> But as you know, these were partial, not the kind of full-fledged
> 1929-45 devalorisation required to clear away all the economic deadwood
> and restart capital accumulation.
Accumulation isn't a one-way street. It's a complex set of social structures and mediations. Sad to say, the Great Depression didn't clear away any economic deadwood, nor did WW II automatically create the ensuing boom. The world wars were a ghastly, obscene and utterly useless sacrifice of human life for self-destructive, imperial ends -- the violent return of primitive accumulation onto metropoles which had previously unleashed such on the periphery for centuries.
The postwar boom happened because by 1945 the political structures of monopoly capitalism (a.k.a. the Cold War world-system) finally took over from the wreckage of liberal capitalism. It was wartime mobilization, not wartime destruction, which enabled labor to extract some of the surplus it created, in the form of the welfare state.
Depression rhetoric aside, we're in a similar transition moment right now. Multinational capitalism has outgrown its monopoly incubator, and new structures of accumulation are being born. But we don't have to go through WW III to get there. This time around, the semi-peripheries and the new metropoles have no reason to fight, and every reason to cooperate in bailing out the economy and jumpstarting the post-American world-system.
-- DRR