Class Struggle and the New Deal

Abstract

The concatenation of rising labor militancy and of the erstwhile convenience that was uniting the emergent industrial union movement with the Democratic party brought together a unique convergence of social forces. In order to slow the rising tide of labor militancy and class unruliness, the Roosevelt administration enacted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in June 1935. Through the NLRA, the industrial union movement had acquired a special legal standing with both industrial capital and the state administration. On the capitalist front, nonmonopoly capital criticized the New Deal industrial recovery program for fostering monopoly growth, whereas monopoly capital increasingly became disenchanted with the apparent prolabor policies of the Roosevelt administration. The exigencies of the balance of class forces and uninterrupted accumulation of capital limited political decision making and the formulation and implementation of New Deal policies.

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