French Government Falls As Social-Democracy Falters Amid New Global Debt Crisis - Part 2 of 9

This was not a crisis-free capitalism. As Mandel describes, for example, in “The Second Slump”, there were, in fact, five cyclical recessions in the period after WWII, even before the “Second Slump” that began in 1974. But, unlike the previous cyclical recessions, or the slump of the 1920's and 30's, social-democracy even seemed to have got the measure of that, as a result of its increasing planning and regulation of the economy, utilising Keynesian demand management techniques, and combining fiscal and monetary policy. As Mandel notes, it did not prevent recessions, such as that of 1957, but it did significantly curtail the severity and duration of them.

Social-democracy, via these same methods, and under the auspices of the hegemony of US imperialism, sought not only to plan and regulate the national economy, but also the global economy. It established international, para state institutions for that purpose, such as The World Bank, IMF, GATT/WTO and so on, not to mention the UN and its various funds and organisations that performed like a global welfare state. All of those institutions were fundamental elements to the creation of a global economy, and single global market. Within that process, also, reflecting a combined and uneven development, Western Europe achieved the goal of economic union, by voluntary agreement, in the form of the EU, to compete with the US, which had formed into a large federal state via its Civil War. Similar politico-economic blocs were established in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

So long as US hegemony remained, this was all fine, because all of these institutions and all of the global planning and regulation, designed to create order, and a rules based system, were, of course, mostly to the benefit of the dominant economies, particularly the US economy, and its multinational companies. Even within these large multinational blocs, the old tensions remained. Germany and France dominate the EU, and gradually came closer, as symbolised by the alliance between Chirac and Kohl, but as Marx and Engels describe in relation to business trusts and cartels, they tend to fracture in periods of crisis, requiring the establishment of a single centralised power, which in the case of blocs like the EU, means the establishment of a single centralised state. It is why British imperialism, tied to US imperialism, has always been at odds with the EU.

Marx and Engels noted that, in the 19th century, when the state intervened to establish laws such as the Factory Acts and so on, the main beneficiaries of that, were not just the workers, but also the large-scale capitals, because they could afford to operate on that basis, and, indeed, as Robert Owen and others had shown, these ways of operating, actually raised productivity and with it profitability. It acted to further spur capital concentration and centralisation, and hasten the demise not just of the petty-bourgeois producers, but of the smaller private capitals themselves. The further development of that large-scale, socialised capital, now organised by armies of professional middle class managers, administrators, bookkeepers, technocrats and so on, on the basis of scientific management, standardisation, regulation and planning, all borrowing from the methods of the encroaching new socialist society, however, was all still conducted on the basis of meeting the needs of capital not labour, and, when it came to the global order, it was still done for the benefit of US capital.

But, the contradictory nature of capitalism, in its imperialist stage, is also, characterised by the development identified by Robert Owen, even before it was more scientifically analysed by Marx and Engels.

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