'Wirtschaftswunder Oder Keines?' (Economic Miracle or Not?)

The publishing house of the Austrian T.U.C. has recently launched a paperback series entitled ‘European Perspectives’. The editors’ aim is ‘to demolish walls the creation of which has become fashionable in our time’. One of the first walls they have demolished is that of the intellectual ghetto to which the Austrian Establishment had hitherto confined the Communists. For the Europa Verlag has brought out an analysis of post-war expansionist capitalism by the Marxist economist Dr. Theodor Prager.

What has produced the impressive post-war growth of capitalist economies. which contrasts so sharply with the stagnation and decline of the inter-war years? Not, according to Prager, any intrinsic general change in the nature and functioning of the capitalist system, nor the high level of military expenditure, which tends rathter to produce creeping stagnation. The answer, it is suggested, lies in the field of ‘political economy’ rather than in that of pure economics.