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It has long been taken for granted, by Marxists and non-Marxists alike, that living in and with capitalism can be something of a roller coaster. Sometimes it's up and sometimes it's down. It's not difficult to understand the economic reality that makes this bumpy ride so much a part of the history of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
But what is equally consistent, though rather more difficult to understand, is quite why so many people, in so many countries, are convinced that this is the only way to live. Nor is it easy to understand why so many people are so prepared to accept the tired old clichés about the necessity of 'belt tightening' or, even more fancifully, that 'we are all in this together' that constitute the rhetoric of the legitimation of austerity. At no point, in any of the recurrent 'crises' of capitalism, has it been the case that the richest have borne the greater share of hard times.
