Capitalists' Institutional Agenda, Class Conflict Spillover, and the Last Instance

This article summarizes developments within the SSA perspective since the publication of Social Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis in 1994. The article first overviews the literature produced since 1994, defining the main lines of research, starting with David Gordon's last contributions to the SSA framework before his death in 1996. In addition, a number of contributions from the academic discipline of sociology are highlighted. The geographic reach of the SSA framework has been extended to new areas, most prominently to developing countries. Several authors have applied the SSA framework to the history and analysis of specific institutions, including institutions of criminal justice and social control, as well as corporate structure. The theoretical contributions made by these works in the last ten years or so are assessed. The article concludes with a discussion of whether there is presently a new SSA in the making. JEL classification: B0, B5, E3, N0, N1, N4

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confidence: 99%

Social Structures of Accumulation Theory: The State of the Art

McDonough

2008

“…Nilsson (1994) provides an excellent discussion and a full model of how the desired institutional agenda of capitalists is developed and then translated into actual institutions. The more modest purpose of this note is to identify the internally conflicting demands of capitalism that require institutional mediation in the particular case of macroeconomic stabilization.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…It should be clear from the model that capitalists would oppose general unemployment insurance because it lowers the cost of job loss, and capitalists uniformly favor keeping the cost of job loss high. However, unemployment insurance may help individual capitalists maintain profitable long-term employment relations with particular employees-either to retain skills or to bond behavior (Nilsson 1994). Unemployment insurance can protect this relationship while partly socializing the cost of slack time.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Radical political economists have constructively disagreed over how capitalists build and maintain the necessary set of institutions; for example, whether the institutions can be understood to develop in response to the expressed needs of capitalists and whether this happens endogenously or exogenously. Nilsson (1994) provides an excellent discussion and a full model of how the desired institutional agenda of capitalists is developed and then translated into actual institutions. The more modest purpose of this note is to identify the internally conflicting demands of capitalism that require institutional mediation in the particular case of macroeconomic stabilization.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Disciplinary Unemployment as a Public Good, or the Importance of the Committee to Manage the Common Affairs of the Whole Bourgeoisie

Ash

2005

Unemployment disciplines workers and reduces the wage that firms must pay to prevent shirking. Equilibrium unemployment is too low from the perspective of the profit-maximizing firm because each firm fails to account for the reduction in unemployment imposed by its own hiring. An executive committee for macroeconomic policy can provide discipline as a public good by maintaining higher unemployment to increase collective profits. JEL classification: E24; E25; J21; J23; P16Capitalists require institutions to keep both their great and their fine machinery running because the machinery itself is not self-regulating. (See Polanyi [1944] for an elegant exposition.) Difficulties arise for capitalists both when different wings of capital have distinct needs and when the multiple needs of the same capitalists create internal conflicts. Institutions manage these conflicts, and institutions require some degree of-presumably costlycooperation and coordination. The character and function of the required institutions have varied over time, as has the extent to which capitalists have known and acknowledged that they need institutions to mediate either intercapitalist conflict or conflicting impulses for capitalists collectively.

The Breakdown of the U.S. Postwar System of Labor Relations: An Econometric Study

Nilsson

1996

Self Cite

The loss of U.S. international hegemony was the major underlying cause of the decline of the U.S. postwar system of labor relations (i.e., the "capital-labor accord"). A fall in the cost of job loss and a weakening of the Keynesian State contributed only a little to the breakdown of the accord. Further, the decline of the accord was hastened by opportunistic attacks by individual capitalists even though these attacks hurt capitalists as a class by weakening institutions that contributed to profitable accumulation.