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analysis of Marxist crisis theory to the controversy between the excess commodity-
excess capital contingents. However, the polemics as to that sector of analysis in
Marxism have been much more prolific and prodigious than the slightly mundane
excess commodity/excess capital controversy, especially since the 1960s and 1970s.
And regulation theory has been part of that second round of polemics.
One such colossal polemic is the ‘revisionist controversy’ –‘has capitalism
changed?’(Howard and King 1992:75). From the mid-1950s onwards, an
understanding of the ongoing changes in the western capitalist economies and the
concomitant growth in productivity as a consequence of the epochal transformation of
capitalist structures earned a certain foothold in the studies of Marxist economists.
For Maurice Dobb, the steady growth of private investment in these economies after
1954 was particularly an astounding fact when he considered the high level of interest
rates and the tightness of credit at the time and their seeming anachronism as shallow
counter-effects for this round of accumulation(1957:79). For neo-revisionists, said
changes in the level and scope of investment and growth stemmed foremost from
changes in the corporate strategy for the planning of private investment via the
increasing leg-room for the managerial elite, changes in the distributional patterns of
income that had simultaneously softened economic inequality and stirred up the
aggregate demand, and, thirdly, from interventionist state. Dobb disagrees with the
first two provisos; however, ‘state monopoly capitalism’ and the effects of increased
state spending upon industrialisation and employment, he ponders, had nonetheless a
not-so-illusory purchase on these changes. In Dobb, two other substantial fixtures of
this adulterated capitalism of the 1950s are the ‘internal accumulation’, that is the self-
financing of corporate investment through profits as opposed to bank credit-based
funding so that outside financiers are no longer imperious; and secondly, the
heightened industrial automation which would be a cunctation for the stagnant effects
of excess capacity in department I(sector of non-wage commodity
production)(1957:81-5).
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