(snip)
First, the fundamental viability of the capitalist system, particularly within the United States, and its historical immutability cannot be questioned. As Martin Wolf declares categorically in the column quoted above, "no credible alternative to the market economy exists..." This view, held even by more thoughtful analysts like Wolf, is bound up with another conception: that this crisis is the product of circumstances that, however dreadful in their cumulative impact, are somehow external to the economic system. The cause of the crisis is not to be found in the essential nature of the profit system. Rather, the problem lies in the environment within which it presently operates.
5. Marxism rejects such a superficial view. It maintains a historically critical attitude toward capitalism, and explains the present crisis as the outcome of contradictions that are embedded, so to speak, in the socioeconomic DNA of the capitalist mode of production. Bourgeois economists and journalists, in contrast, adopt an apologetic approach to capitalism, which denies the existence of economic contradictions that lead inexorably to crisis and breakdown. But, as Karl Marx explained:
"Crises exist because these contradictions exist. Every reason which they put forward against crisis is an exorcised contradiction, and, therefore, a real contradiction, which can cause crises. The desire to convince oneself of the non-existence of contradictions, is at the same time the expression of a pious wish that the contradictions, which are really present, should not exist (Theories of Surplus Value, Book II , p. 519)." http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/dnor-m26.shtml
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