ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account of post-war developments in terms of the association between economic growth and changing forms of class representation. The new forms of class representation embodied in this post-war reorganisation provided the social base for economic growth, social development, and increasing standards of living in all the major industrialised capitalist countries. In the defeated countries of Germany and Japan, the United States also played an important part in shaping post-war economic growth and its social basis. As in Germany, post-war occupation created the basic pattern of class-state relations that were the social basis of Japan's re-emergence as a significant capitalist power. The significance of enterprise unionism in post-war Japan has been widely analysed and the contrast with European developments noted. The enterprise unionism places barriers in the way of, and may indeed render irrelevant, the articulation of working-class concerns through a social democratic political party in the electoral sphere.
