The class politics of age politics: The development of the 1935 Social Security Act

This research is an historical case study of the formation of the Social Security Act of 1935. This research brings the insights of instrumentalist theories of the state regarding capitalist actions in the state to bear on the insights of Poulantzas (1980) who sees the state as an arena for class struggle. Broadening current understandings of power to include agenda setting and hegemonic power as well as direct, overt power, this research finds that class struggle was central in the formulation as well as the actual making of social security policy.;The state mediated struggle between class fractions as well as between classes to create the Social Security Act as part of a new class accord. State managers responded to as well as mediated direct power struggles between capitalist class fractions, fractions based on the retail and international capital industries' ability to mobilize politically to push centralized policies in their interests. The capitalist class also controlled policy agendas by limiting policy goals to developing a capital-labor accord to promote labor force and market stability. While working class insurgency forced state and capitalist action, the middle class reformers displaced direct working class power over policy in their attempts to act on behalf of the working classes in pushing for reforms. These reforms were formulated within a framework of broader capitalist hegemonic ideology which put centralized state policy and put worker well-being as secondary. Poulantzas' insights on the state as defusing working class power through granting individual citizenship rights provide a good starting point to understand the development of the American welfare state. The state, in mediating the struggle between the classes, grounded the centerpiece of the American welfare state in a political discourse based on age, effectively silencing policy attention to inherent class inequalities in a capitalist economy.