I'm surprised that Globalization and technology doesn't merit a mention in his thesis (or at least your summary of it).  Globalization seems to me to have been the ultimate delaying strategy for the crisis of capitalism - proving a source for cheap labour and materials when local resources ran short, and when inflation made them more expensive for capital to employ.

Globalization, for a time, allowed increased living standards in metropolitan/imperial countries so long as their workers kept moving up the food/knowledge chain and so the middle classes were kept happy - their superior qualifications enabled them to maintain or even increase their differentials with the manual labouring classes.

Now, of course, even "professional" jobs are being automated and undercut by cheaper labour from abroad and so the alliance between capital and the middle classes in metropolitan countries is breaking down.  The middle classes are being decimated, and all the gains are going to the top 1%.

The other factor, it seems to me, which delayed the crises is unprecedentedly rapid technological change, which enabled productivity increases to continue even as working hours reduced, and gave first mover advantage to the middle classes in metropolitan countries - an advantage which is now gradually being eroded.

Finally, I see no mention of "Corpocracy", the way in which globalization has enabled the rise of global conglomerates with far more power than most nation states, and which indeed can play off nation states against each other - fomenting wars to both weaken the nations states involved - and to force them to buy military and other hardware, and also encouraging a "race to the bottom" in terms of corporate taxation and regulation and reinforcing the power of corporates vs. democracies.

The Citizens United and other rulings by the SCOTUS has now formalised corpocracy by ascribing to corporates the rights of free speech and religious observance and reducing citizens to employees and supplicants.  What previously would have been seen as bribery, corruption and religious oppression is now legitimated as the divine right of corporates which over-rides those of citizenship.

What we see is not so much a "capital strike" as an overwhelming victory by capital in the class war, with democracy merely the cloak which adds a little respectability to the naked greed and exploitation of 99% of people and the planet.

Index of Frank's Diaries