What is more, there was no conscious policy by the "Fordist" managers of mass production industries to opt for such a supposed "Keynesian" policy of raising real wages and welfare provision. As Robert Brenner and Mark Glick say, US capital never:
resigned itself to the principle of maintaining labour's share or failed to fight tooth and nail to limit the degree to which wages kept up with the cost of living or with productivity. There was never anything resembling a generalised "social contract" on how revenue was to be divided between investment and consumption or between profits and wages. 22
The reality was that as capitalism expanded in the post-war decades, the full employment that resulted forced employers and the state to pay much more attention than previously to reproducing labour power and deflecting working class discontent. Both the conventional Keynesian account and "Regulation" theory confuse causes with effects. In the process they fail to account for the most significant feature of the post-war decades: the rate of profit in the US was between 50 and 100 percent higher than in the four decades before the Second World War. And it more or less sustained that higher level until the late 1960s.23 It was this which explained why capitalists kept investing on a scale sufficient to keep the economy booming without most states needing even to try using the "counter-cyclical measures" suggested by Keynes. But how were such high profit rates achieved and sustained alongside rapidly rising real wages?
Part of the answer lies in the impact of the slump and the war. Some firms had gone bankrupt in the slump. Much capital had been written off. Restructuring through crisis had begun to perform some of its old role of allowing capital to undertake renewed accumulation with a lower rate of profit. The destruction of the war provided further assistance. Vast amounts of investment which would otherwise have raised the ratio of investment to labour (and therefore profits) were instead used for military purposes. Shane Mage, for instance, estimated the combined effect of the crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War on the US economy: "Between 1930 and 1945 the capital stock of the US fell from 145 billion dollars to 120 billion dollars, a net disinvestment of some 20 percent" .24 Written off was an amount equal to a fifth of the pre-existing accumulated surplus value plus all the additional surplus value produced over those 15 years. Meanwhile, capitalists in the defeated states, Germany and Japan, emerged from the war with much of their capital destroyed. They had no choice but to write off much of the value of old investments as they began accumulation afresh, with a skilled labour force forced to accept low wages by the massive unemployment resulting from military devastation.
The Long Boom
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