Le régime central d'accumulation d'après-guerre et la crise

In this article, the author tries to take a new look at the bases of the economic growth during the postwar period. Economic activities are divided into "productives sections " : in the first group are those (industrial, commercial, transportation) which contribute to investment (directly or indirectly : intermediary goods) ; in the second group those which provide consumption goods. Within this framework, the French post-war economy seems to be ruled by a " central accumulation regime ", based on a capitalist and capitalistic revolution of the production conditions in the consumption section, along with a corresponding mutation of the ways of life. These are the essential transformations and their weak dependancy on foreign economies, which are at work in the rapid increase of the accumulation rate (and the profit rate as well) which is observed during that period. These features would explain the original aspect of that period which the combination of a rapid growth in both the level of consumptions and the rate of accumulation. In the second part of the sixties, the progressive shrinking of the wide field open to accumulation by these changes, the corresponding extention of the same field in the world, an active struggle of wage earners to increase their income share, contributed to limit the conditions favorable to this rapid growth. The oil shock then transformed a latent crisis, hidden in France by the 1969 devaluation and the following boom on exports, into an open and general crisis.