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This book, The Twilight of Capitalism, by Michael Herrington, dedicated to Karl Marx and published in 1976, is presently sitting on the bookshelf to my right at Tiny Cup in Bed Stuy. I’m familiar with the book but haven’t read it, so can’t adequately appraise its merits or shortcomings. I just find it interesting that more than thirty years on the same sentiment captured in the title and expressed in the first sentence—“Western capitalism is in crisis.”—still pervades so much thinking on the left, in almost total disregard for the ways the system manages and responds to internal shakes and tremors. The idea that capitalism is dead or dying, together with the utopian fantasy that The Revolution is just around the corner, is popular in graduate school classrooms and among intellectuals on the left that work the public lectures circuit in New York City, but it hardly reflects reality. Rather, it’s a distraction from it.
