Gibbonstrength posted:

angelbutt_dollface....i thought we told you NOT to argue with LIBERALS

My friends and acquaintences are all paleocons

angelbutt_dollface posted:

okay so there was the big one at the end of the 1800s, the depression in the 30s, the recession in the 70s, the dotcom bubble in the late 90s/early 2000s, the recession of 2007/2008 that we still are kind of limping along under. list some other ones

does the tulip trading thingey in denmark or w/e in the 1600s count? (probably not cuz industrial capitalism didnt exist then im dumb)

There were lots of discrete crises in the 19th century. Banking and finance were generally less regulated, especially in the US, and a lack of central banking, deposit insurance, etc., made financial panics a pretty regular event. The Long Depression starting in 1873 was the longest. These sorts of lists often focus on the US in particular and the West in general, because of greater financialization inducing more severe crises, better data in those regions, and just plain indifference to crises elsewhere, so you can definitely pad out your list with non-Western crises. The 1997-1998 Asian Crisis, for example, had a tremendous effect on the political economy of ASEAN countries, and was a formative experience for ASEAN policymakers, comparable to how the Great Depression, '70s stagflation, and 2007-2008 crisis were defining events that shaped the views of contemporaneous policymakers in the US.

That said, at this late date, I don't know that enumerating as many business cycle crises as possible is going to have the desired effect--your interlocutors might instead infer that, having weathered dozens if not hundreds of crises across the world, capitalism is extremely resilient to crisis, and that, despite future crises being inevitable, the end of capitalism is not forthcoming.

Rather than focusing on how capitalism has faced (and survived) business cycle crises many times in the past, you might instead focus on long term threats to capitalism that are currently coming to fruition:

1) Advanced economies are entering a period of secular stagnation, where growth rates are asymptotically dropping to zero (or a small positive number). The promise of a thinner slice of a larger pie--the inequality for growth bargain that rationalized capitalist economies in the 20th century--isn't feasible without growth.

2) Automation is devaluing the labor of an ever growing mass of workers, including professional workers like lawyers, accountants, and doctors who were insulated from this issue in the past, and funnelling that surplus towards capitalists. Countries like the US will inevitably be forced to make major changes to the way resources are allocated in the economy or face violent revolution. The fact that Silicon Valley capitalists are currently rallying around the idea of a minimum income, despite it disincentivizing work and thus being anathema to capital, demonstrates how serious this issue is becoming.

3) As the costs of climate change become more and more pronounced, and some parts of the world become hellscapes over the coming decades, there will almost certainly be a mass reaction against the myopic "profit today, tomorrow be damned" ethos of capitalism.