we thought we’d see the end of capitalism

In 1975 we were all reading Late Capitalism by Ernest Mandel. But the system clearly has not collapsed. Failed states at the periphery show that its health is deteriorating, but the system has been pretty good to the home-owning two-thirds of Americans over recent decades . . . due to:
. the purchasing power of the dollar, the world’s reserve currency;
. cheap labor (manufacturing off-shored to low-wage countries plus, domestically, undocumented immigrants who can be paid less than the minimum wage);
. cheap credit (the Federal Funds benchmark interest rate has been below 4% most of the time for the last 25 years).

People sense trends. They often over-estimate the short-term impacts. Terminal capitalist crisis could be sensed in 1975, but what Mandel predicted at the time is only now of immediate relevance.

The system surely, yes, is facing economic, social, demographic, and ecological limits . . . but what our generation should have learned is how much inertia the extant trajectories possess. In other words, it can take a pretty long time for the chickens to come home to roost.