What silliness. We're now either going to have to get into a useless discussion of absoluteliness or of necessity or of when and how it is for this or for that that quantitative changes become qualitative and therefore more real in their changiness. And you, of all people, appealing to evil? C'mon.
The issue is never change or stability it is the combination of the pace of and participation in and directionality of change.
> It is necessary for human survival to destroy capitalism. And
> this is relevant to the debate over austerity. Austerity is the NORMAL
> condition of capitalism, violated for a short time after WW2. Normal
> processes of change ("Progress") after 1970 returned capitalism to its
> normal state. How did that quote from Benjamin go, re stopping the train
> we're on?
>
>
Again, really? This kind of meta-analysis, while very attractive for polemical, assumes a singularity and continuity to capitalism over the last 150 years in order to assert some sort of homogeneous normality. For that matter, it wholly collapses capitalism and the state as if there was a straightforwardly abstractable essence associated with the myriad expressions of capitalist modernity.
>
> Once when Marx had returned to England from a vacation in Germany where his
> aristocratic friends had wined & dined him, someone pointed out to him that
> that would not be possible under socialism. His reply: I'll be dead by then.
> It seems to me that Marx was a conservative in the sense defined above.
>
>
Oh please, perhaps there's some sort of textual foundation to this account but, even if it's true and Marx had an ascetic vision of/for socialism, these days the idea that a redistribution of the aggregate wealth produced by capitalism would restrict the distribution of high quality amenities embraces far too much of a natural and social limits discourse.
>
> Carrol
Alan