My primary purpose in this chapter is to explore the theoretical foundations of alternative social structure of accumulation (SSA) approaches to the analysis of booms and crises in advanced capitalist economies. A secondary purpose is to consider some of the strengths and limitations of the particular type of SSA theory that Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and I have applied in our own work on the post-World War II United States economy.

In the first part of this chapter I formulate simplified models of two quite different SSA-based theories of capitalist accumulation and crisis – one based on the kind of “neo-Marxian” analysis that Bowles, Gordon, and I have helped to develop, and the other based on an alternative kind of “neo-Keynesian” analysis that reflects work that has been done by other non-neoclassical political economists working on the same range of issues. In the second part I compare and contrast the neo-Marxian and neo-Keynesian models and discuss how each of them can be embedded in an SSA framework. In the final part, I discuss our SSA-based neo-Marxian analysis of the postwar boom and crisis in the US economy in the light of the comparative theoretical issues raised in the first two parts of the chapter.

Modeling alternative SSA theories of boom and crisis

The concept of an SSA was developed as part of an approach to analyzing successive booms and crises in capitalist economies (see Gordon [1978] and Gordon et al. [1982]).