Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal

Politics & Society

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 1980, Pages 155-201

  Skocpol, Theda ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84977196224     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003232928001000202     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), p. 48.
2. See Lester V. Chandler, America's Greatest Depression 1929-1941 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
3. David B. Truman, The Govemmental Process, 2nd ed. (New York- Knopf, 1971; origi nally 1951).
4. Two good surveys of the literature are David A. Gold, Clarence Y. H. Lo, and Erik Olin Wright, “Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State,” Monthly Review 27, no. 5 (October 1975): 29-43, and 27, no. 6 (November 1975): 36-51;
5. and Bob Jessop, “Recent Theories of the Capitalist State,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 1, no. 4 (December 1977): 353-73.
6. I draw especially upon corporate-liberal arguments about the New Deal by Ronald Radosh, “The Myth of the New Deal,” in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the Corporate State, ed. Radosh and N. Rothbard (New York. Dutton, 1972), pp. 146-87;
7. and G. William Domhoff, “How the Power Elite Shape Social Legislation,” The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1971), chap. 6.
8. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, trans. Timothy O'Hagen (London: New Left Books, 1973)
9. “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” Ideology in Social Science, ed. Robin Blackburn (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1973), pp. 238-53. After these works Poulantzas evoived away from political functionalism toward more of a class-struggle approach. But I am only treating the earlier works here.
10. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” Socialist Revolution, no. 33 (May-June 1977), pp. 6-28. Class-struggle versions of neo-Marxism are very diverse, and Block doesn't represent all of them. He just represents an example that I find particularly interesting because the state in Block's theory is not col lapsed into class relations, as it appears to be, for example, in the more recent works of Nicos Poulantzas and in some of the German neo-Marxist theories surveyed in John Hollo way and Sol Picciotto, eds., State and Capital. A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold, (1978).
11. Ralph Miliband. The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 146.
12. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). For relevant works by Domhoff and Radosh, see note 6. In a private communication, Bill Domhoff has convinced me that his views about the Wagner Act have developed away from a strictly corporate-liberal position in publications subsequent to The Higher Circles. Thus my arguments here apply only to the cited parts of that book.
13. James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973).
14. Fred Block, “Beyond Corporate Liberalism,” Social Problems 24 (1976-77): 355.
15. O'Connor, Fiscal Crisis, p. 68.
16. Radosh, “Myth of the New Deal,” in New History of Leviathan, ed. Radosh and Roth bard, p. 186.
17. See Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), chaps. 1-3;
18. and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), chaps. 6-8.
19. Radosh, “Myth of New Deal,” in New history of Leviathan, ed. Radosh and Rothbard, pp. 157-58.
20. This paragraph draws especially upon David Vogel, “Why Businessmen Distrust Their State: The Political Consciousness of American Corporate Executives,” British Journal of Political Science 8, no. 1 (January 1978): 70-72;
21. and Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in American History (New York. Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 100-117.
22. See Louis Galambos, Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a National Trade Association (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)
23. and Robert F. Himmelberg, The Origihs of the National Recovery Administration (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976).
24. Gerard Swope, The Swope Plan (New York: Business Bourse, 1931)
25. Otis L. Graham, Jr., Toward a Planned Society (New York. Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 24-25;
26. and Kolko, Main Currents, pp. 116-20.
27. William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John Braeman, Robert Bremner, and E. Walters (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964). This article discusses the appeal of “analogies of war” to virtually all of the sets of actors in the early New Deal.
28. Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board : Business-Government Relations during World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
29. Leuchtenburg, “Analogue of War,” in Change and Continuity, ed. Braeman, Bremner, and Walters, p. 129.
30. Schlesinger, Coming of New Deal, p. 99.
31. Good background on the labor policies of the New Deal is especially to be found in Irving Bernstein, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni versity of California Press, 1950)
32. and Murray Edelman, “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Inter ests,” in Labor and the New Deal, ed. Milton Derber and Edwin Young (New York: DaCapo Press, 1972), pp. 157-92.
33. Ellis Hawley, “The New Deal and Business,” in The New Deal, ed. Braeman. Bremner. and Brody, vol. 1, The National Level, pp. 64-66;
34. and Schlesinger, Coming of New Deal, chap. 30;
35. William H. Wilson, “How the Chamber of Commerce Viewed the NRA: A Reexamination,” Mid-America 44 (1962): 95-108;
36. and Kim McQuaid, “The Frustration of Corporate Revival in the Early New Deal,” The Historian 41 (August 1979): 682-704.
37. George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962)
38. and Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1954-1940,” American Historical Review 56, no. 1 (October 1950): 19-33. Rudolph writes (p. 22): “The membership of its national advisory council was drawn largely from the successful business interests of the industrial states of the North and East …”
39. Philip H. Burch, Jr., “The NAM as an Interest Group,” Politics and Society 4, no. 1 (Fall 1973): 100-105.
40. On social security see Edwin E. Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act (Madison: University of Wisconson press, 1962), pp. 88-90;
41. and Schlesinger, Coming of New Deal. p. 311. On the Wagner Act see Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy, passim. The resistance of industrial employers is documented in Daniel A. Swanson, “Flexible Individ ualism: The American Big Business Response to Labor, 1935-1945,” (Undergraduate thesis, Harvard College, Social Studies, 1974). See also Vogel, “Why Businessmen Distrust Their State,” pp. 63-65.
42. Hawley, “New Deal and Business,” in The New Deal, ed. Braeman, Bremner, and Broay, voL 1, The National Level, pp. 75-76.
43. Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Robin Blackburn (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1973), p. 245.
44. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, trans. Timothy O'Hagen (London: New Left Books, 1973).
45. See also Simon Clarke, “Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas's Theory of the State,” Capital and Class, no. 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 1-31.
46. Gold, Lo, and Wright, “Recent Developments,” p. 38.
47. The best discussion is Hawley, New Deal and Problem of Monopoly, chaps. 1-2. See also Schlesinger, Coming of New Deal, chap. 6.
48. Analogous criticisms (focused on Poulantzas's own concrete analyses of fascism) are offered by a historian in Jane Caplan, “Theories of Fascism: Nicos Poulantzas as Historian,” History Workshop 3 (Spring 1977): 83-100. As Caplan says (p. 98), “we must … not turn history into a prolonged tautology.” Poulantzas's functionalism constantly tends to do this.
49. Poulantzas, “Problem of Capitalist State,” in Ideology, ed. Blackburn, p. 246.
50. This and the following two paragraphs build on Stephen Ice Skowronek's excellent “Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877- 1920” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, Cornell University, January 1979), to be published soon by Cambridge University Press.
51. This phrase comes from Huntington, “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” in Political Order in Changing Societies, chap. 2.
52. Cuff, War Industries Board.
53. and Leverett S. Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration: An Analysis and Appraisal, 2 vols. (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1935), chap. 4-9.
54. Quoted in Hawley, New Deal and Problem of Monopoly, pp 56-57.
55. Schlesinger, Coming of New Deal, pp. 103-9, is the locus classicus of the Johnson versus-Ickes comparison.
56. Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 23-24.
57. See Chandler, America's Greatest Depression, pp. 231-32; and, in general, the references cited in note 49.
58. Edelman, “Sensitivity to Labor Interests,” in Labor and the New Deal, ed. Derber and Young, pp. 161-64, 178-82.
59. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 172-85.
60. This paragraph (and other discussion of Wagner) draws on J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1971)
61. and Leon H. Keyserling, “The Wagner Act: Its Origin and Current Significance,” The George Washington Law Review 29, no. 2 (December 1960): 199-233.
62. Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” p. 10.
63. Stein, Fiscal Revolution, chaps. 2-5, passim.
64. On the industrial working class see David Brody, “The Emergence of Mass-Production Unionism,” pp. 223-62 in Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America. ed. John Braeman, Robert Bremner, and E. Walters (Columbus Ohio State University Press, 1964)
65. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966)
66. Bernstein, Turbulent Years Derber and Young. eds., Labor and the New Deal; and Ruth L. Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor: The New Deal Era (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Books, 1978). I draw generally on these works in the discussions of labor that follow.
67. Such a portrayal of the process of change is offered by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed., How They Fail (New York: Pan theon Books, 1977), chap. 3. An excellent critique of Piven and Cloward's analyses of events in the 1920s is offered in Timothy George Massad, “Disruption, Organization and Reform: A Critique of Piven and Cloward” (Undergraduate thesis, Harvard College, Social Studies, March 1978).
68. Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy, pp. 71-72, 77.
69. It is highly unusual for a party in power to gain in “off-year” Congressional elections, yet the Democrats did this in 1934. See John M. Allswang, The New Deal and American Politics (New York: Wiley, 1978), p. 30;
70. and James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 32-33.
71. Block, “Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” p. 20.
72. From C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. 61. I have taken the expression via Andrew Martin, “The Politics of Economic Policy in the United States: A Tentative View from a Comparative Perspective,” Sage Professional Paper. Comparative Politics Series (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1973). My thinking has been greatly influenced by Martin's paper.
73. Edelman, “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Interests,” in Labor and the New Deal, ed. Derber and Young, pp. 170-72.
74. Derber and Young, eds., Labor and the New Deal, pp. 3, 134.
75. On unions' political activities, see esp. J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), chap. 2.
76. Huthmacher, Wagner and Urban Liberalism, chaps. 12-13.
77. Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government: The Controversy over Executive Reorganization 1936-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). Polenberg writes (p. 26): “A powerful president equipped with the personnel, planning, and fiscal control necessary to implement his social program—this was the Committee's aim.”
78. Polenberg cites Keyserling, “Wagner Act,” pp. 203, 207-8, 210-12, on Wagner's views on the NLRB's administrative location. See also Huthmacher, Wagner and Urban Liberalism, pp. 243-45.
79. Theodore J. Lowi, “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” in The American Party Systems, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 238-76.
80. Allswang, New Deal and American Politics, chaps. 2-4, passim.
81. and Patterson, Congressional Conservatism, chap. 8. On the paradoxical explanation for the one apparent success that FDR had in purging a conservative, see Richard Polenberg, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Purge of John O'Connor. The Impact of Urban Change on Political Parties,” New York History 49, no. 3 Uuly 1968): 306-26.
82. Edelman, “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Interests,” in Labor and the New Deal, ed. Derber and Young, pp. 185-86.
83. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism, pp. 334-35.
84. On the resulting patterns of power see esp. Morton Grodzins, “American Political Parties and the American System,” Western Political Quarterly 13, no. 4 (December 1960): 974-98;
85. and Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).
86. Patterson, Congressiortal Conservatism, chaps. 6-10;
87. and Richard Polenberg, “The De cline of the New Deal,” pp. 246-66, in The New Deal, ed. Braeman, Bremner, and Brody, vol. 1, The National Leuel.
88. and Huthmacher, Wagner and Urban Liberalism, chap. 14.
89. Robert L. Heilbroner, with Aaron Singer, The Economic Transformation of America (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 205-7.
90. David Brody, “The New Deal and World War II,” pp. 267-309 in The New Deal, ed. Braeman, Bremner and Brody, voL 1, The National Level. See also Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972).
91. There are, however, some very promising pieces of comparative-historical analysis, including Martin, “Politics of Economic Policy in the United States”; Ira Katznelson, “Con siderations on Social Democracy in the United States,” Comparative Politics 11, no. 1 (October 1978): 77-99;
92. Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), esp. conclusion; and, perhaps the nicest example of all of an approach that combines class and political-structural analysis
93. Susan S. Fainstein and Norman I. Fain stein, “National Policy and Urban Development,” Social Problems 26, no. 2 (December 1978): 125-46.