Yes, but, but... whether the historical successor to the "bourgeois democratic republican form" is socialist democracy or fascism (to name two possibilities) is itself of some import, don'tcha think?
BTW, the instability of capitalism is all but universally accepted in contemporary ruling class ideology, and is in fact trumpeted by its propagandists in government, academia, and the media--it's all part of the system's wonderful dynamism, or so it's blathered forth from the White House to "right-leaning" economists* to the WSJ to "Wired" to the lowliest motivational speaker. There has never really been a place, in reality, for an actual conservatism under capitalism, and over 160 years on, Chuck and Fred's description of its social reality has not been much improved upon. But the figure of the "solid bourgeois" (a historically specific form, resulting mainly from the social development of capitalism in Europe, that has had no particular relevance to capitalism for some time) and its somewhat different American analogues (for example, the figure captured by Lewis's Babbitt [not simply a caricature of a petty bourgeois], and the "traditional"--"tradition" such as it is--role of the Chamber of Commerce and the NAM) were there to provide the *idea* of a capitalist form of conservatism. And it wasn't total bullshit, in that capitalists could still (wrongly, but rationally) look for the day when the System Worked--when technology had developed to the proper level, or "government" was put in its proper place, or the damn Communists were finally defeated, or something. But capitalism *has* reached a stage where the wildest dreams of its latter-day ideologists have been, to any practical extent, satisfied; savvy capitalists and the system's well-rewarded proponents now gleefully push a world of self-perpetuating anarchic instability, and propaganda lines that blame the Other for the problems of capitalism are more and more self-evidently atavistic delusions targeted at losers. Not that capitalists aren't playing with fire here--but then, really, playing with fire is what they've always done...
*Yes, nowadays "left-leaning" mainstream economists are clearly more in favor of stable and non-disruptive, that is conservative, social and political forms of capitalism.
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 6:53 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> socialismorbarbarism socialismorbarbarism at gmail.com
>
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