Socialist economic management and the stabilization of capitalism, 1931–40

The collapse of the Labour government in 1931, and the political and economic circumstances surrounding that collapse, raised certain fundamental questions about the nature and fate of capitalism, the general economic strategy to which Labour had been committed and the theoretical basis upon which that had rested. These were matters which, in the 1930s, socialist thinkers addressed as a matter of urgency, and the answers that they furnished had a profound impact on the evolution of socialist political economy in Britain in that decade.