Britain’s decline combined global recession with its specific capital-accumulation crisis

Evidence

In economic terms, Britain’s structural industrial and economic weakness emerged in the immediate aftermath of the postwar boom. The 1960s were marked by the oscillations between recession and recovery, with a steady underlying deterioration. These effectively destroyed the last remnants of the “radical program” on the basis of which Wilson won power in 1964, and to which he tried to harness a new social bloc. By the end of the 1960s, the economy had dipped into full-scale recession—slumpflation—which sustained the exceptional “Heath course” of 1971–1974, and its head-on collisions with organized labor. By the mid-1970s, the economic parameters were dictated by a synchronization between capitalist recession on a global scale, and the crisis of capital accumulation specific to Britain—the weak link in the chain. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1100 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

All this involved a particular form of conjunctural analysis, insofar as they were analyzing the moment in which the long, postwar settlement in the UK, based on the social-democratic construction of the welfare state, moved into terminal crisis in the wake of the stagflation provoked by the rise in global oil prices in 1973. Their analysis was concerned to articulate together the economic, sociocultural, and ethnic dimensions of this (in their terms, “ruptural”) crisis, as post-imperial Britain experienced the simultaneous traumas of economic decline (in the context of what we can see now as some of the early symptoms of globalization), the political bankruptcy of the older Labour tradition, and the conflicts emerging around the particular situation of the new generation of unemployed and alienated black youth in the UK’s inner cities. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 970 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Britain’s economic crisis paired global recession with domestically specific accumulation failure. (similarity 0.94)
• Britain’s mid-1970s crisis combined global recession with its own weak capital accumulation (similarity 0.92)
• Britain’s postwar radical program collapsed under 1960s economic deterioration (similarity 0.86)
• The 1970s UK crisis fused economic, cultural and ethnic traumas into one ruptural conjuncture (similarity 0.81)
• The 1973 oil crisis ruptured the UK postwar welfare-state settlement (similarity 0.79)
• Britain’s mid-1970s crisis was a generalized crisis of hegemony, not a temporary matter (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Britain’s economic crisis paired global recession with domestically specific accumulation failure. #corroborates (0.95) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1100
• The 1973 oil crisis ruptured the UK postwar welfare-state settlement #responds-to (0.50) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 970