Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
I haven't read Johnson's trilogy but Jan did several years ago and gave lurid accounts. That he wasn't a leftist gave the books some of their edge -- but also perhaps led to the "misleading" comparison to Rome. France, Japan, Germany, England have all "lost" their "empires," and yet capitalism in those nations goes on swimmingly, as do their ruling classes. The finiteness of the earth's resources is little comfort: it merely emphasizes the desperate need to overcome capitalism -- a healthy capitalism -- before it destroys us. Perhaps the roaches can exult in _that_ kind of "fallof capitalism, but I don't see why any of us should take comfort from it. I don't see Joanna's point.
Capitalism (I repeat myself) is a complex of social relations and is not in the least affected by what happens to this or that capitalist or group of capitalists or capitalist nations. It cannot decay (except in Joanna's irrelevant terms). That kind of decay helps no one. And "capital" is hardly infinitely potent, but that isn't the point anyway: it is the resiliency of capitalist relations, not the raw power of capital.