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The balance of class forces is a term used to describe the character of class struggle in any given time or context. Labor and business are going to have different degrees of organizational power, with each party’s ability to organize around their interests and win dependent on how much power they have relative to the other.

That gets determined through a variety of institutions and settings. It happens in the voting booth and in the ability of groups to mobilize voters around their aims and message; it happens on the shop floor, where workers and management can organize around their interests in opposition to each other; it happens between organized interest groups in politics in the form of lobbying; and it happens in the streets where people can be mobilized to disrupt and agitate for certain interests. The balance of class forces is broad because it incorporates a lot of different tactics and forms or organization and political leverage around a deeply fundamental question — which side has the advantage, labor or capital?

You can see in the development of private pensions that class power and class struggle was actually key.

After World War II, the major industrial unions in the United States pushed pretty hard to expand the Social Security system in significant ways. There was a bill called the Wagner-Murray-Dingle bill that would have created a universal health-care system, and it would have greatly expanded public pensions — not just covering people that were left out, like farm workers, home-care workers — mostly black and Latino occupations that were excluded from the Social Security Act, but it also would have made the program much more generous.

This bill got killed; it didn’t have enough support, not just among Republicans and Southern Democrats but among Northern Democrats, too. Roosevelt himself, in a shift to the right of his so-called “freedom from want,” refused to back it. Other plans that both of the labor federations supported, like the Townsend Plan, similarly failed to gain political traction. Supported in the streets but not in Congress. Lacking the capacity to shape legislation in the halls of politics, unions were forced to turn to collective bargaining to try to win fringe benefits as an alternative.

After World War II, there’s a major strike wave — the biggest in history to that point. But capital is actually perfectly happy to let workers go on strike. In many of these strikes, firms just let stock and equipment sit idle because of the drastic drop in the demands for their goods after the war. Plus, they had large numbers of returning soldiers that they could run as replacement workers, so they weren’t really threatened by the strikes.

But during this period, politicians were terrified. They saw this as something that could potentially undermine efforts to establish economic connections in war-torn Europe and war-torn Japan, to move American products into those areas to create new sources of profit for the United States. This is a very important recurring theme in my book: politicians at their most fundamental are responding to the structural imperative to promote capitalist growth. How they do that depends on the balance of class forces.

Truman and his allies had a major conference called the President’s Labor-Management Conference in 1945 where he brought together all the key labor leaders, like those in the AFL and the CIO, and the major leaders of the different business associations, like the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and several others.

It’s important to recognize that Truman and other politicians faced a dilemma which they called the “reconversion problem.” The dilemma was, how would the state help the economy transition from a wartime context where labor-management relations and possible unrest were managed with wartime agencies and institutions, like the National War Labor Board, to a postwar situation where those agencies would be dissolved?

The President’s Labor-Management Conference was their attempt at a voluntary solution. Truman opened up the conference with a speech saying, “The whole world now needs the produce of our mills and factories — everything stands ready and primed for a great future.” A possible breakdown in production signaled the possibility of nothing short of a crisis for the American state.

But labor and management found each other at loggerheads, and were not able to work out a deal for a production plans that would be unmarred by industrial conflict. Management was simply unwilling to concede on issues of corporate power, shop-floor management, and wages and fringe benefits.

Over the next few years, the strike wave unfolded. But the state’s effort at a voluntary solution to labor-management problems always explicitly shadowed its willingness to use force if necessary to increase industrial output.

At the close of the failed conference, Truman noted, “In such industries, when labor and management cannot compose their differences, the public through the federal government has a duty to speak and act.” Which is exactly what the state did. Truman intervened in these strikes, sometimes literally seizing industries, sometimes seizing plants, and in doing so he and his administration forced the hand of management to negotiate with labor over fringe benefits.

In one of the strikes, in steel, the National Labor Review Board made a key decision that said that employers had to negotiate over fringe benefits — not that they had to provide them, just that they had to be willing to talk about it. And that decision was basically given a rubber stamp by the Supreme Court in 1949. This was the event that helped to spread private pensions to many workers through collective bargaining. And by the end of 1949, the most staunch, anti-pension business association, the National Association of Manufacturers, says bargaining over these things is now a fact.

Let’s get back to your original question: where does the balance of class forces come into it? We have to ask ourselves, why is it that Truman intervened in the way that he did during the strike wave? After all, Republicans and Southern Democrats were arguing that the state should have simply crushed labor.

We should not misunderstand his motivations. Truman just wanted to promote the expansion of American capitalism to be able to take those opportunities abroad for new sources of profits for American firms. So why did he intervene in support of labor? In short, because labor was a significant constituency within the Northern Democratic Party. Through the CIO Political Action Committee they turned out huge numbers to vote for Northern Democrats. C. Wright Mills went as far as to call the CIO an “appendage of the Democrats.” Northern Democrats needed those votes.

This is the important point, the CIO’s role in the New Deal coalition gave labor a certain advantage in policy-making. But it was also a point of weakness. It was precisely their junior-partner standing within the party that didn’t allow them to radically shape the party’s politics and program — and in turn move America’s welfare state away from the market.