An Irrepressible Conflict. The State, Capitalism, and Labor in the United States

Abstract

Starting from a critical reading of the New History of Capitalism as the history of a long Nineteenth Century in which the US state and capital took shape in light of the centrality of slavery and race in the world market, this introduction outlines the historical relationship between state and capitalism throughout the Twentieth Century – from progressivism to New Dealism, from the Great Society to neoliberalism and Clintonian globalization, up to the current Trumpism – to bring to light the tensions and contradictions of an “irrepressible conflict” in which capital, while historically resorting to the state to ensure its valorization, acts to achieve its emancipation from the social relationship with labor – and from its class conflict – that characterized the last century.