When that ‘golden age of capitalism’ broke down in the 1970s, it paved the way for the Thatcher and Reagan era of deregulation, privatisation and free-market globalisation, which led ultimately to the 2007–2008 international financial crisis and the subsequent global recession of 2009. The post-war era, to which much is owed to John Maynard Keynes – from his critique of the post-World War One settlement (Keynes, 1919), to his magnum opus on how to tackle recession and unemployment (Keynes 1936), through to his role in the Bretton Woods planning for new economic institutions and policies for a regulated and co-operative economic regime. There have been historic attempts to create more sustainable models of economic activity, still based on the capitalist system, most notably out of the wreckage of the speculative frenzy that led to the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the global Great Depression of the 1930s that amongst other things contributed to the rise of Nazism and the path to World War Two. Today, a large part of that energy and action goes on speculation and deal-making, trying to grab a bigger size of the existing pie – baked by someone else – rather than contribute towards the production or creation of new goods and services. That fundamental driving force of the system to produce more and more, on an ever-expanding scale, to out-compete your rivals lost its primacy long ago. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.
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