Un texto remitido por Oscar Delgado, dilecto amigo y colega en la arisca república de las letras, las artes y las ciencias sociales. N de la R.

Is there life

after capitalism?

By Richard Greeman

His recent book Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalists Essays (Illustrated) is available online at www.lulu.com/content/923573 (free downloads). He can be contacted at: rgreeman@gmail.com

From: State of Nature

"If betting against the bankruptcy of Greece is the best use the bankers can find for their capital, then capitalism is in big trouble. The unforeseen and too-soon-forgotten Great Crash of 2008 has left in its wake a twilight spectacle of ghoulish speculative capital destroying whole economies so as to feast on their corpses."

Remember the Great Crash of 2008? Or have soothing siren songs about 'recovery' lulled you to the point where you see it fading into history like the financial shocks of 2001 (the dot-com bubble), 1994 (the Mexican debt crisis), 1989 (the Savings & Loan crisis), 1987 (the Black Monday stock market crash), 1973-74 (the oil crisis and stock market crash) and the Crash of 1929 (ancient history, irrelevant)?

Before recollection fades, let me refresh your memory... and remind you of a few remaining problems. According to the neo-liberal, free-market orthodoxy a crisis like the Crash of 2008 was theoretically impossible because capitalism had achieved equilibrium of un-ending growth.

Small wonder no one - outside of a handful of old-fashioned classical Marxists like this author - saw the Crash of 2008 coming. Yet as my Slovenian friend the Groucho Marxist Slavoj Zizek quipped: 'The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was unpredictable.'

Indeed, we anti-capitalist, anti-IMF globalization protesters have been denouncing the banks and warning of an impending crash for over a decade, only to be met by ridicule, tear-gas and mass arrests: 'the police were used to literally stifle the truth,' concludes Zizek. [1]

The questions that remain are these: Does the Crash of 2008 validate the Marxist assumption that the underlying cause of capitalism's crisis is structural, or rather systemic? And if so, can the much-vaunted 'recovery' of 2009 be expected to last? Or for that matter, capitalism itself?

Summary: 1. The Crash of 2008 - 2. Obama and the Jobless 'Recovery' of 2010 - 3. Blowing New Bubbles - 4. The Great Recession - 5. Can Capitalism Reform? - 6. So Marx Was Wrong? - 7. Overproduction and the Decline in the Rate of Profit - 8. Historical and Geographical Limits to Capitalist Growth - 9. Why Hasn't Capitalism, with Its Alleged 'Contradictions' Already Collapsed? - 10. Military Keynesianism - 11. The Devil in the Zeros - 12. Advertising - 13. Death on the Installment Plan - 14. Capitalism's 'Final' Crisis? - 15. What Next?