
> Capital, which isn't a thing or a person but let's use it like that
> under erasure anyway, did solve its 1970s crisis by the mid 1980s.
You think that because you are resident in the USA, where the
working-class collapse also contributed to higher profit rates alongside
the rise of financial rates of return (the new Foster/Magdoff lays this
out very nicely). Capital is a global relation, and if you spent a bit
of time with us in the southern hemisphere, or the FSU, where we think
of the 1980s-90s as the lost decades, Doug, then you wouldn't talk of a
crisis being 'solved'. Capitalism is uneven and combined development,
comrade.
My point in this longstanding debate with you, comrade, is that by failing to invoke the tendency of capitalism to crisis, we're throwing away one of socialism's most important selling points.
> ... even socialism would have problems that it would have to solve
> (starting with its introduction), and no doubt serious ones (starting
> with its introduction).
Yes, but the kind of crisis-generating problems we see with capitalism are not internally hardwired into the underlying dynamics of socialism, the way they are with capitalism.
>