The individual capitalist managers and individual state managers could rely for a time on the sheer size of the resources at their disposal to try to ignore these pressures. But they could not do so indefinitely. At some point they had to face hard choices if they were not to risk collapse: they could try to impose the law of value on those who laboured for them through what could be a painful and hazardous process of internal restructuring; or they could take desperate gambles in order to try to shift the global balance of forces in their favour. For the civilian corporation this might mean pouring resources into one last, possibly fraudulent, marketing ploy; for those running the state, to try to use its military force to compensate for its economic weakness. Hence the way in which the real history of capitalism in the 20th century was very different to the picture of peaceful and honest competition presented in economic textbooks-and accepted by some Marxists who have not understood the need to look at the real social relations which lie beneath surface appearances.
Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State
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