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Comment: Restoring Class to State Unemployment Insurance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Carl J. Cuneo
Carl J. Cuneo
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

There has been a recent tendency, with deep historical roots in structural-functionalism and elite analyses, to insulate the state from class formations and struggles. Reacting against classical Marxist and neo-Marxist attempts to locate certain features of state policy in the class struggles of capitalist formations, there has been a reversion to “explaining” state policy solely by the “internal dynamics” of state administration and the motives and intentions of their incumbents. Leslie Pal's critique of my work in his article is yet another attempt in this tradition. After critiquing my “narrow” use of “relative autonomy” and “rigid” reliance on “class struggle” to account for the introduction of the Employment and Social Insurance Act of 1935 and the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1940, he offers an alternative classless “model” which relies heavily on actuarial ideology and federal-provincial relations in the dynamics of internal state administration. In light of his use of my work as a point of departure, I will make only a few salient points. My comments are divided into two parts: theoretical assumptions and the class nature of actuarial ideology.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 93 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1986

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References

1 Contrast, for example, the classical authors such as Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin and such neo-Marxist writers as Nicos Poulantzas with Bob Jessop who calls for nonclass explanations of state policy. Compare Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850.” in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. Collated Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress, 1978), 45–145Google Scholar: Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” ibid., Vol. 11 (1979). 99–197; Lenin, V. I., The State and Revolution (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Poulantzas, Nicos. Political Power ami Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1975)Google Scholar: Poulantzas, Nicos, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978)Google Scholar: and Jessop, Bob. The Capitalist Stale: Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982).Google Scholar

2 Pal, Leslie A., “Relative Autonomy Revisited: The Origins of Canadian. Unemployment Insurance.” this JOURNAL 19 (1986). 71–92.Google Scholar

3 Cuneo, Carl J., “State. Class, and Reserve Labour: The Case of the 1941 Canadian Unemployment Insurance Act.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 16 (1979). 147–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar: and "State Mediation of Class Contradictions in Canadian Unemployment Insurance. 1930–1930.” Studies in Political Economy 3 (1980). 37–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Poulantzas, Nicos, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” in Blackburn, Robin (ed.), Ideology in Social Science Glasgow: Fontana, 1972), 238–53Google Scholar; Ralph Miliband, “Reply to Nicos Poulantzas,” ibid., 253–253; Miliband, Ralph, “Poulantzas and the Capitalist State.” New Left Review 82 (1973). 83–92Google Scholar; and Poulantzas, Nicos. “The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau,” New Left Review 95 (1976), 63–83.Google Scholar

5 Pal, “Relative Autonomy Revisited,” 71.

6 Ibid., 77 (emphasis in original).

7 Stevenson, Garth. “Federalism and the Political Economy of the Canadian State.” in Panitch, Leo (ed.). The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1977). 71–100.Google Scholar

8 Pal. “Relative Autonomy Revisited.” 91–91.

9 Ibid.. 76. 77–77, 83–83.

10 Ibid., 74.

11 Ibid., 78–78.

12 Ibid., 77.

13 Ibid., 78.

14 Cuneo, “State Mediation of Class Contradictions."

15 Pal, “Relative Autonomy Revisited,” 79 (emphases added).

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 81.

18 Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 98.Google Scholar

19 Pal. “Relative Autonomy Revisited,” 82.

20 Ibid., 83.

21 Ibid., 84.