The other advanced capitalisms
The picture so far has been of the US economy in the post-war boom. It was responsible for approaching half of total world output at the end of the war, and its dynamic determined to a great extent what happened elsewhere. But the big European economies, with substantial but lower levels of arms spending, showed many of the same features. In Britain and to a lesser extent France, great investments in arms industries had the effect of drawing the rest of the economy forward, counteracting some of the pressures for the organic composition to rise and the rate of profit to fall, and permitting continual economic expansion-all without resort to Keynesian measures.
In Germany armaments were less important. But the role of the government remained important. One Marxist account tells how:
far more than in any other capitalist country the bourgeoisie in the Federal Republic made use of the state apparatuses and the monetary and fiscal system to force capital accumulation by means of favourable depreciation rates, credits for reconstruction at favourable rates of interest and finance for investment. All this took place in contradiction to the official neoliberal economic theory . . . 33
In Japan state capitalism advanced further in its influence over civilian industry than almost anywhere else in the Western world-despite a low level of direct state ownership. The state and the largest private firms worked together to ensure that that portion of the national income that had gone into arms before 1945 now went into productive investment:
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Capitalism in the 20th Century