The Collapse of the Riskless, Middle-Class Economy

The very basis of Japan's post-war economic growth was time and place specific. A fundamental failure to recognise the temporary nature of Japan's success led the Japanese to make ad hoc changes, which served largely to prop up the prevailing status quo. Inevitably, Japan's ability to sustain the level of growth required to maintain its economic system periodically faltered, before collapsing in the nineties. Since capitalist enterprise, by its very achievements, tends to automatize progress, we conclude that it tends to make itself superfluous — to break to pieces under the pressure of its own success. The perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the small or medium-sized firm and ‘expropriates’ its owners, but in the end it also ousts the entrepreneur and expropriates the bourgeoisie as a class which in the process stands to lose not only its income but also what is infinitely more important, its function (Schumpeter 1950: 134).