The New Deal as State Capitalism: the Labour State and Freedom of and from Capital

Abstract

Starting from the contemporary debate on State Capitalism, this essay investigates this category in the New Deal. It was not only used by business and political associations that fueled a new conservative discourse against the state and labor. It also emerged in scientific and Marxist literature that discussed the liberal or totalitarian character of the New Deal. This debate expressed the changed relationship between capital and labor: workers’ action within the state to determine the conditions of production and social reproduction, and state intervention for the constitutional integration of the working class to ensure the valorization of capital. By showing this dual movement, the category State Capitalism outlines the political conditions of the class struggle that marked the New Deal. Its historicity also allows us to show how the constitutional order of the Twentieth Century, which neoconservatism and neoliberalism have failed to completely dismantle, is at stake in the United States today.