FRANCES FOX PIVEN and RICHARD
A. CLOWARD :
(©Monthly Review, January
1998)
Eras of Power
by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A.Cloward
During the past few years a strong challenge has been mounted in the pages
of Monthly Review to the argument—prevalent on the left as well as the
right—that globalization and technological change have combined to bring
us
into a new era. Ellen Meiksins Wood captured the gist of the emerging MR
position in an essay entitled "Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism"
in
which she asserts that there has been no historic rupture, no epochal shift,
to
usher in globalization or postfordism or postmodernism. All these concepts
have "the effect of obscuring the historical specificity of capitalism"
which "by
definition means constant change and development...." What we are
witnessing is the diversification and extension of the old logic of the
mass
production economy.1 "This is capitalism."2
We agree with much of the empirical basis for the MR challenge to the new
catechisms about globalization and technological change. We agree, for
example, with the arguments, made variously by Wood, Tabb, and
Henwood in the pages of Monthly Review, and by Gordon, Zevin, Hirst,
and Thompson, and others elsewhere, that the competitive pressures in
domestic markets attributed to increased global trade and capital movement
have been vastly overstated, especially with regard to the United States,
which remains less exposed to international trade and capital flight than
most
other rich industrial countries.3 And we also agree that much of this is
not
really new in any case, that international integration characterized earlier
periods of capitalist development, particularly the years before the First
World War.
But if the system is basically the same, why is so much changing? In
particular, why are class power relations changing? The evidence is
considerable. Unions, once the bedrock of working-class power, are on the
defensive, losing members in most capitalist countries, and in Britain
and the
United States, losing battles as well—at least when they dare to fight
them.4
Meanwhile, historic left parties are refashioning themselves as the champions
of neoliberal policies, and turning their backs on the organized working
class
that was once their base. Welfare state protections, the main political
achievement of the industrial working class, are being whittled back in
the
interest of labor market "flexibility;" cutbacks in social benefits intensify
worker insecurity, smoothing the way for lower wages and less secure
conditions of employment. And inequalities are widening, especially in
Britain
and the Untied States, where income and wealth inequalities are spiraling
to
nineteenth-century levels.
To be sure, it still is capitalism. But we think the innovation and development
characteristic of capitalism is interacting with shifts in class power
to produce
convulsive changes not only in patterns of production and exchange, but
in
patterns of culture and politics. And, contrary to Wood, we think these
developments are usefully characterized as ruptures with the past, the
continuities of capitalist social relations notwithstanding. Indeed, we
think
such ruptures have studded the history of capitalism, sometimes affecting
particular industries, but sometimes transforming entire societies. Capitalism
develops not only through gradual and incremental changes propelled by
the
logic of accumulation, but also through wrenching upheavals forged by
momentous class power conflicts, as when the organization of steel
production was transformed by smashing the craft workers in the
nineteenth-century United States, or when public sector unionism was
crushed in the post First World War period. And, again contrary to Wood,
we think such upheavals are sometimes so broad in scope and consequence
that they usefully demarcate distinctive eras or epochs. The events which
culminated in the termination of English poor relief in favor of an
"unregulated" market in labor in the 1830s marked such an epochal change,
which the intense protests of the Chartist movement could not reverse.
It
may be that the interplay of contemporary economic restructuring and power
shifts in the advanced capitalist countries, and especially in the United
States,
is also epochal in its significance. In any case, it is a class power struggle
which has to be understood in power terms, a predatory mobilization by
capitalists made possible by working-class weakness and disarray, although
justified in economic terms as the result of new market imperatives.
I
We make our argument about power upheavals in two parts. First, we
discuss the theoretical basis for the longstanding left conviction that
labor
power is rooted in capitalist production relations, and in the organization
of
workers for political power that production relations facilitate. MR authors
share this conviction, and so do we. Second, and this is our more distinctive
argument, we think that actualization of the power is by no means automatic
or inevitable, but is realized only over time and with difficulty, as ordinary
people penetrate dominant ideologies, build the solidarities that make
the
actualization of power possible, and challenge the rules which guarantee
their
quiescent co-operation. The disturbances which ensue as people discover
and act on the power capacities yielded them by specific forms of economic
and political organization lead to new institutional arrangements: the
creation
of a social compact to conciliate popular forces, while also regulating
and
caging them. Economic change may shatter these achievements, not because
capital no longer depends on labor in the abstract, or because state rulers
no
longer depend on mass publics, but because the painfully constructed forms
of popular understanding and organization, which made possible the
realization of some power from the bottom, weaken. The erosion of popular
power capacities in turn smooths the way for new assertions of power from
the top. Capital breaks the social compact which working-class power
made necessary. By doing so, however, it may also unleash new possibilities
for popular struggle.
Capitalist societies organize production and exchange through networks
of
specialized and interdependent activities. These networks of co-operation
are also networks of contention. They help to shape the interests and values
which give rise to conflict. More important for our argument, networks
of
interdependency also generate dispersed power capacities. Agricultural
workers depend on landowners, but landowners also depend on agricultural
workers, as industrial capitalist depend on workers', the prince depends
in
some measure on the urban crowd, and governing elites in the modern state
depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics.
Actual power relations are of course tangled and intricate, since urban,
democratic, and capitalist societies generate multiple and cross-cutting
forms
of interdependence. We take for granted, however, that some relationships
are much more important than others. The dominant
interdependencies—and the power constellations they make
possible—develop within economic relationships, and within the relations
which anchor state elites to the societies they rule. Thus dominant
interdependencies, and dominant forms of power, reflect the co-operative
activities that generate the material bases for social life, and that sustain
the
force and authority of the state. If workers withhold their labor, production
stops; if they withhold their votes, regimes fall. And, of course, the
one set of
relations is deeply intertwined with the other. States define and enforce
property rights, regulate money and credit, and regulate the relations
between employer and employees, for example.5 The relations between
class-based interest groups and state authorities inevitably focus importantly
on these economic policies. And the broadly parallel evolution of industrial
capitalism and electoral-representative institutions in the twentieth-century
means that working-class economic challenges are systematically
transported into the relations between voting publics and the state.
This emphasis on power capacities shaped by the interdependent relations
which constitute economy and polity is clearly consistent with the Marxist
view of working-class power as rooted in the role of the proletariat as
a
force in capitalist production. It is, we should note, also consistent
with other
important theoretical traditions, including, for example, Norbert Elias'
depiction of the development of European central states as propelled by
the
dynamics generated by the networks of interdependency which developed
among the warrior rulers of these societies.6 And it fits Schumpeter's
model
characterizing the capitalist state as the "tax state" which, because it
depends
on economic resources it does not control, ties state authorities in close
interdependence with the owners of private property who do control those
resources.7
The left confidence in working-class power was also expressed in the belief
that working-class power would grow. Marx had rooted the growth of
proletarian power in the development of industrial capitalism; Bernstein
saw
roughly parallel possibilities for working-class power in the development
of
electoral-representative arrangements. Social democratic perspectives later
melded the power yielded workers by industrial capitalism with the power
generated by electoral representative arrangements, so that working-class
power resources were said to grow in tandem with both industrial capitalism
and electoral democracy.8 In the happiest variants, these power resources
resulted in a welfare state compact which promoted the "decommodification"
of labor, and therefore a fundamental empowerment of labor in market
relations.9
A broadly compatible view of the growth of working-class power is
incorporated in the work of historians dedicated to recovering the history
of
"protest from below" in preindustrial Europe, such as Eric J. Hobsbawm,
George Rudé, and Charles Tilly. Even pluralist analysts point to
the
interdependencies of voters and political elites generated by liberal
democracy itself, arguing that periodic elections and an enfranchised mass
public forces elites to defer to the popular will. One variant or another
of this
optimistic perspective has nourished the left for at least a century and
a half.
With these points made, it is clear that the globalization thesis cuts
to the
core of left political conviction. The effective exercise of labor power
has
always been premised on the limited ability of capital to exit or threaten
to
exit from economic relations. Globalization, together with postfordist
production methods, seems to open unlimited opportunities for exit, whether
through the relocation of production, accelerated trade, worker replacement,
or capital flight, all of which seems to radically reduce the dependence
of
capital on labor. Workers, for their part, tied as they are by their merely
human fear of change and rupture, can never match these exit options. And
while working-class voters may still be able to make regimes topple, the
significance of voting power depends on the significance of state power.
But,
so the argument goes, states whose sovereignty is confined to fixed
territories also must knuckle under to the whims of a mobile capital.
Economic globalization thus presumably eviscerates both economic and
political forms of working-class power. As a result, workers and voters
in
the mother countries of capitalism are now pitted against low-wage workers
and feeble governments everywhere, and pitted against technological
advances as well. So, if the globalization thesis is true, it is devastating
to the
left as we have known it.
No wonder the determination with which MR authors (and we as well)
scrutinize and challenge the argument. But scrutinizing and disputing the
extent of global trade or capital movement does not quite grapple with
the
realities of class power under new conditions. What is at issue is not
simply
whether it is still capitalism, or whether capital is still dependent on
labor in
the abstract, or whether nation states still matter, but whether economic
changes have undermined the conditions which once made at least the partial
actualization of economic and political power from the bottom possible.
II
Over the broad sweep of Western and capitalist development, the old idea
that working-class power will grow as capitalism develops may yet prove
to
be correct. There are some strong theoretical reasons for thinking so.
If
power is rooted in interdependent relations, then the increasingly elaborate
division of labor that characterizes capitalist societies, as well as the
continued penetration of the core into the periphery with the consequent
absorption of previously marginal groups into the capitalist division of
labor,
would diffuse power capacities more and more widely. (Our reading of the
political implication of Durkheim's idea of the growth of organic solidarity
is
similar: a tighter grid of interdependencies means that everyone in the
grid
has some leverage, at least under some conditions.) This line of reasoning
reverses the conventional wisdom: it is not decentralization but centralization
and the integration that it implies that enlarges at least the abstract
possibility
of popular power. The remote village may be shielded by its remoteness
from a predatory state or a predatory capital, but neither can it have
influence on the state or capital until it is brought into some kind of
relationship with them.
But while capitalist development increases the potential power of working
class and previously marginal groups, it can also work to impede the
actualization of that power potential. Whatever is true in principle of
the
advancing division of labor, the power capacity of lower strata groups
has
certainly not advanced smoothly. At the very least, there have been periodic
sharp reversals, and we appear to be witnessing such a reversal now.
In principle, economic and political organization yields power to all parties
who make necessary contributions to economic or political processes. In
principle, workers in a capitalist economy always have potential power
over
capitalists, whether they labor as agricultural tenants, or as industrial
workers, or as technicians in a postindustrial economy. In principle, they
have power because their contributions are necessary to ongoing processes
of production and exchange. But the actualization of those power capacities
is conditional on their ability to withhold or threaten to withhold their
co-operation, and this capacity depends on other features of
worker-employer relationships beyond the fact of interdependency. To
understand class power dynamics, and especially to understand the impact
of postindustrial changes on worker economic and political power, we have
to pay attention to the ways that economic change affects the ideas and
capacities for organization of working-class groups, and their ability
to
withstand threats of capital exit or deploy threats of exit themselves.
The first condition for the assertion of power from below is that people
recognize their contribution to economic and political life. Economic and
political interdependencies are real in the sense that they have real
consequences. But they are also cultural constructions. To be sure, if
people
do in fact have agency, which we take to mean at a minimum some ability
to
penetrate a dominant ideology, and some capacity to act outside the rules
which strip them of power, then the very fact of participation in
interdependent activities would incline them to recognize their contributions,
and therefore their power capacities. Perhaps so, or at least to some extent,
or at least under some conditions.10 But such recognition must always
overcome inherited and deeply imprinted interpretations which privilege
the
contributions of dominant groups,11 and must also overcome the continuing
ability of dominant groups to project new and obscuring interpretations.
Second, since the relevant contributions to ongoing economic and political
activities typically involve numerous individuals, people must develop
a sense
of solidarity and some capacity for concerted action so that their collective
leverage can be deployed against those who depend on them, for work,
votes, or acquiescence in the rules of civic life. This is the classical
problem
of organizing, whether workers, or voters, or community residents. And
finally, the threat of exit, including the threat that employers will turn
to
replacement workers or that politicians will court alternative voter blocs
must
be limited, or at least the prospect of exit must not be so frightening
that
people cannot imagine enduring it.
These conditions for the realization of class power, and the ability of
groups
to manipulate them, depend on very specific and concrete historical
circumstances. To appreciate this, we have to forgo our tendency to speak
of classes and systems. For some purposes, these abstractions are of course
useful. But the interdependencies which sometimes make assertions of
popular power possible don't exist in general or in the abstract. They
exist
for particular groups, who are in particular relationships with particular
capitalists or particular state authorities, at particular places and particular
times.
Economic changes can be significant not because class interdependencies
evaporate, but because economic change, especially rapid and uneven
change, transforms these concrete particularities. People recognize their
leverage over particular employers, not over capital in general, although
they
are surely influenced by more general ideas about the relationship of
employers to employees. They recognize commonalities and capacities for
collective action among members of particular concrete groups far more
readily than among the working class in general, although here too broader
group identities and antagonisms may predispose them one way or the other.
And people fear the loss of particular forms of employment to which they
have access, and in the particular places where their lives are rooted,
although once again they are surely more likely to be alert to these dangers
if
they think capital exit is a more widespread phenomenon. The decline of
hand-loom weaving in nineteenth-century England is an example, for it did
not mean that manufacturers no longer depended on labor. But it did mean
that the hand-loom weavers and framework-knitters could be starved out
as
manufacturers turned to women and children to work in the new mills. And
as this happened, the understandings, forms of solidarity, and strategies
for
controlling exit, developed in an earlier era of putting-out manufacturing,
eroded.
Thus, while capital still depends on labor in general, ongoing contemporary
economic changes are undermining the ideas, the solidarities, and the
strategies for curbing exit threats that were developed by concrete groups
under the concrete circumstances of industrial capitalism. The old
occupational categories—the miners, the steelworkers, the dockers, and
so
on—that were at the forefront of labor struggles have been depleted. And
those who remain no longer have the confidence that they can act to "shut
it
down," paralyze an industry, and even make an entire economy falter.
Meanwhile, the working-class towns and neighborhoods are emptying out,
the particular working-class culture they nourished is fading. The unions
that
drew on all of this are necessarily enfeebled. They are enfeebled even
more
by employer strategies that take advantage of the decline of older forms
of
working-class power to launch new and terrifying exit threats—by hiring
contingent workers and strike replacements, by restructuring production,
or
by threatening to close plants or to shift production elsewhere.
Incessant talk about globalization and downsizing figures indirectly in
all of
this, as the rise of an ideology that asserts the necessary and inevitable
autonomy of markets and therefore of capital, a resurrection of
nineteenth-century laissez-faire doctrines about the unregulated market
now
expanded to world scale. But none of this talk would be especially forceful
by itself. The ideology is frighteningly persuasive not only because it
is heard
on all sides, but because it appears to explain the decline of concrete
and
particular working-class groups. Globalization talk gains force not from
abstract generalities about trade and capital movement, but when jobs are
cut or restructured, when trucks labeled "Mexico" pull up to a striking
plant,
or simply when a business moves across the state line.
III
Understandably, there is a good deal of nostalgia for the working-class
formations of the industrial era. We are all social democrats now, so to
speak, and we mourn the passing of the old sureties of the mass strike,
of
big union and of labor parties which help to produce not only welfare state
protections, but the political legitimation of the industrial-era working
class.
All of this was won not only because the economic and political relations
of
the industrial era made capital dependent on workers in the abstract, but
because people in specific situations could make that dependence work for
them. The loss is awesome.
But there is another face to economic change. Economic change weakens
old forms of working-class power, and frees capital to smash the compact
that power from below made necessary. This means new hardships,
especially for more vulnerable groups. But it also means a kind of liberation
from the constraints which were a condition of whatever concessions the
compact granted. Federal protection for the right to organize was a victory.
So was union recognition by the big industrialists a victory. These victories
did not come unencumbered, however. They brought with them a new
regime of labor regulation which limited the right to strike, encouraged
union
oligarchy, and allowed employer influence to gradually increase over time.
Now, as the old victories are whittled away, the curbs on popular politics
imposed with them may lose force. If they do, the possibilities of new
surges
of disruptive politics from below will increase.
Meanwhile, economic change also creates concrete new possibilities for
worker power. People work at new and different occupations, they have
different skills, and in time they will see the power potential inherent
in the
interdependencies of a new and fabulously complex and precarious
communications-driven economy that is as vulnerable to mass disruption
as
the manufacturing-driven economy was. In time, maybe only a little time,
they will develop the awareness of commonalities and capacities for joint
action which will make working-class power possible again. And they are
also likely to find the imagination and the daring to break the new rules
governing communications which are even now being promulgated to
criminalize the exercise of power from below.
It is the end of a power era. It is also the beginning of a power era.
NOTES
1.Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Modernity, Postmodernity, or
Capitalism?"Monthly Review, vol 48, issue no. 3 (July-August,
1996) p. 34.
2.Ibid p. 38.
3.Doug Henwood, "Post What?" Monthly Review,vol 48, issue no. 4
(September, 1996); Doug Henwood, "Talking About Work,"
Monthly Review, vol. 49, issue no. 3 (July-August, 1997); William
K. Tabb, "Globalization is an Issue, The Power of Capital is the
Issue," Monthly Review, vol. 49, issue no. 2 (June, 1997). See also
David Gordon, "The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling
Foundations?" New Left Review, issue no. 168, (March/April,
1988); Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in
Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of
Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); and Robert Zevin,
"Our World Financial Market is More Open: If So, Why and with
What Effect" Financial Openness and National Autonomy;
Opportunity and Constraints, ed. Tarig Banuri and Juliet Schor
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 45 and 72. Zevin
concludes after a careful examination of trends in world financial
markets that "there is no convincing evidence that the policy/political
`discipline' of the capital markets is greater than it ever was." Indeed,
he sees no trend toward financial openness not only over the past
century, but over the last three centuries. There are disagreements in
this emerging school of skeptics, of course. For example, Tabb seems
to think technological change is more important than does Henwood,
and Zevin also argues persuasively that financial trends have not been
influenced by communications technology.
4.Bruce Western, "Union Decline in Eighteen Advanced Capitalist
Countries," American Sociological Review, vol 60, issue no. 2
(April, 1995).
5.For a discussion, see Fred Block, "The Roles of the State in the
Economy," The Handbook of Economic Sociology, ed. Neil J.
Smelser and Richard Swedberg (Princenton: Princeton University
Press, 1994).
6.Norbert Elias, Power and Civility: vol. II of The Civilizing
Process (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
7.Joseph Schumpeter, "The Crisis of the Tax State," Joseph A.
Schumpeter: The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. R.
Swedberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
8.See for example Walter Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
9.On decommodification, see Gosta Esping-Andersen, Politics
Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) and The Three Worlds
of Welfare Capitalism (Princenton: Princeton University Press,
1990); and see also Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward,
The New Class War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Other
class analysts saw the welfare state as less the expression of
working-class interests, and more the instrument for the domination of
workers, although this analysis has lost salience as welfare state
programs have come under attack.
10.Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), and before him Alexis de Tocqueville
The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955). Both seemed to think that the
recognition of interdependencies was inevitable when they argued that
peasants would come to see the extractions of a predatory landed
aristocracy as unjust unless those extractions were balanced by
contributions to the peasant community.
11.This includes of course the interpretations produced by intellectuals
which privilege the contributions of dominant groups. A curious
example is in the literature on exchange theory, which advances a
definition of power as rooted in the exchange of services and benefits,
and is thus at the outset similar to our definition. But the drift of this
literature, and particularly of the work of Peter Blau, is to define
power in relationships as the result of furnishing needed contributions,
a tautology that of course works to justify unequal power.
(*)FRANCES FOX PIVEN and RICHARD A. CLOWARD are co-authors of The Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997)