Activity

Neo-Keynesian success brought its own downfall in over-accumulation, over-production, and sundry other dislocations: OPEC price hikes in oil, stagflation, the beginnings of financialization, the transfer of production to low-wage areas, the end of social compromise and the appearance of the disastrous, neoliberal solution of market fundamentalism that would reach its peak in the 1980s and 90s.

Lessons learnt and the demands of sacrificing masses forced advanced capitalism after the War into a golden age of reform and relative equality, regulated by cooperating nation-states under the benign hegemony of the US and by the framework of the Bretton Woods system.

Yet this is largely belied by his account of its actual trajectory.

The initial polarity here is between ideology along Durkheimian lines as a power-enhancing means of solidarity and cohesion in social formations, and ideology as Weberian value-rationality, where there can be no adjudication between ultimate values.

history as civilizational leaps has typically been a dialectical process of material advances followed by marcher lord conquest and a greater geographical stage (empire)