It is certainly too early to tell. Capital has overcome systemic crises of accumulation before: between Schumpeter and Arrighi (among others), we have pretty good accounts of this. But it generously does it by shaking itself apart and reforming, under a new hegemonic flag, at a larger scale (As the British Empire to the United Provinces, the US Empire to the British). The thing is: large has limits. Maybe China, as everyone suspects. But maybe not; it's simply not clear how the transfer of power would happen, or if China (or anyone else) can actually have a more expansive and totalizing grasp of the world economy. 

I agree Jane Dark. The price mechanism is important to capitalism and it is surely being challenged by current struggles in currencies markets but it is not history. More to the point, social property relations have yet to undergo any seismic shift. Capital still exploits labor for profit and nothing has replaced capitalism on a systemic level.

Its clear from Marx that crisis is built into the Capitalist system to allow it to become stronger and update itself. With the new virtual classes causing massive shifts in spacial relations through the process of a virutalization of a second life, superimposed upon what could be called a real life. Capital continues to deterritorize the globe, the success of 'collaborative culture' in becoming the new hegemonic ideal, only shows that capital is far from dead. The fact so many people blindly uses the internet, not aware that information is THE  commodity to exchange, every keystroke is gathering information and thus making money. The internet is all rented space, we bring work home, we work for free, we create content and profiles, we attract people to websites, we create virtual communities from social networks, all on the tools we are provided with, which are themselves exploitation's of our General Intellect. Thus one can not even think about declaring an end to capitalism, an end to one form yes, but the information revolution through the communicative industries will have the same effect as the industrial revolutions. The internet is not a democratic place, rather it is a space where a puppet master(s) pulls the strings and makes us dance to his tune.

Agreed—Joshua's was a great, provocative piece, especially on the shortcomings of even the best narratives of the financial crisis (like Lanchester's), and on where to look for structural explanations. And of course it is in Harvey's other works, as well as Brenner, Gowan and Arrighi, that we get fuller accounts of how capitalism addresses and overcomes periodic crises. Though I think Joshua was right in one of his final asides: some of the Obama administration (including Summers?), and many commentators, think that a likely and possibly sufficient solution would be a revaluation of the renminbi. Many European countries are locked into a serious battle over who should suffer most as their economies contract or stagnate, but that debate hasn't happened to the same extent in the US—apart from the question of extending Bush's tax cuts. 

Hmm, someone has agreed with me by saying something different. "Too early to tell" is very different from "no end in sight." The article itself argues that it's too soon to tell...but that there are actual "limits to capital," and that's what I've said above. Harvey, Arrighi, Brenner are all differently articulate on the idea that capital does in fact face real horizons; it can reform itself, but that doesn't mean it always will (see Adam Smith in Beijing, Turbulence, Limits to Capital, etc etc). 

btw, this is Joshua — jane dark is just a handle, and I didn't want to mislead anyone. 

Is wage labour about to disappear? Are not pre-industrial land-owners still  fiercely battling capitalism's encroachements? And if the new, upcoming, ruling class certainly holds most capital owners in its dependency, has it developed its new way of organizing production to the extent that it could reduce capital accumulation to insignificance? Capitalism is ruining many people's lives (and so, for hundreds of millions, are pre-capitalist land owners), but it is still the driving force of most material production, without which, of course, we would cease to debate.

Read my book (which I hope Verso will publish), The Pagan Christian Right, on the militant Christian Right:  as an anthropologist/archaeologist, I discern our militant Christian Right is a present manifestation of the 4000+-year-old Indo-European cultural tradition of militancy, in the Bronze Age called the Battle-ax culture.  This powerful ethos of competition, Hobbes'   , is the essence of capitalism in our culture.  Maybe the economics will change but the ethos of I'm-getting-mine-the-hell-with- you isn't going away.  Alice Kehoe 28 September 2010