ABSTRACT
75This chapter is a condensed version of a chapter drawn from City, State, and Market. It homes in on a key assumption of structural Marxism, namely, that urban political processes in general are determined by the class relations of urban space that characterize all capitalist societies. My analysis starts from the premise that actual empirical research reveals considerable differences among “capitalist” nation states in the ways in which economic and social crisis conditions found in each society are politically mediated at the urban level. The abstract, ahistorical, and universalistic character of structural Marxism, I argue, almost ritualistically turns to systemic economic logic to explain both the social production of beliefs (i.e., urban culture) and the dynamics of political mobilization or quiescence (i.e., urban politics) in all capitalist societies. Fiscal welfare state policies were a key element in the cultural and social production of political quiescence rather than political mobilization by middle class mass publics, particularly under U.S. welfare state capitalism. Rather than generating political opposition and resistance, because of their low visibility, unfair implementation, and differential neighborhood effects, U.S. “fiscal welfare” tax expenditure policies, along with “occupational welfare” policies (e.g., differential pension policies for blue vs. white collar workers) were ideologically framed in the United States to produce middle class political subjects who tended to believe that private consumption was preferable to collective consumption, that suburban living standards constituted the good life, and that highly regressive fiscal and occupational welfare state benefits were “private” rewards flowing to productive members of society rather than state sponsored forms of upward redistribution to powerful segments of society. In the last instance, it therefore becomes important to compare the different implementation of capitalist welfare state policies between the U.S. and European welfare states as well as across European social democracies.
