State Mediation of Class Contradictions in Canadian Unemployment Insurance, 1930–1935

Abstract

Marxist structural theorists explain the state's long-term implementation of capitalist class interests, not through a direct manipulation of the state by the capitalist class, but through the state's mediation of contradictions, rooted in a capitalist economy, between the working and capitalist classes. The central economic contradiction is between the forces and relations of production: the capitalist class, because of its private ownership and control of the means of production, appropriates to itself the wealth produced by the working class as surplus value in socialized production.