Corporate Socialism under FDR
"Corporate Socialism under FDR" is the Infrared framing of the New Deal era: the point is not that Roosevelt "saved capitalism" (the libertarian talking point) but that the American state socialized the commanding heights in fact — planning, coordination, and control over finance and industry — while leaving bourgeois property forms intact as a shell.
The argument
- Engels: joint-stock companies and trusts show that the bourgeois state is forced to take over productive functions — "the capitalist has no further social function" and becomes redundant. The NRA, wartime production boards, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation were exactly this: the state as actual proprietor-in-fact.
- The war economy proved full mobilization without market allocation was possible in America — rationing, price controls, directed investment produced the arsenal of democracy, not despite but through planning.
- Hence "We already live in socialism": the socialization of production happened on American soil decades ago; what remains contested is only who commands it — the people or the financial oligarchy.
Why it matters
This reframing destroys both liberal mythology (FDR as benevolent centrist tinkering) and Trotskyist mythology (America as immune to socialism). The American state has always been capable of total economic direction; the question is class agency.