Sheldon wrote:

There can be no doubt that capitalism’s historic crisis is deepening with a seeming disregard for the bourgeoisie’s various attempts to buy time. Even where austerity has been viciously enacted, there’s no indication that the crisis is being alleviated. Job cuts lead to more jobs being cut; human life is degraded at a terrifyingly exponential rate. This is a global trend, which even affects the economic “miracles” which the capitalist ideologists love to point to so much—the income disparity, the impact on the environment, the wonton disregard for human life is just as real in the periphery of the advanced capitalist nations as in California—one of the largest economies in the world!The only alternative for revolutionary minorities and our class is class struggle. The task of the future freedom of mankind is not in some bourgeois notion of “democracy,” but in the working class’ revolutionary consciousness and the struggle it wages to create a society where production is oriented along the principle of: from each according his ability and to each according to his need. This inability—in the end—to provide for human needs must be seen as the fundamental failing of capitalism.

  This is a good quote from Sheldon and I find, on rereading, that issues of Internationalism have a number of very readable blogs contained within, which for some unknown reason I have missed or taken lightly.  Perhaps it's the magazine's passion for detailed facts which has deterred this particular reader.  But look at the final sentence in the above paragraph. Isn't this a bit of a shocker?  The writer is not saying  that the fundamental problem for society is with the nature of capitalism itself, and all its mind-bending inner economic contradictions, and following this up with a lengthy economic analysis. Nor indeed is he saying that the gross decomposition of capitalist society, with its wars, austerity and suffering, is the fundamental problem, with human life being degraded at a terrifying exponential rate. But what he does say is the fundamental problem, and says it so simply and in so few words, is that capitalism is unable to provide for human needs.   I think that's marvelous and well said.  Anyone can understand it. Anyone can respond to its awesome significance.  We are living in a society that cannot satisfy humanity's needs.  How awful!   How terrible!  But this is all we need to know to push us to destroy the system. This is the foundation stone of the proletarian revolution.