“If profitability is threatened, reforms must go.” Roberts should have added: but the state intervenes to maintain stability in society because absence of reforms sharpens class struggle. In orde to save capitalism, the capitalist state initiates reforms even if those reforms are minor or undermined in a later stage. The debate continues …
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51