{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":175,"pdf_page":175,"physical_index":175,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"edc32afa297480e2018b5ce34632ff4fac5e0e1c94edd6023a9a630d27b26ee0"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Yet even this limited \"negation\" of the free labour market was a burden that put up the overheads of each national capital. As such they exerted a downward pressure on the rate of return on the total national investment. For a long period this did not seem to matter. Other factors were at work protecting the rate of profit. But once the upward dynamic of the boom began to weaken, the costs of welfare became a crucial problem. The two functions-of increasing productivity and buying consent-were no longer complementary. Capital had to try to reduce the cost of maintaining and increasing productivity, even if doing so upset its old mechanisms for keeping control over the working class. This was to be an important factor shaping class struggle once the long boom faltered.\n\nThe Eastern bloc\n\nThe Western economies and Japan were not the only ones to achieve rapid growth rates during the post-war decades. So too did the USSR and the countries it dominated in Eastern Europe. Soviet electricity output grew by 500 percent between 1950 and 1966, steel output by just under 250 percent, oil output by 600 percent, tractor output by 200 percent, fabric output by 100 percent, shoe output by 100 percent, the housing stock by 100 percent.42 By the mid-1970s the same consumer goods which had transformed people's lives in Western Europe and North America-the television set, the refrigerator, the washing machine-were also making their appearance in Soviet and East European homes, even if more slowly.43 Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1 989-91 it has usually been forgotten that in the 1950s and 1960s even by many Western opponents of the USSR took it for granted that its growth rate was higher than regimes elsewhere in the world had achieved. A trenchant critic of the system, Alec Nove could write, \"The success of the Soviet Union . . . in making itself the world's second industrial and military power is indisputable\" . 44\n\nBut simply growing fast did not overcome the external pressures for more growth, since even after decades of industrialisation the\n\nThe Long Boom\n\n175","previous_page":174,"next_page":176}