Who’s Afraid Of Voluntarism?

Abstract

In Dismantling Solidarity, Mike McCarthy argues that policy makers drove the gradual privatization of retirement security. They did so, however, within two key constraints, namely, the structure of capitalism itself, which led policy makers to make decisions that they thought would facilitate capital accumulation, and the balance of class forces. McCarthy demonstrates this claim by walking us through three periods in the transformation of American pensions: the initial drive toward privatization after the Second World War; the initial financialization of pensions with Taft-Hartley and ERISA in 1947 and 1974 respectively; and finally, the enormous shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution or 401K plans, which occurred as an unintended consequence of additional regulation under the Reagan administration. The contributions of this book are many, but I would highlight one in particular. Whereas other scholars explain this monumental transformation in monocausal terms (e.g. the balance of class forces or pluralist interest groups), McCarthy offers a highly sophisticated, historically sensitive alternative hypothesis that turns on the interaction of multiple sets of actors. For example, in the first period, policymakers together with their allies in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) tried to universalize the solidaristic government-based program of Social Security but were stymied by the antilabor bloc of Southern Democrats and Republicans. In that context, lawmakers were left to intervene in industrial relations disputes on the side of workers by pushing for the establishment of defined benefit plans. President Truman and the Democrats tilted toward labor in this moment because of the balance of class forces, in which labor was, if no longer in the ascendant, nevertheless an enormous influence in Washington and in the party. In general I am sympathetic to arguments that press the relative autonomy of the political, so overall I am convinced by the book, but I have questions for Mike and for all of us working at the intersection of labor and institutional politics that are related to potentially competing intellectual tendencies in the field. McCarthy’s work is part of a growing tendency to temper political agency with structural scope conditions, typically anchored in the exigencies of capital accumulation. Analysts who tend toward voluntarism, myself included, have sought to counter theories arguing that politics are merely a “reflection” of the social, whether framed as socioeconomic crises, social cleavages like race and