Today the sheer scale of integration of national economies means that serious implementation of state capitalist solutions would cause enormous disruption to the system as a whole. Yet for national states simply to sit back and leave giant firms to go bust in the hope of crises liquidating themselves, as the Hayekians preach, would do even greater damage. The two long-term tendencies pointed to by Marx-for the rate of profit to fall on the one hand and for the concentration and centralisation of capital on the other-combine to put the whole system in a noose. The attempts of capitals and the states in which they are based to wriggle out of it can only increase the tensions between them-and the pain they inflict on those whose labour sustains them.
As states stepped in to intervene in the economy to cope with the crisis after October 2008, some sections of the left believed that the resurrection of Keynes meant the resurrection of the welfare policies of the long boom. In Britain, Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London, declared that the "economic assumptions of New Labour's thinking . . . have been abandoned". Polly Toynbee proclaimed, "At last, the party of social justice has woken up . . . The New Labour era is over." Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of the biggest UK trade union, Unite, saw the pre-budget report as "a welcome warm up exercise after 30 years of inaction and neoliberal economics". Yet reality soon proved otherwise. The government aimed to pay for a short-term economic boost with long-term cutbacks in expenditure on education, health and social services. The new Keynesianism for capital was combined with a continuation of neoliberalism for those who worked for it.
This was not a peculiarity of Britain. In every sector of the world system the attempt to deal with long-term downward pressures on profit rates continued to mean efforts to push through counter-reforms in working hours, welfare provision, wage rates and pensions. The push was intensified as global economic growth fell to zero and threatened to fall further. The turn to
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