LAUSR

This letter addresses the following S&D articles from November 2017 (31:3): Victor Wallis’s “Capitalism Unhinged, Crisis of Legitimacy in the United States,” Hester Eisenstein’s “Comments,” and the roundtable report, “The Party, WhatWe Need and How to Get It” (moderated by Moodliar). These three articles raise fundamental issues: what is the current state of capitalism? what is the current state of the movement? what can we do about it? Capitalism sprang from feudalism as a historically progressive movement, both economically and politically. Its progressive phase has ended and it is now slowly degenerating; we know from Marx that capitalism will eventually collapse and be replaced by something new. Where in the cycle is US capitalism? Is it near the final crisis and collapse or will it again re-energize itself? Wallis makes an important observation about the particular development of capitalism in the US: the combination of a manufacturing system based on wage labor in the North and the plantation system based on slavery in the South. This accounts for the close intertwining of the exploitation of the working class and racism in the US, and the centrality for the Left to deal with racism in building working class unity. This is a fact understood by many on the Left, but not completely by others – for example, the 2016 Sanders presidential campaign and some of its supporters. Wallis cites 10 points concerning the crisis of capitalism leading to the conclusion, “the US polity has lost all capacity to deal rationally – in terms of long-term viability – with the problems that it faces.” I would hesitate to make this conclusion definitive, even though it may Socialism and Democracy, 2018 Vol. 32, No. 2, 177–180, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2018.1508974