HAS BRITISH CAPITALISM CHANGED SINCE THE WORLD-WAR-1

Although capitalism in Britain has undergone numerous modifications since the First World War, it is questionable whether these can be claimed to amount to an evolution from one to another sub-type of the capitalist mode of production. In this article, it is argued that between 1915 and 1922 there evolved in Britain a sub-type of the capitalist mode of production which was indeed qualitatively different from the sub-type which had lasted from roughly 1880 until 1914, but that there is no such qualitative difference between the capitalism of the 1920s and that of the 1980s. Two general conclusions are suggested to follow in view of the persistent tendency of both contemporary and subsequent commentators to exaggerate the significance of such changes as have occurred: first, descriptions of what changes feel like to those involved in them are a misleading indicator of how much has actually changed and why; second, changes are too often interpreted as trends when they are in fact only phases of a cycle.