…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 the 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 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.
We make our argument about power upheaval 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 the production relations facilitate. MR authors share this conviction, and so do we. Second, and this is our more distinctive argument, we think that the actualization of the power is by no means automatic or inevitable, but is realization 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 politicly 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.
