Power, Accumulation, and Crisis: The Rise and Demise of the Postwar Social Structure of Accumulation
Author(s)
Gordon, David M.; Weisskopf, Thomas E.; Bowles, Samuel
Abstract
In the United States, the period immediately after World War II was one of prosperity, rising expectations and falling inequality. By the end of the 1970s, however, the trends in economic growth, earnings and productivity which marked this “Golden Age” had faltered. High inflation and sluggish growth in the late 1970s (stagflation) were followed by steep recession in the early 1980s and the resurgence of inequality. The authors of the chapter summarized here trace the reversal of the Golden Age to the mid-1960s when profitability began to decline. Their analysis, based in a Marxian framework, proposes that the economic regime which gave rise to postwar prosperity was inherently contradictory and ultimately unsustainable.
