Kidron's logic found empirical confirmation in what actually happened to the organic composition of capital. Its rise in the post-war decades in the US was much slower than in the pre-slump decades.28 It was also much lower than that which occurred in post-war Europe, where the proportion of national output going into arms spending was considerably lower than in the US.29
Arms, accumulation and planning
The arms economies were not a result of a conscious strategy aimed at warding off slumps. They followed from the logic of imperialist competition in the Cold War era. But sections of capital certainly appreciated their effects in keeping the boom going. "Military-industrial complexes" emerged, drawing together the military and those in charge of the arms industries, which had a direct interest in pushing forward the inter-imperialist conflicts. They were able to unite the ruling class as a whole behind their policies not only because of fear of the rival power, but also because of the effect of arms budgets in sustaining accumulation.
John Kenneth Galbraith described in the 1960s the inter-relation between government expenditure and what he termed the "planning system" by which each large corporation planned its investments many years in advance:
Although there is a widespread supposition to the contrary, this increase [in state expenditures] . . . has the strong approval of the businessmen of the planning system. The executive of the great corporation routinely opposes prodigality in government expenditure. But from his pleas for public economy defence expenditures are meticulously excluded.30
One effect of such expenditures was to allow the great corporations to undertake long-term planning of their own investments with the assurance that they would be able to make a profit on them and turn it into cash by selling their goods ("realising their surplus value", to use Marx's terminology). This changed their internal operations in ways which seemed to contradict the usual assumption about capitalist behaviour being motivated by shortterm profit requirement and price competition for markets.
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Capitalism in the 20th Century