The Left is caught in an endless circle of failed predictions of cataclysmic victories.

If you look at what Marx wrote, he thought that socialism would come to America first. He didn’t even think we needed a revolution. It could just be voted in, here. After all, America had universal white male suffrage.

If you look at Emma Goldman, you’ll see her talking about how she thought (in 1911!) that prisons would be abolished soon.

If you look at manifestos from the 1930s, they didn’t think that the Great Depression would ever end. They thought that this was the final deathbed of capitalism, and that it would all be over soon.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they felt optimistic, too. If you read Bookchin from around that time, he seems to have been very much under the impression that automation was already so advanced as to rule out much more automation, or even much more need for work.

Photo by Thibault Penin on Unsplash

Hey — maybe this is really it. Maybe global warming will kill capitalism. Or, perhaps the rate of profit will finally decline to zero. The Marxists have been insisting that it will for long enough — maybe their predictions will come true through the magic of repetition.

There’s a saying that I’ve heard — something along the lines of “communism collapsed, but capitalism collapses every 4 to 7 years”, in reference to the fall of planned economies all across the world and to the business cycle: for my younger readers, financial crises usually happen with much more usual regularity (we are perhaps 5 years overdue for one) and with much less severity than in 2008.

And, in a sense, this is true — but, in a more realistic one, no: it absolutely is not. Communism (or, at least, ML-style state socialism; apologies to my anarcho-communist readers) came crashing down once, and completely and irreparably died. Capitalism, comparatively, merely gets the hick-ups sometimes — and then, after a breather, continues onwards.

Hey, maybe this time is special. Maybe you’re special. Maybe this time, global warming or crash 2.0 or whatever really will kill off capitalism. But, I want you to understand: there are 200 years of people standing behind you, all equally certain that the end was nigh.