legitimation crises typically unfold at a different pace and rhythm to stock market crashes

The difference between socialism and capitalism is worth noting. Socialism aims to democratically manage and regulate capitalism in ways that calm its excesses and redistribute its benefits for the common good. It is about spreading the wealth around through progressive taxation arrangements while basic needs--such as education, health care and even housing--are provided by the state out of reach of market forces. Many of the key achievements of distributive socialism in the period after 1945, in Europe and beyond, have become so socially embedded as to be immune from neoliberal assault. Even in the United States, social security and Medicare are extremely popular programmes that right-wing forces find almost impossible to dislodge. [...]

Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organisation to displace market forces and capital accumulation as the basis for organising production and distribution

When the individual liberty and freedom it promises is mediated through the institutional arrangements of private property and the market, as it is in both liberal theory and practice, then huge inequalities result

[...] an ethical, non-exploitative and socially just capitalism that redounds to the benefit of all is impossible. It contradicts the very nature of what capital is about.

Now often referred to as 'the precariat' (to emphasise the floating and unstable character of their employment and lifestyles) these workers have always accounted for a large segment of the total labour force.

There are various broad fractious currents of thought on the left as to how to address the problems that now confront us.

[...] there is no way that an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it and reworking the constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system and endless capital accumulation. [...]

[...] Racism and the oppression of women and children were foundational in the rise of capitalism. But capitalism as currently constituted can in principle survive without these forms of discrimination and oppression, though its political ability to do so will be severely curtailed, if not mortally wounded, in the face of a more unified class face. [...]

To understand the political necessity of this requires first that the enigma of capital be unravelled. Once its mask is torn off and its mysteries have been laid bare, it is easier to see what has to be done and why, and how to set about doing it. Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.