Richard B. DuBoff

To determine the causes of the current socio-economic crisis of the United States and to draw appropriate political conclusions, it is essential to understand how the system evolved toward its present condition. Accumulation and Power helps provide this understanding by showing how the development of corporate enterprises and the corresponding emergence of a class structure composed primarily of capitalists and wage laborers caused fundamental metamorphoses in the processes of competition, aggregate-demand determination, and state policy making. Richard Du Boff demonstrates that although this transformation entailed an unprecedented development of productive capacity, the end result was a system in which the socially-rational utilization of this productive capacity conflicts with the overriding objective of the capitalist class: "to maintain control over the profit-making environment and to keep unwelcome incursions into it bottled up."(Paul Burkett, Feb. 1993)