Even in periods of accumulation crisis and stagnation, like the 1970s, capital is so over-accumulated that industry cannot dispose of its product profitably in a free market, operating at full capacity. Over-accumulation is the underlying and most fundamental crisis tendency at all times.

As we have seen, paradoxically, one solution to the crisis of over-accumulation is even more accumulation to increase the profitability of old investments. The term "accumulation crisis" refers, not to absolute levels of capital accumulation, but to insufficient rates of additional accumulation to make make old investments profitable. But this "solution," while staving off disaster in the short run, further exacerbates the long-term problem of over-accumulation, which requires in turn still greater accumulation in the future to keep today's investments profitable. The system becomes ever more over-accumulated, and dependent on greater and greater levels of future accumulation.

Since over-accumulation is chronic and fundamental, even in periods of accumulation crisis, there are limits to the feasibility of neoliberal reaction. The state can only reverse the social and economic gains of labor to a limited extent. So despite the neoliberal hat-tipping to the glories of "free market capitalism," the reaction of the 1970s was not toward less state involvement in the economy. It was only toward less state support for aggregate demand and less accommodation with organized labor. And even so, it was not feasible to reduce the bargaining power of labor to pre-New Deal levels, because it was necessary, in remedying the problems of under-accumulation, to avoid provoking a new crisis of realization.

Thus, the state capitalist system is balanced on the edge of a knife. There is permanent tension between the requirements for realization and full output, and for further accumulation; or, as James O'Connor put it, "economic (and social and political) contradictions between conditions of value and surplus value production, on the one hand, and effective demand and value realization, on the other."⁴⁸ Corporate liberal solutions to the crisis of over-accumulation impede the further accumulation necessary to make existing investments profitable. But the neoliberal shift of consumption funds to investment threatens the aggregate demand necessary to absorb output at full capacity, and threatens to make active the tendency toward over-accumulation which is always latent in the state capitalist system.

In this state of ongoing tension, something has to give. One way out is severe recession or depression which, by radically devaluing existing accumulations of capital, increases the ratio of surplus value to constant capital and thus restores a healthy rate of profit. After the massive destruction of capital values in depression, those who come out on top are in the position to start a new wave of accumulation. For the capitalists who survive, it is a "solution"; but from the point of view of the capitalist class as a whole, it is a catastrophic one, not to mention dangerous and politically costly. An economic system that "solves" the tension between accumulation and realization by increasingly severe swings of the business cycle sounds dangerously close to the late capitalism predicted by Marx.

The fiscal crisis of the state is also chronic. No matter how much the welfare state is retrenched and unions are emasculated, the economy requires increasing government inputs to render capital profitable. Even during periods of accumulation crisis like the 1970s, capital is nevertheless over-accumulated to the point of being unprofitable without massive state intervention. But such state expenditures, by reducing the pool of private funds available for private investment, also intensify the tendency toward accumulation crisis.

The corporate economy, at its present levels of accumulation and centralization, is simply incapable of operating at full capacity and disposing of its full product without massive state inputs and massive state involvement in the economy. And such interventions, by their very nature, destabilize the corporate economy in such a way as to require still further intervention. As a result, to the danger of accumulation and fiscal crisis is inherent in even the minimal forms of state intervention, which are themselves absolutely necessary to prevent the primary crisis tendency of over-accumulation and under-consumption. It is impossible to stave off accumulation and realization crises without levels of consumption and state spending that imperil adequate levels of new accumulation. And any shift in resources from consumption to investment sufficient to secure adequate levels of new accumulation will threaten the level of demand necessary to absorb the output of industry operating at full capacity. It is virtually impossible to steer a middle course between the two crisis tendencies.

It might not be altogether fanciful to discern in the history of the past hundred years a long-term political cycle of state intervention in the economy: an oscillating political business cycle of alternating reactions to the crises of over-accumulation and under-accumulation. O'Connor seemed to be hinting at such a political cycle when he wrote that "historical crisis created large-scale capital and the working class/salariat, which created social democratic state forms and contents--all of which were at the root of the modern accumulation crisis."⁴⁹

The neoliberal reaction of the 1970s, and the subsequent polarization of wealth and income, arguably created new crisis tendencies toward over-accumulation. The impending crisis was concealed in the 1990s by the largely state-created high tech industry. This new industry staved off a new crisis of over-accumulation by providing a large and profitable outlet for surplus capital: a long-wave investment cycle comparable to the auto industry in mid-century. Still, the polarization of income and the channeling of all productivity increases into further investment foreshadowed a new crisis of overproduction and under-consumption.

Richard K. Moore's recent speculations on a quiet anti-neoconservative "coup" currently in progress are quite interesting in this context. Moore suspects, behind the war of a thousand cuts from leaks on the Plame scandal, Abu Ghraib, etc., a movement on the part of the uniformed military and CIA and State Department careerists (not to mention much of the corporate establishment) to remove the Bush clique from power.⁵⁰ I myself wonder whether the U.S. policy establishment is reassessing, not only the PNAC foreign policy agenda, but the neoliberal consensus itself. Is there a long-term policy shift in the works, comparable to that of the early '70s--but this time back toward corporate liberalism? It would be interesting, in this regard, to see Thomas Ferguson’s assessment of the flow of corporate money to the respective parties.