The explanation of the boom as a result of Keynesian policies is often combined with references to a "Fordist" period in which the great capitalist corporations accepted a compromise with workers based on wages high enough to buy a continually increasing amount of output. The French economist Michel Aglietta, for instance, has argued that "Fordism" regulated "private working class consumption" by "generalising the wage relation" to guarantee "the maintenance cycle of labour power".21 So, for him and his "Regulation School" version of Marxism, Keynes is the prophet of Fordism, with Keynes's criticism of neoclassical economics and his notion of "effective demand" a partial recognition of the need for production and consumption to be integrated at a certain stage of capitalist development.
Certainly, one element in the dominant state interventionist ideology of the post-war decades was the contention that welfare provision could counterbalance cyclical ups and downs in the demand for consumer goods. The "supply side" need of capital to ensure the reproduction of labour power for it to exploit (which we have looked at in Chapter Five) seemed to coincide with "demand side" worries about keeping markets expanding. Promises to expand welfare provision also suited social democrat and Christian Democrat parties in Europe as a way of winning votes and luring workers away from the Communist parties to their left. Yet none of this is adequate to explain why the global economy should boom in the post-war years after slumping pre-war.
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Capitalism in the 20th Century