ABSTRACT
The major crisis that was to beset Fordism towards the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s was not, as it has often been suggested, the product of some aberrant ‘external’ factor which destabilised an essentially healthy capitalist system. The crisis was not, for example, the result of the trebling of the price of oil by the Arab cartel and the ensuing oil crisis of 1973. Nor was it caused by the exhaustion of natural resources. In truth, the major crisis of post-war capitalism was far more fundamental to the logic of capital itself. Writing in the 1970s, Edmond Preteceille and Jean-Pierre Terrail (1985) have argued that the post-war crisis was:
a universal crisis of capitalist society, a profound crisis arising within the very heart of that society from the dominant social relations which define it: the exploitation of labour by capital and the process of capital accumulation. The heart of the crisis lies in the overaccumulation of capital, the structural result of the recent period of rapid capital accumulation which continued until the late 1960s.
