ABSTRACT
When the Thatcher government came to power in 1979, it promised to eradicate the roots of the ‘British disease’. More fundamentally, the success of Thatcherism is not without its contradictions. The basis for the Thatcherite coalition was the fact that in 1979 the rule of capital itself was at stake. The resolution of crises in capitalism has never taken place through the wholesale replacement of one regime of accumulation by another, but rather through a new combination of elements of the old order with certain new elements, resulting in a new regime of accumulation. The Reagan policies which aimed at the reimposition of American leadership over the West were relatively successful in the early 1980s, but were increasingly plagued by internal contradiction and dissension. The transition to Fordist industrial production in Britain, incomplete as it may have been, was heralded by the introduction of continuous wide-strip mills in the steel industry just before and immediately after the war.
