Capitalist Class Agency and the New Deal Order

Abstract

In the United States the apparent crisis of neoliberalism has called forth nostalgia for the regulated capitalism of the post World War II era. In particular, radical economists’ thinking continues to be influenced by the notion of a “limited postwar capital-labor accord.” But a careful accounting of historial scholarship since the 1980s shows the stylized thinking found in social structures of accumulation (SSA) literature and radical political economy generally to be inaccurate and misleading: inaccurate because it creates an image of a golden age that never was, and misleading in that it suggests a politics of social cooperation rather than worker militancy. In this paper we show that capitalists as a class never accepted anything resembling such an accord. JEL classification: B5, J5, N32