ABSTRACT
Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory is a theory of stages of capitalism. Capitalist stage theory focuses on periods intermediate in length between a short-run business cycle and overall capitalist history. As accumulation proceeds the institutions of an SSA are undermined by class conflict, capitalist competition and the process of accumulation itself. The SSA framework arose in the United States in the wake of the collapse of what many have termed the "Golden Age" of post-World War II capitalism. Marxist theories of capitalist crisis had tended to locate crisis in fundamental tendencies of the capitalist economy which were always potentially present. The SSA framework has attracted more subsequent work than Mandel's theory of long waves but has not been as widely utilized as Regulation School's characterization of Fordism and Post-Fordism. Initially the SSA framework was closely associated with the macro-modelling work of Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf in examining the "rise and demise" of the postwar SSA.
