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State Capital’s Foremen IN DECEMBER 1958, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Mervin McLain appeared before the California State Chamber of Commerce and presented a talk on “the role of the government as the hired hand on the farm.” In her analysis of the complex role of the state in immigration policy during the bracero era, Inside the State, Kitty Calavita comments: “Though vivid, this ‘hired hand’ analogy is misleading.” Her argument, much of it valid, is that at both the level of individual departments and agencies and at the level of the state as a whole, pressures on the state are too diverse, internal logics too entrenched, and an “agency’s own bureaucratic interests” too important for anything like a “hired hand” relationship to develop between the state and capital. Throughout her book, Calavita makes it clear that the ins (and to some degree the usdl) “used its extensive powers to the advantages of growers,” but in dismissing the “hired hand” analogy and calling for a close analysis of the actions and activities of policymakers, she does not advance another, more convincing reason for why an agency’s own interests so readily aligned with capital’s. It’s as if it’s mere coincidence . No doubt, as Calavita argues, state agents’ and state agencies’ interests are “not always parallel” to those of their primary clientele—the bes and fps with bracero users, for example. But the alternative to parallel is not only orthogonal ; it might be interwoven, or imbricated, or enmeshed, any of which will create a bond between strands that is stronger than its elements.1 The focus on the micropolitics of bureaucracy (a focus hardly unique to Calavita: it is by now nothing less than a preoccupation of state theory these days) leaves wanting a theory of power, and especially a theory of the relations of power that create the structural position of bureaucratic agencies—and their employees—in the political economy, much as Calavita would like to question this. Her argument that we need to find ways to “incorporate in our analyses both social structures and the political actors who are situated within those structures” leads in the right direction but is radically incomplete because it provides no hints about how structures (what, like determinations, Raymond William might call “pressures and limits”) actually work. Indeed, she denies they do, arguing that “structures don’t act, people do.” But this hobbles her analysis. Throughout her book, Calavita consistently invokes abstract structures (“capi- 258 • state talism”) whenever she wants to understand the general tendencies of agencies to vouchsafe the interests of growers, without ever inquiring precisely how those structures operate. In essence, she takes them for granted. At the same time she “pluralizes” the state, claiming that while its actions must be at times coordinated , they are in no sense “monolithic.” But all this accomplishes in the end is an “adding in” of difference to what she calls a “dialectical-structural model” of the state. The degree to which adding in difference really leads to a conceptualization of the state different from pluralist or interest-group theories of the state is debatable.2 A focus on the structural imbrications of the state—understanding its structural position within the political economy—does not require ignoring the specific actions and ideologies of key players as well as low-level workers within the state; indeed, it necessitates an even closer focus on their actions by insistently raising the question: why have the state agents acted the way they have? Nonetheless, Calavita is definitely right that the “hired hand” metaphor is too limited for understanding the actions of the state in California during the bracero era. This is not only because, as any amount of scholarship over the last generation has shown, being a “hired hand” never means that one is merely at the whim of the employer: even under quite oppressive conditions workers impose their will on the work process, seeking to make room for their autonomy on the shop floor or in the field—braceros did lay down their tools and refuse to work; braceros and domestic workers did slack off on the job; they all employed all those “weapons of the weak” we have come to celebrate in the absence of anything that looks like effective class struggle. To be a hired hand is not to be an automaton (even if it is to name the limits of one’s autonomy). It is also because the historical geography of the...

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