ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the state’s pro-worker interventions and the labour circuit, and the driving forces behind the state’s pro-worker measures. It argues that there is an objective pressure on the state to intervene on behalf of workers and that this pressure is mediated by working-class struggle. Given the immanent potential for class conflict within the exploitative capitalist system, the capitalist state granting material concessions is an attempt to produce common people’s consent to the system and to subdue the intensity of actual class struggle as well as pre-empt future class struggle. The chapter also discusses the limits to what the state can do for workers under capitalism, the limits that exist because of the capitalist control over property and production, nature of capitalist accumulation and its crisis-proneness, and the capitalist state’s bureaucratic functioning and its anti-worker politics. The nature of the functioning of the state itself limits the effectivity of pro-worker policies.
