“The Crisis of Capitalism.” For more than half a century, in the era of post-Caxton hot-metal printing, every micro-circulation Trot samizdat had that headline permanently set in type. Any dip in sterling, any prolonged strike or economic downturn brought the apocalyptic prediction onto the front page, thrust aggressively in the faces of uninterested commuters, by vendors who appeared to have spent the previous night sleeping under a hedge.
“The Crisis of Capitalism” became the Left’s equivalent of the existential threat proclaimed by millenary cults waiting eagerly on mountain tops for global extinction. There were moments, occasional setbacks, notably in Britain in the 1970s, when the forecast of meltdown in the capitalist system temporarily assumed quasi-credibility, but such experiences were short-lived. Then the Soviet Empire, the standard bearer of the binary alternative to capitalism, went into involuntary receivership and was liquidated by Mikhail Gorbachev.
