Chapter Fourteen. The american radicals: A subversive current at the heart of the empire

Abstract

The first major contribution of the radical North-American current was the revelation and theorisation of 'labour-market segmentation'. According to the American radicals, anti-imperialist, social, ecological and consumer struggles play a central role in explaining the activation of the 1970s crisis. The affinity with the French regulation school is clear, but the American radicals pay greater attention to the concrete forms of the organisation and control of work, to the heterogeneity and segmentation of the labour market, to employer strategies for dividing the working class, and to social and political struggles. The American radicals have always been empiricists, carefully testing their analyses against the available historical and statistical data. But, under the pressure of neoclassical academic circles, and conducing to their rapprochement with the centrist 'liberals', they have gradually tended to reconcile their conceptual tools with those of the mainstream. Keywords: American radicals; labour market