[Pen-l] Question just posed on "Meet the Press"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Gregory, who is even more pro-corporate than his predecessor the 
late Tim Russert, just asked his panel of economic experts the final 
question in the opening segment of this very high-profile 
inside-the-beltway TV news show:

"Does capitalism have a future?"

We have certainly come a long way since this:

http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm

Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?"

The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to 
liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's 
language, asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental 
contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that 
between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the 
chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class 
issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Kojève 
(among others) noted, the egalitarianism of modern America represents 
the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. 
This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the 
United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent 
years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with 
the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains 
fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as 
with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it 
up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. 
Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of 
liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and racism" which 
persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.


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