Skocpol and others were advocating a "state-centered" account (vs. neo-Marxist class-based accounts), according to which (roughly) you can't understand how (e.g.) the NLRA passed without looking at the role of well-meaning policy-makers like Robert Wagner. (Obviously not Carrol's position! Skocpol's view is a kind of bland pluralism posing as something insightful but mostly crowding out left class analysis.)
Goldfield, in defending a class analysis of the New Deal and of the passage of the NLRA in particular, pointed to the key role of militant, radical labor organizing in bringing about the NLRA (which Goldfield viewed as co-opting that radicalism). But what I also seem to remember is that part of Goldfield's evidence was letters from capitalists to FDR and maybe also to Wagner expressing their alarm at the labor insurgency they were seeing. As I remember, they were urging them to do *something *to stave off--more radical labor activity? serious disruption to the status quo? revolution? I can't remember the details. I wish I had copies of the articles in question--here is at least the first page of one of them that someone who has access to JStor could take a look at: http://www.jstor.org/pss/1961668.
Since I don't remember the details of the letters Goldfield cited and quoted from, I don't know exactly how they bear on Carrol's point or the larger discussion. But I think they would bear on the question of whether, and in what sense, and how self-consciously, capitalists have been afraid of threats to capitalism itself. Maybe someone else remembers this debate or has access to Goldfield's articles (and maybe Goldfield follows lbo-talk!).
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 19:34:29 -0500
> From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How we got from there to here
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Message-ID: <B7F71742C9DB41DA85CEDCAC03DD0DEA at CarrolHPDesk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> After writing my last post (sorry about the doubling) I began to think more
> about that paragraph I added on capitalists not fearing revolution.
>
> I think increasingly for several years now what almost all my posts carry
> as
> a sort of implicit sub-text concerns the terrible resiliency of the
> capitalist system, its capacity to not only survive disasters to any one
> capitalist regime, discrediting of any one capitalist class, but the very
> vigor it derives from such disasters. That is, I think, why I have grown
> increasingly impatient with "criticism" of capitalism. Nothing anyone can
> say about how bad capitalism, or the u.s. capitalist class, or banks or
> this
> or that capitalist politician is of the slightest risk to capitalism.
> Joanna
> writes that WW 1 "discredited" the capitalist ruling classes. Perhaps, in
> the eyes of a scattering of intellectuals and of various revolutionary
> parties and movements. But it didn't make any real difference to capitalism
> The Great Depression and WW2 really revived world capitalism and
> established
> it on stronger foundations than ever.
>
> It is really almost laughable to think that capitalists are actually afraid
> of revolution, of communism. What they are afraid of, what makes them climb
> the wall in a frenzy, is any interference at all with how they do business.
> Remember the capitalist Marx refers to who would rather throw his property
> into the English Channel that let anyone tell him how many hours a day he
> could work children to death. That gives you the essence of capitalist
> "fear." Marvin notes (correctly) that the reentry of the SU and China into
> the world capitalist system gave capital much more power over labor (it
> increased the industrial reserve army; it also increased absolute surplus
> value, and relative surplus value can't exist except in the presence of a
> the creation of absolute surplus value). That increase in the industrial
> reserve army meant FREEDOM -- not from revolution but from bothersome
> restraints on how they handled their labor force.
>
> Carrol
>
>
--
--
Chris Sturr
Co-editor, Dollars & Sense
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Boston, Mass. 02108
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