Suchergebnisse

Capitalism has maintained its position through mediation of contradictions between classes, according to Marxist structuralism. Examined is an expression of such mediation, the development of contributory unemployment insurance, heralded by capitalists as a fair way to share wealth with the working class. A review of Canadian working class agitation for noncontributory unemployment insurance during the Depression argues that contributory insurance represents government's attempt to placate more conservative workers while using police repression & other tactics on the more radical unemployed. Some provisions proposed by the Communist Worker's Unity League have been implemented in changed form in contemporary benefit programs. Noted are the debilitating effects of splintering the working class, the isolation of the chronically unemployed, the creation of labor camps, & the eventual legitimizing of a contributory pattern. 1 Table. D. Dunseath.

The forms of politics are created in the promotion, organization, & resolution of conflicts, but the efficacy of these forms is diminishing. Governing mechanisms are neither trusted nor fully utilized by conservative, liberal, or socialist constituencies; the decrease in conflict articulation & resolution makes government both repressive, as liberals claim, & ungovernable, as conservatives do. Strategies are increasingly created outside official channels through a substitute consensus of public & private groups, eg, corporate, scientific, religious, union, & media organizations. Concurrent with this movement is a closer relationship between state & citizen in which state policies control such formerly private concerns as land use, technological development, education, & urban renewal. D. Dunseath.

Examined is the development of language policy in Quebec from the end of World War II to the implementation of the Official Language Act of 1974. Demonstrated is the legitimating use made of language by capitalist state interests. Language policy created in the 1960s & 1970s established a supporting structure for capitalist political & economic institutions. Corporate debate about the working language was more responsive to francophone-employer class interests than emerging petit bourgeois needs; the debate furthered cooperation among bourgeois groups but did not create a coalition between francophone-employer & francophone-petit bourgeois classes. Social class analysis categories are those paralleling political bourgeois clusters in the language field: monopoly capital, nonmonopoly francophone capital, & nonmonopoly nonfrancophone capital. Studied are three areas in which language policy helps create a political consensus in Quebec: economic enterprises, the provincial regime, & the educational system. 1 Table. D. Dunseath.

While Marxist writers have been primarily concerned with the forms of worker revolt against capitalism as a system, recent writers have begun to examine forms of worker resistance that do not threaten the system. Such resistance is examined in a group of women packers in a New Brunswick fish-packing town. The town is a company town that acts as a means of social control; an employee committee that provides contract negotiation & grievance procedures serves to keep workers satisfied. The company is now phasing out company-town & piecework systems in favor of employee committees to keep out unions & implementing automation to reduce workforce needs. However, these methods appear likely to lead to greater militancy in the long run. Modified HA.