Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory is a theory of stages of capitalism. Capitalist stage theory focuses on periods intermediate in length between a short-run business cycle and overall capitalist history. These periods consist of a long period of relatively stable capitalist accumulation followed by a relatively long period of crisis and breakdown. Each of the periods of accumulation is underpinned by a set of institutions designated as an SSA. Examples from the United States include the competitive capitalist SSA in the latter half of the nineteenth century followed by the long depression, the monopoly capitalist SSA established at the beginning of the twentieth century and ending in the Great Depression and the postwar SSA, which ended with the Great Stagflation of the 1970s.
In a capitalist system, class divisions and capitalist competition combined with the central role of profit-making lead to periodic institutional instabilities and the interruption of accumulation. For stable accumulation to resume, these sources of instability must be countered through the construction of a new set of enduring economic, political and ideological institutions. The construction of such a social structure underpins the profit rate and creates secure expectations that stimulate long-term investment. This is the basis of a new period of accumulation and the new stage of capitalism. The ensemble of these institutions is the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA).
As accumulation proceeds the institutions of an SSA are undermined by class conflict, capitalist competition and the process of accumulation itself. These forces and the interdependence of the institutions eventually lead to a breakdown in the set of institutions, a fall in the profit rate and the collapse of accumulation, initiating a period of crisis that is only overcome with the construction of a new set of institutions. Thus capitalist stages are constituted by the sets of interdependent economic, political and ideological institutions that underpin relatively successful periods of accumulation. The period of growth then ends with a succeeding period of crisis in which accumulation is slower and unstable. (For useful collections of articles explaining, reviewing and applying the SSA approach see Kotz, McDonough and Reich [1994]; McDonough, Reich and Kotz 2010; McDonough, Kotz and Reich 2014].)
The Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) framework arose in the United States in the wake of the collapse of what many have termed the “Golden Age” of post-World War II capitalism. The mid-1970s was a period of capitalist crisis characterized by simultaneously high levels of unemployment and high levels of inflation. This “Great Stagflation” appeared to run counter to Keynesian orthodoxy, which held that the two macroeconomic problems should not increase simultaneously. This contradiction prompted a theoretical shift that developed alongside the period of economic distress. Monetarism and a variety of new free-market economic theories (e.g., supply-side economics, rational expectations and real business cycles) increasingly came to dominate establishment economics. These had in common a different role for government—lower taxes, deregulation and shifting income away from labor— policies that have been termed neo liberalism. The more radical Post-Keynesian school sought to resolve the problems by returning to the importance of uncertainty in Keynes’ theory of investment and leavened this by explaining inflation as the result of distributional conflict. Some Marxian thinkers saw this new crisis as another crisis of capitalism similar to the two “Great Depressions”—the long depression at the end of the nineteenth century and the more familiar Great Depression of the 1930s. This observation would lead to the promulgation of general theories of capitalist stages and their subsequent crises.
Marxist theories of capitalist crisis had tended to locate crisis in fundamental tendencies of the capitalist economy which were always potentially present. These tendencies included the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, disproportionalities among economic sectors and a tendency for either overproduction or underconsumption. Thus the emergence of crisis would be the present expression these long-run secular tendencies. The new theories that arose in the 1970s and early 1980s in the wake of the stagflationary crisis did not share the same emphasis on these tendencies. Crises could arise due to the breakdown of the institutional framework which conditioned the previous period of capitalist expansion. Some of the previously identified secular crisis tendencies could play a role in the breakdown of a particular SSA, but they would not all necessarily be present in every crisis. This argument defined recurring crisis periods as more serious than downward fluctuations of the ordinary business cycle, but not as the expression of an ultimate crisis of capitalism.
In defining crisis in this way, these theories drew on another tradition within the Marxian literature. This was a stage theoretic tradition that began with Hilferding’s (1910) seminal work on finance capital. Hilferding’s work sought to explain the recovery of capitalism after the long depression at the end of the nineteenth century. While emphasizing the emergence of the dominance of finance capital, Hilferding developed a multi-institutional analysis which identified a number of important transformations in capitalism that served to resolve the long depression and inaugurate an era of renewed capitalist expansion. Nicolai Bukharin (1915) recapitulated Hilferding’s multifactoral argument while placing the emphasis on the globalization of economic activity. The possibility of this shift of emphasis highlights the holistic character of this kind of analysis. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin (1917) summarized Hilferding’s argument but laid emphasis instead on the emergence of the monopoly stage. It was possible in these arguments for the emergence of finance capital or imperialism to temporarily resolve a crisis and set the foundations of a new stage of capitalism. This tradition was to be carried forward in the work of Ernest Mandel (1970; 1978; 1980), Paul Sweezy (1968) and Paul Baran (Baran and Sweezy 1966)
The new theories emphasized not only the recurring periods of crisis but also the periods of capitalist stability and expansion that preceded the crises. Crises arose after long periods (averaging twenty-five to thirty years) of relatively unproblematic capitalist reproduction and accumulation. In this way attempts to understand the serious character of the stagflationist crisis of the 1970s led to the formulation of theories of long periods of capitalist growth as well as long periods of capitalist crisis. These were variously characterized as theories of long waves in capitalist history and theories of capitalist stages. The new theories thus proposed an intermediate level of capitalist crisis, a new theory of long waves in capitalist history and a theory of capitalist stages.
Two strands of this approach arose in Europe. Ernest Mandel contributed his monumental work Late Capitalism (1978). Mandel’s work on long waves was not, however, extensively developed by subsequent authors. The French Regulation School has been much more influential. Michel Aglietta’s A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (1979) became the founding document of this school. The Regulation School contended that the dynamic tendencies of capitalism had to be institutionally “regulated” if they were not to prompt instability and crisis. The school identified different “regimes of accumulation” that united varieties of production regimes with the social consumption norms needed to realize profits. They also theorized “modes of regulation,” which brought in other institutions such as money and the state. The regime of accumulation and an associated mode of regulation could create a period of capitalist stability like the post-World War II “Fordist” era. The potential of these institutional arrangements to underpin growth would, however, eventually become exhausted, leading to a period of crisis.
At roughly the same time as these European developments, the SSA framework emerged in the United States. Its founding document was Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformations of Labor in the United States, written by David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich. David Gordon (1978; 1980) had previously published two articles that developed an approach to long cycle theory and stages of capitalist development. Gordon’s innovations were undertaken against the background of the American Monopoly Capital School founded earlier by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. The Monopoly Capital School saw the Great Depression years as the expression of the long-run stagnationist tendency of monopoly capital (as first described by Lenin), which was only temporarily interrupted by the post-World War II expansion. In Baran and Sweezy’s view, this expansion was consequent on a unique set of historical circumstances that were unlikely to be repeated, so that the stagnationist tendencies of monopoly capitalism were bound to reassert themselves.
The question that Gordon’s long wave reformulation posed to the monopoly stage of capitalism tradition was whether the postwar expansion was not simply a confluence of circumstances but rather a powerful institutional reorganization of American capitalism, historically analogous to the earlier organization of monopoly capitalism. Gordon proposed a set of newly arrived institutions that accounted for the long period of American postwar prosperity. These included multinational corporations, dual labor markets, American international hegemony, a conservative version of Keynesianism and bureaucratic systems of workplace control. The crisis of the 1970s was consequent on the breakdown of the ability of these institutions to underpin further successful accumulation.
The addition of a new period of profound institutional transformation to the previously analyzed transition to monopoly capitalism raised the question: Could these successive institutional transformations be generalized in a comprehensive theory of the inauguration of stages of capitalism? In Segmented Work, Divided Workers, Gordon, Edwards and Reich firmly answered this question by proposing that both the monopoly capital transition and the post-World War II transition rested on the construction of Social Structures of Accumulation. The construction of an SSA formed the institutional basis for a new stage of capitalism. The disintegration of this SSA marked the termination of this stage.
In Segmented Work the framework was refined and perhaps more importantly applied to explain the history of capital-labor relations in the United States. The three authors had earlier brought segmented labor market theory together with the theorization of the transition to monopoly capital. Yoking the SSA approach to the history of capital-labor relations provided a clarifying framework for this history and at the same time provided a powerful illustration of the potential utility of the theory of SSAs. Gordon, Edwards and Reich had constructed a theory of long waves of growth and stagnation, a theory of capitalist stages, an intermediate theory of capitalist crisis and a framework for the understanding of major transitions in the history of capitalist institutions.
All the theories of capitalist stages have undergone changes and developments over the last few decades. More orthodox Marxists have generally rejected theories of capitalist stages, perhaps because Marxists in the value theoretic tradition that emphasizes the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall have been concerned to develop a secular theory of crisis. This approach has denied that the global neoliberal era that succeeded the Great Stagflation represented a resolution, however temporary, of that crisis. These analysts have seen the entire period since the mid-1970s as one of uninterrupted crisis. Thus Mandel’s hypothesis of the possibility of capitalist recovery despite his affirmation of the falling rate of profit has lost contemporary relevance for these theorists.
Many Regulation School concepts have by contrast been widely diffused in the radical academy. The postwar regime of accumulation, which combined mass production with a linking of wages and productivity and then mass consumption, was labelled as “Fordism.” This conception was widely discussed in conjunction with “the crisis of Fordism” and speculation on the nature of the “Post-Fordism” that was succeeding the earlier regime. In the face of this success, however, the Francophone Regulation School shifted its theoretical moorings. Renouncing Marxian theory, the French Regulation School has searched for an alternative theoretical framework in institutionalism and a microeconomics of “conventions.”
The SSA framework has attracted more subsequent work than Mandel’s theory of long waves but has not been as widely utilized as the Regulation School’s characterization of Fordism and Post-Fordism. At the same time, it has largely retained its theoretical coherence. Writing in the late 1990s, Michael Reich (1997) identified the SSA perspective as rooted in “Marxian insights concerning class conflict over production and distribution at the workplace and in the political arena, and by Marxian and Keynesian macroeconomic analyses.” This characterization is still basically accurate, although the American institutionalist tradition should also be acknowledged.
Initially the SSA framework was closely associated with the macro-modelling work of Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf in examining the “rise and demise” of the postwar SSA. In Beyond the Wasteland: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline, Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf (1983) argued that the postwar SSA rests on three buttresses, Pax Americana, the limited capital-labor accord and the capitalist-citizen accord. These institutions originally raised the profit rate and their disintegration brought lower profit rates and the onset of crisis. This argument was further developed in a series of academic articles (Weisskopf, Bowles and Gordon 1983; Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1986; 1989). In these articles, Weisskopf et al. (1983) find econometric support for the hypothesis that variations in profitability can be explained by variations in quantitative indicators of capitalist power in the postwar SSA. This modelling has been extended to Greece and South Korea (Mihail 1983; Jeong 1997), but has not been a major focus of the SSA literature in recent years. Nevertheless there has been further progress in the statistical identification of long waves of accumulation in a number of countries (Goldstein 1999; Li, Xiao and Zhu 2007).
The framework has been extended to countries outside of its initial application to the United States. India has proven to be an interesting arena for SSA studies. In India Working, Barbara Harriss-White (2003) applies an SSA approach which emphasizes the social institutions that condition accumulation at a given point in time. She concentrates on a tight analysis of the informal economy outside the major urban areas. Gender, religion, space, classes and the state are all central to the analysis.
Shilpa Ranganathan and Harland Prechel (2007) develop a more historical analysis of SSAs in India. They identify a transition from colonial capitalism to national capitalism in the immediate post-colonial era. Significantly, another transition occurs to a more transnational form of capitalism following a debt crisis in 1991. William I. Robinson (2003; 2004; 2008) has developed comprehensive accounts of the history of SSAs in Latin America, addressing both Central and South America. He has located these developments in the context of his broader work, which argues that globalization is a qualitatively new epoch in world capitalism, characterized by the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and the re-articulation of most countries into a global production and financial system. The SSA framework has also been controversially applied to understanding apartheid in South Africa (Heintz 2002).
The SSA framework has been used to analyze the history of specific institutions. Prominently, a “spatialization” school has sought to directly extend Gordon, Edwards and Reich’s history of labor control strategies into the modern era. Gordon, Edwards and Reich identified successive labor control strategies in proletarianization, homogenization and segmentation. Michael Wallace and David Brady (2010) identify a spatialization strategy based on controlling labor through capital mobility and the threat of capital flight. Following the original argument in Segmented Work, they argue this strategy forms the basis of the current SSA.
In addition to labor control, another strand of the literature has taken up the broader issue of social control in general. David E. Barlow, Melissa H. Barlow and Theodore G. Chiricos (1993, 146) observe that
the criminal justice system is a vital component of the social structure of accumulation in capitalist societies. As the capitalist state’s most openly coercive form of social control, criminal justice plays a critical role in maintaining social order, and thereby, establishing a favourable business climate.
They then conduct a careful long-wave/SSA history of criminal justice policy in the U.S. from 1789 to the present day. Raymond J. Michalowski and Susan M. Carlson (2000) examine the relationship between unemployment, crime and imprisonment. They accord great importance to distinct phases within SSAs.
Phillip Anthony O’Hara (1995) adds the family to the set of institutions that are crucial to conditioning accumulation in the U.S. in the postwar period. He also emphasizes the importance of household labor in general in capitalist economies. Racial questions are addressed by Francisco Valdes and Sumi Cho (2011). They use the SSA perspective as one source for the development of a critical race materialism. This critical race materialism then allows a reframing of the SSA analysis that includes racial dynamics.
Martin H. Wolfson (2013) has used the SSA framework as a backdrop to understand the history of finance in the United States. On a more microeconomic level, Harland Prechel (2000) has developed an SSA analysis of transitions in corporate form and strategy.
Kent A. Klitgaard and co-authors (Hall and Klitgaard 2012; Klitgaard and Krall 2012) have argued that ecological economics has made progress in understanding how the human economy is necessarily embedded in the larger biophysical ecosystem, drawing sustenance from that system and impacting on it. They contend, on the other hand, that ecological economics has an insufficiently sophisticated theory of the internal dynamics of the capitalist economy and its limits expressed in recurrent crises. They have proposed that SSA theory is well poised to fill this gap.
Finally, SSA theory has been brought up to date through a discussion of the emergence of a new SSA after the stagflationary crisis. This is found in institutional changes such as neoliberalism, globalization and financialization. This recent period has been characterized in a number of different ways. In parallel with the first writing on capitalist stages at the turn of the twentieth century, the analysis is multi-factoral, but with different writers placing particular emphasis on different institutions. Kotz and McDonough (2010) characterize the current SSA as global neoliberalism. Asimakopoulos (2009) describes a world SSA based on global segmentation of labor. Brady and Wallace, as discussed earlier, base the new SSA on the spatialization of labor control. William K. Tabb (2012) argues that financialization is the most important element of the current SSA. William I. Robinson (2012) contends, in line with his earlier work, that globalization is a qualitatively new epoch in world capitalism, characterized by the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and the re-articulation of most countries into a global production and financial system.
Both David M. Kotz (2010) and Duncan K. Foley (2012) use an analysis of the recent SSA and its crisis to categorize different kinds of structural crises. Kotz distinguishes between the crises that end a regulated form of SSA and those that end a liberal SSA. The latter are more severe, less easily resolved and more system-threatening. He contends that this is the kind of crisis we are facing today. Foley draws a distinction between crises caused by falling profitability and those caused by rising exploitation. The current crisis is of the latter type, and solving a severe shortfall in demand is the precondition for emerging from the crisis.
While a solid body of theory and applications has been established within the SSA framework, there are a number of tasks which remain pressing. There has been relatively little discussion of the philosophy of social science underlying SSA theory. Other Marxian approaches to capitalist stage theory have implicitly assumed a traditional dialectical materialism or an Althusserian approach (Lipietz 1993). Since the SSA approach proposes an intermediate level of structure between the conjuncture and the totality of capitalist history, this suggests an underlying depth ontology with layered social structures operating at multiple levels. One direction in which to pursue this would be within the critical realist philosophy founded by British philosopher Roy Bhaskar. The establishment of a depth ontology for stages of capitalism will involve the examination of actual determinative structures at play on several levels of abstraction and at the temporalities of capitalist history in total, the capitalist stage and the conjuncture. Such an analysis must ask whether a realist depth ontology actually functions to clarify the multileveled expression of social structures in a periodized capitalist history, thus serving as an underlaborer for stage theory.
The current conception of institutions within the SSA framework is borrowed from the Veblenian tradition of institutional economics. As such it is a rough and ready, partially empirical notion of institution revolving around custom, habits, rules and laws. These institutions are then regarded within the SSA framework as the crystallization of the balance of class forces at a particular point in time. The SSA framework would benefit from integrating sociological discussions of structure into its conception of institutions. The sociological tradition has a rich discussion of the origin of structural relations within society. While this discussion is more centered on the concept of agency than a Marxist approach would warrant, further consideration of this tradition could deepen the SSA theory’s approach to institutions.
The framework could also extend its historical consideration of crises back to the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe, applying the SSA framework more thoroughly to earlier European history in order to expand the number of crisis periods under study. The investigation of earlier European crises will involve historical description and the construction of a narrative account of the genesis, development and emerging crises of sets of interdependent institutional structures and the comparison of these dynamics with subsequent stages of capitalism. The periods ending with depression of the 1820s and the revolutions of 1848 are prominent candidates for this kind of consideration.
Beyond these historical and theoretical tasks, the main concern of SSA theory in the immediate future will undoubtedly be to analyze the unfolding economic turmoil that began in 2007–8. At the time of writing the elite response to the crisis consists primarily of attempted intensifications of neoliberalism. SSA theory indicates that an intensification of the institutional structure that led to the crisis in the first place is highly unlikely to constitute a successful response. As this becomes clear, other possible resolutions will come to the fore. These resolutions are likely to be either major restructurings of institutions within capitalism or initiatives designed to take human society beyond the capitalist pattern of alternating periods of long-run growth and crisis. In either case, a deeper understanding and analysis will be urgent.
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