The Reconstruction boom post-1945

The articles grouped together here give an account of an internal debate within the organisation, on the origins and driving forces behind the Reconstruction boom that followed the 1939-45 world war.

ICC internal debate on economics (Part 5): Chronic overproduction - An unavoidable fetter on capitalist accumulation

Submitted by International Review on

World debt has reached astronomical proportions, no longer making it possible to go on "re-launching" the economy through a new spiral of debt without threatening the financial credibility of states and the value of their currencies. Faced with this situation, revolutionaries have a responsibility to make an in-depth analysis of the ways in which capitalism has up till now kept its system artificially alive by "cheating" its own laws...

ICC internal debate on economics (Part 4): The causes of the post-1945 economic boom

Submitted by International Review on

For the fourth time since we began to publish elements of our internal debate in the International Review n°133 , we reproduce below a text on the explanation of the period of prosperity that followed World War II. The article below defends the thesis of "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism", which considers that the prosperity of the 1950-60s was based on the bourgeoisie's development of various Keynesian measures.

ICC internal debate on economics (Part 3): War economy and state capitalism

Submitted by International Review on

The principal purpose of this article is to develop some of the groundwork for the analysis of the post-1945 economic boom that was sketched out in International Review n°133 under the title "State capitalism and the war economy".

Our contention is that it is capitalism's driving forces which determine both the extraordinary dynamism of s ascendant period, impelling it from its beginnings in the city-states of Italy and Flanders to the creation of the first planetary society, and the enormous destructiveness of capitalism's decadent period that has subjected humanity to two world wars whose barbarity would have made Genghis Khan blench, and which today threaten our species' very existence.

 

ICC internal debate on economics (Part 2): The bases of capitalist accumulation

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The thesis we have titled "Extra-capitalist markets and debt", as its name suggests, considers that the outlets which made it possible to realise the surplus value necessary for capitalist accumulation in the 1950s and 60s were constituted by extra-capitalist markets and credit. During this period, debt gradually took over from the world's remaining extra-capitalist markets as these became inadequate to absorb all the commodities produced under capitalism...

ICC internal debate on economics (Part 1): The causes of the post-1945 economic boom

Submitted by International Review on

In this issue of the International Review, we are continuing the publication of our internal debate on the explanation of the post-war boom during the 1950s and 60s.
In this issue, we open our pages to the two positions which have not yet been the object of extended examination, with the following articles: "The bases of capitalist accumulation" (which defends the "Extra-capitalist markets and debt" thesis), and "War economy and state capitalism".

ICC internal debate: The causes of the post-war economic boom

Submitted by International Review on

In International Review n°133 we began the publication of a debate within the ICC on the underlying causes of the period of post-war prosperity during the 1950s-60s, which has proven to be an exceptional one in the history of capitalism since World War I. In that article, we posed the terms and framework of the debate, and presented briefly the main positions around which it has turned. We are publishing below a new contribution to the discussion.

This contribution supports the thesis presented in n°133 under the title "Keynesian-Fordist state capitalism", and attributes the creation of solvent demand during the post-war boom essentially to the Keynesian mechanisms set up by the bourgeoisie.

In future issues of the Review we will publish articles presenting the other positions in the debate, as well as a reply to this position in particular as regards the nature of capitalist accumulation and the factors determining capitalism's entry into its decadent phase.

 

Internal debate: the causes of the post-1945 economic boom

Submitted by International Review on

In spring 2005, the ICC launched an internal debate focused on the underlying causes of the economic boom that followed World War II, a period which remains an outstanding exception within the history of capitalism's decadence, achieving spectacular and then historically unprecedented overall growth rates for the world economy. The purpose of this article is to introduce briefly the framework of the debate as well as the main positions that have so far been adopted within it.

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