Class Compacts, the Welfare State, and Epochal Shifts (A Reply to Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward)

Monthly Review

Volumn 49, Issue 8, 1998, Pages 24-43

  Wood, Ellen Meiksins ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0007041542     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (11)

1. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New Press, 1997), pp. 13-14.
2. In case it needs emphasizing, I'm not here rejecting, nor have I ever rejected, the idea of epochal shifts as such, though I think it would be difficult to find any epochal shifts that meet Piven and Cloward's criteria. And I certainly have never denied that capitalism changes. On the contrary, I emphasize that capitalism constantly changes. The point is that we have to understand the process of change. Sometimes the concept of "epochal shifts" is a way of avoiding the issue, as we leap from one "epoch" to another while losing sight of historical process.
3. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Penguin, 1975), p. 229.
4. The following discussion of the post-war period is indebted to Robert Brenner's forthcoming book, Uneven Development and the Long Downturn: the Advanced Capitalist Economies from Boom to Stagnation (Verso, 1998), Part Two, especially section II.
5. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (Verso, 1986), p. 123.
6. I owe to John Mage this explanation of why so many on the left feel compelled to talk about "globalization" as a massive historical transformation of epochal proportions, different from the changes that capitalism regularly undergoes.
7. I'm not sure, by the way, why they think that I, or anyone else at MR, believes that there is anything automatic about the "actualization" of working-class power. See, for example, my argument in The Retreat from Class (Verso, 1986), chapters six and seven. I have also consistently argued, contrary to some conventional Marxist wisdom (and contrary to the assumptions Piven and Cloward attribute to Marxism), that the development of industrial capitalism does not automatically and unambiguously promote the growth of working-class power but that, on the contrary, the very structure of a mature industrial capitalism has a centrifugal effect on class struggle, a fragmentation of the working class, together with a tendency to drive a wedge between "economic" or "industrial" struggles and political ones, which requires difficult ideological and organizational processes to overcome. See, for instance, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), chapter One, based on an article originally published in New Left Review in 1981; and my introduction to this year's summer issue of MR.
8. I'm not sure, by the way, why they think that I, or anyone else at MR, believes that there is anything automatic about the "actualization" of working-class power. See, for example, my argument in The Retreat from Class (Verso, 1986), chapters six and seven. I have also consistently argued, contrary to some conventional Marxist wisdom (and contrary to the assumptions Piven and Cloward attribute to Marxism), that the development of industrial capitalism does not automatically and unambiguously promote the growth of working-class power but that, on the contrary, the very structure of a mature industrial capitalism has a centrifugal effect on class struggle, a fragmentation of the working class, together with a tendency to drive a wedge between "economic" or "industrial" struggles and political ones, which requires difficult ideological and organizational processes to overcome. See, for instance, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), chapter One, based on an article originally published in New Left Review in 1981; and my introduction to this year's summer issue of MR.
9. I'm not sure, by the way, why they think that I, or anyone else at MR, believes that there is anything automatic about the "actualization" of working-class power. See, for example, my argument in The Retreat from Class (Verso, 1986), chapters six and seven. I have also consistently argued, contrary to some conventional Marxist wisdom (and contrary to the assumptions Piven and Cloward attribute to Marxism), that the development of industrial capitalism does not automatically and unambiguously promote the growth of working-class power but that, on the contrary, the very structure of a mature industrial capitalism has a centrifugal effect on class struggle, a fragmentation of the working class, together with a tendency to drive a wedge between "economic" or "industrial" struggles and political ones, which requires difficult ideological and organizational processes to overcome. See, for instance, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), chapter One, based on an article originally published in New Left Review in 1981; and my introduction to this year's summer issue of MR.
10. For a discussion of socialist - as distinct from social democratic - alternatives in societies that are still capitalist, see Greg Albo, "The World Economy, Market Imperatives, and Alternatives," Monthly Review (December, 1996); and Sam Gindin, "Notes on Labor at the End of the Century: Starting Over?" Monthly Review (July/August, 1997). I'd like to thank Bill Fletcher Jr. for his very helpful comments, though he won't necessarily agree with everything I say.
11. For a discussion of socialist - as distinct from social democratic - alternatives in societies that are still capitalist, see Greg Albo, "The World Economy, Market Imperatives, and Alternatives," Monthly Review (December, 1996); and Sam Gindin, "Notes on Labor at the End of the Century: Starting Over?" Monthly Review (July/August, 1997). I'd like to thank Bill Fletcher Jr. for his very helpful comments, though he won't necessarily agree with everything I say.