{"id":240378,"date":"2023-07-31T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=240378"},"modified":"2023-07-28T11:12:08","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T10:12:08","slug":"reflections-on-political-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/reflections-on-political-capitalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on \u2018Political Capitalism\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jul-Aug 2023 – <\/em>Dylan Riley and<\/span> Robert Brenner\u2019s \u2018Seven Theses on American Politics<\/em>\u2019, published after the US <\/span>midterms last winter, has outlasted its immediate occasion in striking fashion. The article sparked a thoughtful, expansive, at times technically intricate debate that has ranged beyond the pages of New Left Review<\/em>\u2014drawing responses in Jacobin<\/em> and Brooklyn Rail<\/em>, spawning Substacks and podcasts\u2014and spanned the generations. Riley and Brenner\u2019s interlocutors in the journal so far\u2014Matthew Karp, Tim Barker and Aaron Benanav\u2014are part of a cohort of radical intellectuals shaped by the fallout of the 2007\u201312 crisis; the richness and rigour of today\u2019s discussion far surpasses what left analysis could muster a decade ago.footnote<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The proximate purpose of \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 was two-fold: first, to explain the Democrats\u2019 unexpectedly robust performance in the midterms, and, second, to assess the ideological complexion and macro-economic consequences of \u2018Bidenism\u2019\u2014the Administration\u2019s fiscal stimuli and eco-nationalist neo-industrial policies: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, and the chips<\/span> and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, both passed in the summer of 2022. Riley and Brenner\u2019s assorted theses\u2014\u2018rough\u2019, \u2018unfinished\u2019 and \u2018proposed in an experimental and provisional spirit\u2019\u2014were \u2018intended to provoke further discussion\u2019. Before revisiting them in detail, it is worth reflecting: why did they succeed?<\/p>\n

\n

Bucking the tendency of American political commentary to neglect the \u2018economic history structuring shifts in the political system\u2019,footnote<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a> \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 attempted to apprehend conjunctural developments\u2014election results, government policies\u2014by linking them to a \u2018deep structural transformation\u2019 within American capitalism, namely the emergence of a \u2018new regime of accumulation: let us call it political capitalism\u2019, under which \u2018raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return\u2019. By sketching these structural, longer-term changes in the dynamics of accumulation, Riley and Brenner sought to clarify the conditions and parameters of politics. It is the bracing depth of their analysis that accounts for the intensity and calibre of the engagement it has attracted\u2014as well as, perhaps, for the preponderantly critical character of the responses. An inquiry into the material substratum and \u2018structures\u2019 of American politics, inevitably somewhat schematic and broad-brush, is bound to elide or distort some of the more nuanced aspects of the conjuncture, especially one as complex and fluctuating as the early 2020s.<\/p>\n

Whatever the pitfalls of the approach, the perplexing characteristics of the present period, most agree, warrant fresh, ambitious theorizing of the kind on display in \u2018Seven Theses\u2019. The debate is an attempt to grapple with a succession of unprecedented crises\u2014and the distinctive political reactions they elicited\u2014in the heartlands of the capitalist system: the slow and faltering recovery from the near-meltdown of the financial system in 2008, austerity and foreclosures hitting working people as quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates drove asset prices to dizzy heights; the rise of new tech giants with a private-monopoly hold over digital communications and algorithmic regulation; the political shock of Trump\u2019s victory to the two-party system and the liberal establishment; the deterioration of us<\/span>\u2013China relations, beginning in 2018, and ominously ramped up under Biden; the onslaught of extreme weather events as the world warms faster than predicted; the watershed of the pandemic, with the Federal government pouring cash into workers\u2019 and companies\u2019 bank accounts, as large sections of the global economy went into lockdown; soaring consumer prices, with food and fuel spikes driven by a ferocious land war in Europe and supply-chain hangovers from Covid-19, alongside a tight labour market\u2014with unemployment in the us<\/span>, as of June, still at 3.6 per cent despite ten successive rate hikes by the Fed since March 2022.footnote<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a> Beneath these shocks, the symptoms of a deeper, longer-running malaise linger, stemming from the secular deceleration of the world economy\u00a0and aggravated by the weak, uneven recovery of the 2010s: stagnating real wages and worsening precarity, depressed rates of accumulation even as profits have revived, a hypertrophied and brittle financial sector increasingly dependent on monetary stimulus and bailouts. Whether or not political capitalism, the flagship concept of \u2018Seven Theses\u2019, is an apt way of capturing the novelties, not to say morbidities, of the era, few could question that there is, as Barker put it, \u2018something to talk about here\u2019.<\/p>\n

Political capitalism played a less prominent but still animating role in earlier analyses by both Riley and Brenner, including \u2018Escalating Plunder\u2019, Brenner\u2019s blistering audit of the Fed bailouts authorized by the cares<\/span> Act, passed by Trump in March 2020, and Riley\u2019s \u2018Faultlines\u2019, published after Biden\u2019s election later that year. But the concept also draws and expands on ideas formulated in older writings. An important antecedent to the present discussion is Brenner\u2019s editorial launching Catalyst <\/em>magazine in 2017, where he adumbrated the lineaments of the new regime. But the key historical account, setting the scene for its emergence, is Brenner\u2019s influential study of the postwar trajectory of world capitalism, first laid out in a special issue of nlr<\/span> in 1998 and later published as The Economics of Global Turbulence<\/em> (2006), various aspects of which have been revisited over the course of the debate.footnote<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a> Not only did \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 reignite broader, older arguments about the vicissitudes of the capitalist system, but the emphases and parameters of the debate that ensued have shifted as it has progressed, with \u2018political capitalism\u2019 deployed to explain quite disparate local phenomena, from pandemic relief to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.footnote<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is perhaps little surprise, given its all-encompassing and protean character\u2014and with the real-world referents rapidly evolving\u2014that the debate has at times seemed in danger of becoming at once involuted and diffuse. What follows, then, will seek, first, to narrow the discussion, and second, to open it out: to distinguish a few of the most salient and fundamental questions raised, and to reflect on the political stakes involved in posing them. Along the way, the aim will be, if not to resolve, then at least to acknowledge and define the areas of surface confusion and contradiction, ambiguity and irony, dappling the concept of \u2018political capitalism\u2019. The hope is that recasting the discussion in leaner and more reflective terms will facilitate further exchange of a focused, attentive and productive kind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The seven theses<\/h4>\n

Given midterms traditionally punish the incumbent party, why did the bruited \u2018red wave\u2019 fail to douse Congress despite Biden\u2019s lacklustre approval ratings amid entrenched inflationary pressures?footnote<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a> Conventional analysis pointed to immediate, contingent factors\u2014the Supreme Court\u2019s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion in the summer of 2022, the off-putting extremity of the Republican candidates endorsed by Trump (and, in some cases, deliberately boosted by Democrat donors\u2019 funds). For Riley and Brenner, these explanations \u2018miss the larger picture\u2019: the sociological recomposition of the two major parties\u2019 bases over the last two decades that has transformed the character of elections. While much of the twentieth century saw \u2018significant electoral swings, and big congressional majorities\u2019, the twenty-first has been distinguished by feverish deadlock, with narrow victories scraped by turning out \u2018a deeply but closely divided electorate\u2019.<\/p>\n

The \u2018peculiar intensity\u2019 of recent elections\u2014hyper-partisanship producing a kind of churning stasis: \u2018two symmetrical waves, crashing into one another\u2019footnote<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a>\u2014is an effect, Riley and Brenner claim, of the rise of a new electoral structure \u2018axed on conflicts of material interest within<\/em> the working class\u2019, defined capaciously as the 68\u201380 per cent of American households \u2018who do not own assets and therefore must subsist on wage income\u2019. The new structure is the upshot of a two-way shift widely known by the shorthand \u2018class dealignment\u2019, which Matthew Karp summarizes as \u2018the movement of poorer and lower-educated voters toward the Republican Party, and the parallel migration of wealthier and higher-educated voters toward the Democrats\u2019.footnote<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a> The Democrats\u2019 strong showing in the midterms, Riley and Brenner argue, is a reflection of the Party\u2019s \u2018neo-technocratic\u2019 appeal to its core constituency among the \u2018credentialled\u2019 fraction of wage-earners. In a highly polarized political landscape, turn-out is a major determinant of success, and the well-educated who now lean Democratic are more likely to be politically engaged, an extra advantage in off-year polls.<\/p>\n

How do Riley and Brenner explain this transition to tight, heated elections won by mobilizing some portion of a fractured and ideologically reshuffled working class? The standard \u2018class dealignment framework\u2019\u2014the rival account they aim to dislodge\u2014interprets the new social fissures reshaping electoral politics as a symptom of \u2018identity\u2019 having displaced class as the determining principle of political affiliation. This \u2018idealist\u2019 explanation, Riley and Brenner contend, is \u2018misleading, or at least highly partial\u2019, because it neglects the \u2018robustly material\u2019 (if \u2018obviously non-class\u2019) basis of contemporary American politics. The divergent attitudes and allegiances of the higher- and lower-educated segments of the wage-earning class \u2018are understandable pragmatically without having to attribute to [either] group a fanaticism which it does not hold\u2019.footnote<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

What \u2018pragmatic\u2019 explanation do they propose? They link these new electoral dynamics to the new political-capitalist regime, itself a kind of morbid adaptation to the \u2018long downturn\u2019: the system-wide, global slowdown that set in in the early 1970s, catalysed by declining profitability in manufacturing as intensifying international competition mired successive national industries in chronic crises of overcapacity and weak aggregate demand from which they are yet to escape. Eroding wages to subsidize profits only exacerbated shortfalls in consumer spending, while state interventions\u2014from Keynesian stimulus to accommodating monetary policy and the massive expansion of public and private debt\u2014stabilized the system but at the cost of entrenching its structural weaknesses, preventing a replenishing shake-out of unproductive capital. As Brenner explained in Catalyst <\/em>in 2017, faced with few outlets for profitable investment, capitalists \u2018turned to a far-reaching programme of politically founded upward redistribution\u2019. Profits were sustained by suppressing wage growth and speeding up work, among other traditional cost-cutting measures, and, increasingly, by \u2018skipping production altogether\u2019, seeking higher returns in financial speculation and political predation\u2014taking advantage of a repertoire of \u2018politically constituted rip-offs\u2019, including such varied items as regressive tax cuts, deregulation, monetary infusions, near-zero interest rates pumping up asset bubbles and the socialization of the losses of an over-leveraged financial sector.footnote<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In these straitened, skewed circumstances, redistribution from capital to labour \u2018becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible\u2019, producing a vicious \u2018politics of zero-sum redistribution, primarily between different groups of workers\u2019, in which \u2018parties become fundamentally fiscal<\/em> rather than productivist coalitions\u2019. Instead of pursuing their collective interests as a class, workers attempt to protect the value of their labour power by coalescing into \u2018status groups\u2019\u2014\u2018credentialled\u2019 workers promoting \u2018expertise\u2019 and \u2018science\u2019; \u2018native\u2019 workers opposing immigration\u2014as a way of \u2018managing competition\u2019. Education and race thus become forms of \u2018social closure\u2019.footnote<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The \u2018Biden experiment\u2019\u2014the second principal subject of \u2018Seven Theses\u2019\u2014is another symptom and casualty of political capitalism, shaped and ultimately undermined by the structural weakness of the us<\/span> economy as well as its sui generis<\/em>, \u2018accidental\u2019 origins. \u2018The pursuit of a quasi-New Deal fiscal programme without the requisite capitalist growth has predictably contributed to rising inflation\u2019 (\u2018what one gets when one pursues deficit spending in the absence of a dynamic capitalism\u2019). Meanwhile, the zero-sum politics to which stagnation has given rise foreclose meaningful redistribution. Whereas the New Deal and Great Society programmes were premised on a \u2018booming economy\u2019 and working-class militancy, the \u2018neo-progressive\u2019 fiscal largesse of the 2020s is \u2018largely a fortuitous response to the Covid pandemic\u2019, Trump\u2019s populist example (and \u2018perhaps\u2019 rivalry with China). What\u2019s more, the means of the Democrats\u2019 electoral success\u2014their \u2018strikingly effective\u2019 bid to the highly educated\u2014further curtails the Party\u2019s legislative ambitions.footnote<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a> In immediate terms, this is due to the ideological cast of its wealthy supporters, many of whom, as Karp has observed, \u2018strenuously oppose\u2019 progressive redistributive measures.footnote<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a> In the longer run, the Democrats\u2019 neo-technocratic brand of \u2018multicultural neoliberalism\u2019 is \u2018premised upon, and likely to reinforce, the fragmented nature of the us<\/span> working class\u2019, impeding the coalescence of the class-based social forces that have historically propelled pro-labour reforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Responses<\/h4>\n

Vividly juxtaposing the opposing political trajectories of two cities in Minnesota\u2014the tony, exclusive suburb of North Oaks, a gop<\/span> fortress that turned Democratic in 2022, and the depressed, blue-collar town of Hibbing, which opted for Trump in 2016 and 2020\u2014Karp\u2019s contribution constitutes less a refutation than an elegant refinement of \u2018Seven Theses\u2019.footnote<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a> In particular, Karp proposes a slightly different, and finer-grained periodization. Whereas Riley and Brenner trace the origins of the new electoral structure to the 1990s (\u2018definitively since 2000\u2019), Karp maintains that the \u2018truly fateful shift in voting patterns\u2019\u2014\u2018the two-way traffic of downscale voters travelling right and upscale voters moving left\u2019\u2014\u2018has only occurred in the last decade\u2019.footnote<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a> He agrees that the shift had been brewing for decades\u2014the \u2018electoral order first began to wobble in the 1970s\u2019\u2014as \u2018stagnation, deindustrialization and the consequent retreat of organized labour\u2019 eroded the support of centre-left parties. But, noting that Obama lost North Oaks and won Hibbing in 2008 despite Republican appeals to an exclusionary nationalism, he argues that political loyalties were only decisively reversed \u2018after 2012\u2019, with the election of Trump in 2016 a kind of cartoonish denouement.<\/p>\n

Tim Barker and Aaron Benanav, by contrast, primarily take up Riley and Brenner\u2019s characterization and critique of \u2018Bidenomics\u2019\u2014as well as Brenner\u2019s account of the long downturn. This has become the basis for \u2018extraordinarily strong claims about the future of capitalism and the feasibility of various political projects\u2019, Barker contends, before raising searching questions, empirical and theoretical, about the significance of the rate of profit in manufacturing.footnote<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a> Is \u2018politically engineered upward redistribution\u2019 a sufficiently subtle analytic instrument with which to parse the fiscal and monetary policies of the 2020s, encompassing not only Fed bailouts but relief for workers, not only monetary stimulus but a dramatic tightening of credit to contain inflation? Even if the \u2018overall tilt of state policy is regressive\u2019, Barker insists that the distributional consequences\u2014on both income and power\u2014of, for example, low interest rates, are more ambiguous than Brenner\u2019s verdict suggests: \u2018politicized plunder\u2019 funnelling wealth to the rich by inflating asset prices and stock markets. The instrumental and ideological motivations of fiscal intervention are often complex, too: one ought to ask \u2018whether the government ever spends money to legitimate itself, or to buy votes from non-rich people, or to invest in the cheapest possible version of social reproduction.\u2019footnote<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Benanav\u2019s contribution, in part a defence of Brenner\u2019s account of overcapacity, was a response to a subsidiary strand of the debate, launched by Riley\u2019s short article in Sidecar<\/em> which glossed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year as a \u2018beautiful, almost paradigmatic demonstration of the fundamental structural problem of contemporary capitalism\u2019\u2014namely the secular decline of profitability and the ensuing recourse to \u2018directly political mechanisms\u2019 to generate returns. Biden\u2019s green-nationalist industrialization drive, inevitably greeted by retaliatory \u2018onshoring\u2019 projects elsewhere, will only aggravate \u2018the problems of overcapacity on a world scale\u2019, necessitating \u2018increasing state support\u2019, either \u2018monetary juicing\u2019 or \u2018direct profitability guarantees\u2019, both of which in turn would \u2018exacerbate the phenomenon of political capitalism\u2019.footnote<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a> A rebuttal by J. W. Mason appeared in Jacobin<\/em>, where he defended the prospects for New Deal-style stimuli and industrial strategy by taking issue with Brenner\u2019s account of overcapacity. Mason argued that the notion that increasing public investment in one country will \u2018diminish opportunities for profitable accumulation elsewhere\u2019 misconceives demand as finite\u2014an \u2018absolute or externally given\u2019 constraint\u2014as opposed to a flexible variable, in part determined by the changes in supply effected by the collective investment decisions of producers.footnote<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In response, Benanav argued that Brenner\u2019s theory of overcapacity is in fact dynamic rather than static. The \u2018zero-sum game\u2019 doesn\u2019t imply a \u2018fixed amount of demand\u2019, but a fiercely competitive world system in which the ongoing slowdown in average rates of economic growth pits capitalist firms and states against each other, such that the rise or recovery of manufacturing in one country, often achieved through currency revaluation, can only be achieved \u2018at the expense\u2019 of other countries\u2019 industries. In order to explain why overcapacity has become so entrenched, dragging down growth, Benanav augments Brenner\u2019s theory with a sketch of what he terms the \u2018goods-to-services demand shift\u2019. Since productivity growth is harder to come by in services\u2014less amenable to mechanization than manufacturing\u2014they become more expensive over the course of economic development, eating up proportionally more of people\u2019s income, less of which is spent on manufactured goods. Thus the demand shift undermines \u2018the self-reinforcing dynamic in which industrial supply created its own demand\u2019, issuing in a surfeit of productive capacity.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, writing in Sidecar<\/em>, Grey Anderson highlighted the near-total neglect of \u2018the relational logic between expanded domestic spending and an increasingly aggressive Pacific policy\u2019\u2014not only in the \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 discussion, but in broader left assessments of Washington\u2019s industrial pivot:<\/p>\n

Viewed from the halls of power, the anti-China orientation of us<\/span> industrial policy is not an unfortunate by-product of the green \u2018transition\u2019, but its motivating purpose. For its conceptors, the logic governing the new era of infrastructure spending is fundamentally geopolitical; its precedent is to be sought not in the New Deal but in the military Keynesianism of the Cold War.footnote<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A trenchant critique of the \u2018worldwide comeback\u2019 of industrial strategy\u2014and of the myopia of the left\u2019s warm reception\u2014also appeared in Brooklyn Rail<\/em>, where Jamie Merchant similarly emphasized the anti-China objectives galvanizing Biden\u2019s neo-mercantilist policies, though stressing economic relationships rather than national-security logics. Insofar as \u2018politically engineered upward redistribution\u2019 within the us<\/span> polity scants these broader geopolitical dynamics, \u2018political capitalism\u2019 could appear a parochial framework. As we saw, the crucial backdrop to the emergence of the new regime is the fading dynamism of global capitalism since the 1970s; yet \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 only examines the effects of this worldwide slowdown on American politics\u2014as though national political systems, while shaped by global economic forces, operate in an insular vacuum. International competition was the pivotal factor in Brenner\u2019s original account of overcapacity, but has faded from view, Merchant observes. Bidenomics is a product of the long downturn in a more thoroughgoing sense\u2014not only indirectly, as shaped by the zero-sum political dynamics to which secular stagnation has given rise, but as the American iteration of \u2018a strategy that capitalist countries are forced to adopt to defeat one another on the shifting stage of global competition\u2019, which entails the \u2018constantly expanding footprint of national states in both domestic and international corporate economies\u2019:<\/p>\n

The different national forms this takes\u2014Bidenomics in the us<\/span>, Germany\u2019s Industrial Strategy 2030, China\u2019s Made in China 2025, India\u2019s mii<\/span> (Make in India) initiative, and so on\u2014are all particular instances of a single, structural transformation of the world economy into a fragmented state-capitalist hellscape.footnote<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Ambiguities, contradictions, ironies<\/h4>\n

Is \u2018political capitalism\u2019, in the broad sense of the dependence of capitalist profits on political power, really new? Aren\u2019t capitalist economies always \u2018politically constituted\u2019, with profit-making perennially reliant on the complicity if not active intervention of the state, which establishes and enforces the institutional conditions that permit the sustainable extraction of surplus value\u2014enshrining strong private property rights, tinkering with the value of currencies, regulating trade union activity? Are the political mechanisms of upward wealth transfer Riley and Brenner identify\u2014such as tax breaks and privatization\u2014so very \u2018novel\u2019, and do they really compose a distinct \u2018regime of accumulation\u2019? Riley and Brenner do not define the term\u2014which derives from Michel Aglietta\u2019s R\u00e9gulation et crises du capitalisme<\/em> (1976)\u2014but such a regime presumably fosters capital accumulation, in the sense of returns on productive investment, yet one of the defining features of the contemporary period, especially glaring since 2008, is the persistently depressed rates of accumulation even though profits as such have rallied.footnote<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Political capitalism has not only attracted this sort of lively critical engagement, but also generated a certain amount of confusion. Its relationship to neoliberalism, in particular, remains somewhat unclear; at times, the two seem virtually synonymous.footnote<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a> The politicization of the rate of return appears to have begun with neoliberalism, as Riley explains in \u2018Faultlines\u2019: \u2018with the onset of the long downturn, a profound mutation in the material basis of us<\/span> party politics took place from around 1980. Political power, rather than investment and accumulation, began to play an increasingly direct role in securing rates of return for capital . . . this could perhaps be termed \u201cpolitical capitalism\u201d.\u2019 Is political capitalism a wholly new regime or neoliberalism in more brazen form?footnote<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Karp and Barker both mischaracterize political capitalism in passing as chiefly referring to the large-scale state interventions of the Covid era. The mischaracterization is partly down to the capacious application of the concept, flexibly adapted to contextualize both midterm elections and fiscal stimuli, but the term itself could also be seen as misleading: \u2018political capitalism\u2019 conjures a highly proactive state, directly administering productive enterprises, rather than a servile, hamstrung one, enriching capitalists in ways that ever more flagrantly contradict the needs of the ordinary people it purports to represent.footnote<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a> Recall that in \u2018Escalating Plunder\u2019, Brenner criticized the emergency funding extended by the Fed to corporations\u2014\u2018placing money in their hands without conditions on how they should spend it\u2019 (such as to retain employees and refrain from stock buybacks)\u2014as \u2018a hands-off <\/em>approach to the economy\u2019s leading producers and financiers on the part of the bipartisan political-economic establishment\u2019.footnote<\/span>26<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In fact, these sorts of Keynesian expansionary policies were explicitly contrasted with and excluded from political capitalism in the 2017 Catalyst<\/em> editorial, where Brenner described the turn to \u2018politically founded upward redistribution\u2019 as precisely a response to the diminishing effectiveness of stimuli in the 1970s. And among the repertoire of classically neoliberal policies Brenner included in his list of political \u2018rip-offs\u2019\u2014tax cuts, privatization, financialization\u2014fiscal spending was conspicuously absent. In \u2018Escalating Plunder\u2019, he lamented the absence of a \u2018new wave of statist intervention in the interests of greater productivity and competitiveness\u2019. But by the time of \u2018Seven Theses\u2019, as Barker points out, Biden\u2019s raft of subsidies designed to boost domestic manufacturing joins the list of rip-offs, and is blamed for stoking inflation.<\/p>\n

Described as \u2018massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population\u2019, does Biden\u2019s array of tax credits, loans and grants hew to the logic of \u2018political capitalism\u2019? There is little disputing their broadly upward-distributive character, which Thomas Meaney has aptly described as the \u2018public subsidization of private capital\u2019s returns\u2019, inducing companies to invest in environmentally and geopolitically strategic industries by socializing the risks of such investment.footnote<\/span>27<\/sup><\/a> Even the Economist <\/em>concedes the sum of Biden\u2019s spending is \u2018remarkable in that it is going mainly to private enterprises\u2019.footnote<\/span>28<\/sup><\/a> The subsidies certainly disburse public monies to capital, whose profits can in that sense be regarded as politically assisted, if not politically decreed. Yet doesn\u2019t subsuming all such policies under the rubric of \u2018politically engineered upward redistribution\u2019 \u2018conflate wildly different sorts of policy\u2019, as Barker puts it\u2014income tax breaks with \u2018Made in America\u2019 initiatives? Is the contrast between the political and the productive implied in Riley and Brenner\u2019s definition\u2014which juxtaposes productive investment with \u2018investments in politics<\/em>\u2019\u2014sustainable when considering the chips<\/span> Act and ira<\/span>, which are certainly politically driven and upwardly redistributive but also, crucially, designed to draw capital into the productive sector?<\/p>\n

Whether or not the investment they spur will prove \u2018productive\u2019 or not is another matter: the \u2018reshoring\u2019 of, for example, chip-making, to a \u2018high-cost destination\u2019 like the us<\/span>, in combination with the disruption to international supply chains caused by export controls, is likely to be, in the Economist<\/em>\u2019s judgement, \u2018distressingly inefficient\u2019, as well as threatening a global glut. The effects on employment of this influx of capital to domestic industry may also be underwhelming; job growth in manufacturing has slowed this year, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment in the sector to shrink between 2021 and 2031, despite the \u2018boom\u2019 supposedly ignited by Biden\u2019s initiatives.footnote<\/span>29<\/sup><\/a> Nevertheless, it is surely beyond question that these bills are designed to increase American productive capacity and that the battery-makers and ev<\/span> manufacturers taking advantage of the handouts will be using them to purchase factors of production\u2014building factories, hiring workers\u2014and that such investments will be a \u2018key determinant\u2019 of their eventual returns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Stagnationary impasse?<\/h4>\n

The equivocation about Keynesian stimulus is a symptom, it would seem, of a larger uncertainty about the prospects for reviving growth, and the capacity of states to reshape economies in ways that overcome the structural weaknesses stemming from overcapacity and falling real wages. The longer-term outlook for a return to rapid growth rates in advanced economies looks bleak. The productivity revolutions that transformed agriculture and industry, bringing new phases of accumulation, are, as Gopal Balakrishnan observed back in 2009\u2014foreseeing a \u2018long-term drift\u2019 towards a \u2018stationary state\u2019\u2014unlikely to be repeated for service-dominated economies catering to ageing, shrinking populations.footnote<\/span>30<\/sup><\/a> Riley and Brenner appear similarly sceptical about the prospects of revitalizing American capitalism. Bidenomics, as we saw, is a \u2018quasi-New Deal fiscal programme without the requisite capitalist growth\u2019. Several questions present themselves: couldn\u2019t the original New Deal\u2014in its initial stages, an emergency response to prolonged depression\u2014equally be described as a \u2018fiscal programme without the requisite capitalist growth\u2019? Even if war preparations were what ultimately lifted the us<\/span> economy out of its rut, wasn\u2019t growth the goal rather than a prerequisite? And can Bidenomics be described as \u2018deficit spending without growth\u2019 or does its strategic attempt to bolster productive capacity more closely resemble \u2018a programme of restructuring\u2019? Biden\u2019s subsidies fall far short of the spending proposed in the foiled Build Back Better plan, let alone Sanders\u2019s $16tn Green New Deal\u2014and come to a mere 0.5 per cent of gdp<\/span>, compared to the approximately 6 per cent of gdp<\/span> a year invested in infrastructure in the mid-20th century.footnote<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a> Would these more extravagant investment programmes propel the economy where Bidenism can only overheat it? And if not, what sort of policies could<\/em> revive profitability and overall growth rates?<\/p>\n

The persistence of \u2018a low- or no-growth environment\u2019 can, in Riley and Brenner\u2019s rendering, seem all but guaranteed. But their scepticism about the likelihood of rekindling growth is not only anchored in the secular trends afflicting advanced economies the world over. It is also rooted in a deeper pessimism about the political<\/em> possibility, in the us<\/span>, of transcending stagnation given the electoral dynamics\u2014zero-sum conflict among a fractured working class, the preclusion of \u2018hegemonic growth coalitions\u2019\u2014it has set in motion. \u2018The politics of the present period\u2019, they contend, \u2018does not hold out even the hope<\/em> of growth\u2019; Clinton\u2019s 2016 campaign, for example, \u2018propos[ed] virtually nothing by way of economic growth\u2019. But whether or not this is an accurate description of American politics, especially rhetorically,footnote<\/span>32<\/sup><\/a> we might ask whether Riley and Brenner\u2019s assertion is a rebuke of an ideological lapse\u2014a failure of political imagination\u2014or a neutral observation of a structural fact, the logical political upshot of an intractable economic situation. As a result of stagnation, \u2018parties can no longer operate<\/em> on the basis of programmes for growth\u2019. This somewhat counter-intuitive argument\u2014one would think that parties would be keen to develop \u2018programmes for growth\u2019 during protracted downturns\u2014springs from a view of electoral politics as fundamentally constrained by the deterioration of the system which it can do little to remedy: instead of proposing implausible or inflationary productivist rebounds, parties reactively assemble fiscal coalitions.<\/p>\n

The deeper import of Riley and Brenner\u2019s critique of the \u2018Biden experiment\u2019, then, is that the scope of electoral politics is circumscribed by the macro-economic environment, and by the social relations and political dynamics to which this gives rise. If this is a general insight, its specific application to the contemporary period\u2014conveyed with polemical clarity in Riley\u2019s Sidecar<\/em> piece\u2014is that the era of political capitalism precludes reformist agendas of a \u2018classically social-democratic kind\u2019. Demonstrating that a redux of the New Deal\u2014\u2018premised on the social relations of a highly profitable manufacturing capitalism\u2019footnote<\/span>33<\/sup><\/a>\u2014is \u2018both unrealistic and insufficient\u2019, as Riley explained in an interview with Jacobin<\/em> radio, seems among the central motivations of \u2018Seven Theses\u2019. \u2018In a period like this\u2019, Brenner added in the same conversation, \u2018there are just going to be strict political limits to what can be done in redistributive terms\u2019.footnote<\/span>34<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

If these are the political limits of low-growth economies, what of the prospects for stretching or transcending them? The twist of the knife implied by Riley and Brenner\u2019s portrait of the era is that the new regime\u2014pitting fiscal status-groups against one another to defend their share of a fixed or shrinking pie\u2014atomizes and demobilizes the working class. Given that, as Brenner argued in 1985, \u2018All else being equal<\/em>, declines in profitability and the general outlook for business actually tend,\u00a0in themselves<\/em>, to increase the power of capital vis \u00e0 vis labour\u2019, the renewal of class-based movements with the social clout to mount an effective opposition to the system seems at once more essential and more remote than ever.footnote<\/span>35<\/sup><\/a> It\u2019s as though Riley and Brenner are implying that \u2018political capitalism\u2019 produces a political system constitutionally incapable of alleviating the structural crisis of chronic stagnation\u2014its parties unable \u2018to construct hegemonic growth coalitions\u2019, reduced to forming governments with slender, fragile majorities\u2014and a class structure, segmented by education level among other forms of identitarian \u2018closure\u2019, that is ill-equipped to arrest or reverse stagnation\u2019s regressive social consequences.<\/p>\n

Secular stagnation, in other words, is presented as something that reconfigures politics, but which politics, so reconfigured\u2014at both elite and mass levels\u2014appears all but powerless to alter. In this regard, Karp\u2019s alternative, more precise timeline of class dealignment is an expression of a telling difference, of emphasis if not of perspective. If the long downturn and the pivot to politicized plunder prepared the ground, what expedited the movement of the \u2018have-nots\u2019 away from the Democrats was the substantive transformation of the Party itself\u2014into a \u2018fundamentally technocratic\u2019, ardently neoliberal party with \u2018predominance atop America\u2019s social, cultural and economic hierarchies\u2019\u2014which Karp argues toppled the rickety alignments on which it had formerly relied. Though Riley and Brenner note the way successive Democratic Administrations have been \u2018strongly committed to neoliberalism\u2019, the ideological makeover appears more adaptive than causal.footnote<\/span>36<\/sup><\/a> Whereas in their account, parties appear as opportunistic shape-shifters who \u2018operate in\u2019 and \u2018accommodate\u2019 and \u2018adapt\u2019 to the economic conditions, ideological mood and balance of class forces, Karp lays greater emphasis\u2014and blame\u2014on political decision-making, granting the political field as a whole more autonomy. Faced with certain \u2018social and economic currents\u2019, Karp wrote in Jacobin<\/em> in 2021, centre-left parties chose to navigate them in a fateful way: \u2018prioritizing global markets, cosmopolitan values and professional-class voters rather than unions, wages and blue-collar workers\u2019. \u2018The death of class politics is not an outcome these party leaders feared; it is a goal they have zealously pursued\u2019: \u2018Class dealignment is both a historical process and<\/em> a political choice\u2019.footnote<\/span>37<\/sup><\/a> If Riley and Brenner wished to dislodge idealist explanations of class dealignment, Karp would perhaps argue that their materialist alternative, for all its clarity and depth, is at risk of over-correcting: not only eliminating voters\u2019 worldviews from us<\/span> politics, but understating the autonomy of political actors, carrying the comfortless implication that the moribund economy has mechanically transformed America\u2019s political landscape in ways that preclude its rejuvenation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Zero-sum socialism?<\/h4>\n

In diagnosing this stagnationary impasse, \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 raises several difficult political questions that it does not itself answer: what, as Riley asks in \u2018Faultlines\u2019, is a \u2018socialism appropriate to the emerging regime of political capitalism\u2019? How might transformative redistribution be achieved in an age of economic malaise and political predation? If rapid growth rates are a thing of the past\u2014absent a cathartic liquidation of inefficient capital or the discovery of a new self-sustaining \u2018growth engine\u2019 of the kind manufacturing provided several decades ago\u2014what does a realistic, humane and egalitarian politics look like in a permanently subdued or stationary economy? How might class-based solidarity be renewed and social power amassed in an environment of zero-sum fiscal conflict that tends to divide and demobilize workers?<\/p>\n

These complex questions cannot be answered here, nor perhaps anywhere in abstraction. But theoretically speaking, it\u2019s possible to speculate on a few possible cracks in the political-capitalist edifice which the left might exploit. One potential opening inheres in perhaps the most important feature of the current period: the divergence of the rate of return from the rate of accumulation. These are usually linked, as David Kotz has explained, since high profits both provide a stimulus to invest, and increase the resources available for doing so. But since the 2008 crisis, accumulation rates have remained weak even as profits have staged a recovery. This is the other side of the political-capitalist equation: just as profits are no longer driving accumulation, productive investment is no longer the \u2018key determinant\u2019 of the rate of return. This implies a brewing crisis of legitimacy, since the correlation between profits and accumulation was the cornerstone of the notion that \u2018what\u2019s good for General Motors is good for America\u2019, as Brenner explained in 2017. In that hegemonic view:<\/p>\n

It is in everyone\u2019s interest, including the working class, to see first to the profits of the employers, because only if the latter can make a profit will they be willing to accumulate capital and, so long as capitalist property relations prevail, only if they accumulate capital (increase investment and employment) can working people increase their living standards.footnote<\/span>38<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the delinking of \u2018money making\u2019 from \u2018profitable production\u2019, as Brenner put it in \u2018Escalating Plunder\u2019, not only delegitimizes the capitalist class, by attenuating the structural connection between their self-enrichment and general welfare, profit and use value. Might it not also disempower capitalist elites, as profits\u2014siphoned off politically rather than earned competitively\u2014become less socially salient? And isn\u2019t the very dependence of capitalist profits on government measures a sign of structural weakness as well as temporary dominance? C\u00e9dric Durand wondered recently whether the reliance of finance on central bank stabilization might be weakening its hegemony.footnote<\/span>39<\/sup><\/a> Might not the dependence of profits on politics have a similar effect, recalibrating the balance of power between capital and the state?<\/p>\n

In 1993, Brenner argued that as long as capitalist property relations endure, \u2018the state cannot be autonomous\u2019, not because it is \u2018always directly controlled by capitalists\u2019 but \u2018because whoever controls the state is brutally limited in what they can do by the needs of capitalist profitability\u2019\u2014the precondition for high employment and state services yet \u2018difficult to reconcile with reforms in the interest of working people\u2019 over \u2018any extended period\u2019.footnote<\/span>40<\/sup><\/a> After the onset of the long downturn, Brenner continued, the state \u2018unleashed powerful austerity drives designed to raise the rate of profit by cutting the welfare state and reducing the power of the unions\u2019 and so \u2018could not but reveal itself as supinely dependent upon capital\u2019. The drift of Federal policy under political capitalism\u2014escalating tax breaks, massive handouts to private enterprise and so on, not to mention \u2018vertiginous levels of campaign expenditure and open corruption on a vast scale\u2019\u2014implies the us<\/span> state is ever more subservient to, if not largely captured by, elite interests. But if the needs of capitalist profitability and the interests of working people have become glaringly untethered, isn\u2019t it possible that, in principle at least, this could enlarge rather than further erode the state\u2019s autonomy? The state\u2019s \u2018supine dependence\u2019 upon capital proceeded from the fact that sustaining accumulation seemed necessary to raise living standards. Insofar as political capitalism implies a system in which capitalists have increasingly already played the capital strike card\u2014abstaining from investment and pouring capital into a hypertrophied financial sector or into politics itself to obtain returns\u2014doesn\u2019t this diminish their political pertinence?<\/p>\n

Political capitalism implies a cronyist fusion between capital and the state\u2014in Catalyst<\/em> in particular, Brenner barely distinguishes between economic and political elites, alluding to \u2018capitalist classes and their governments\u2019, and somewhat imprecisely conflating \u2018the world\u2019s economic and political rulers (the top 1 per cent by income or above)\u2019.footnote<\/span>41<\/sup><\/a> Any loosening of the capitalist grip on the state would presumably depend on the balance of class forces and social power outside it. What are the prospects for a rebalancing in favour of labour? It is virtually an axiom of Riley and Brenner\u2019s account that sluggish or crisis-ridden economies disadvantage workers. Yet if rapid growth defused class conflict\u2014not so much facilitating redistribution as obviating the need for it\u2014might there not be political potential in the heightened antagonisms a zero-sum environment implies? In a critical discussion of Benanav\u2019s work on automation and the future of employment, Balakrishnan suggests as much: far from blocking the route to a \u2018freer future\u2019, \u2018isn\u2019t a zero-sum class struggle the most radical of all, posing the question of who rules?\u2019 Under these conditions, Balakrishnan conjectures, might class be reconceived in a more \u2018abstract\u2019 form, with the salient social fissures drawn along new axes that \u2018cut across cultural divides\u2019, freeing \u2018anti-capitalist struggles from the self-destructive dynamics of identitarian ideology\u2019?footnote<\/span>42<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Toward the end of his Sidecar<\/em> article admonishing the left for its \u2018self-defeating\u2019 nostalgia for the New Deal, Riley briskly outlines his alternative: \u2018What the planet and humanity need is massive investment in low-return, low-productivity activities: care, education and environmental restoration.\u2019footnote<\/span>43<\/sup><\/a> But this vision\u2014which has affinities with \u2018degrowth\u2019 platforms that emphasize investment in labour-intensive and ecologically innocuous economic activities like care work\u2014surely implies an epochal redistribution of power and something approaching democratic planning, which would depend on the renewal of class-based opposition suppressed by the forces of political capitalism. Rising labour productivity fuelled the growth that facilitated the simultaneous expansion of profits, wages and welfare states. Its decline will mean profits can only be sustained by eroding workers\u2019 incomes, weakening demand and investment, and so aggravating stagnationary dynamics. Political capitalism, in other words, is precisely a regime that has emerged from weakened productivity growth; what would it take to create a systematically<\/em> low-productivity economy that is more equal and rational, not to mention less ecologically destructive?<\/p>\n

Riley\u2019s alternative to industrial policy and Green New Deals thus encounters similarly vexing questions of power over the allocation of resources. One of the ironies of the definition of political capitalism is that \u2018political\u2019\u2014fortified by intensifiers like \u2018raw\u2019, \u2018openly and obviously\u2019\u2014accrues the negative associations that might have been reserved for \u2018upward\u2019: it risks implying that political interference in economic activity of any kind is regressive (or futile), rather than the specific telos and character of this interference under political capitalism. \u2018Political engineering\u2019, after all, is perhaps one way of describing economic planning, and \u2018politically engineered redistribution\u2019, of an egalitarian and deliberative variety, is one description of a socialist, or proto-socialist, demand. Riley\u2019s vision of \u2018massive investment in low-return, low-productivity activities\u2019, meanwhile, implies the use of political power to determine the rate of return\u2014only in this case not to artificially sustain it, but to forcibly suppress it, i.e., to overcome the systemic compulsion to maximize profit in order to reroute capital into socially necessary but less lucrative lines of production\u2014building solar panels faster than price signals dictate or justify, for example.<\/p>\n

The transformative aim of \u2018class politics\u2019, as Riley and Brenner define it, is to exert political control over how the social surplus produced by workers is invested\u2014\u2018a thoroughgoing democratization of the investment process and its function\u2019, in Benanav\u2019s phrase; in other words, not the removal of political power from the process of accumulation and profit-making, but the greater dispersal of this power so that decisions about how to allocate capital and distribute income are made by political forces that are responsive to popular-democratic pressures, and oriented to fulfilling social needs without overtaxing the biosphere, or, for that matter, impinging on other countries\u2019 ability to do the same. In this sense, the situation may resemble the one Wolfgang Streeck outlined over a decade ago:<\/p>\n

More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners. In fact, looking back at the democratic-capitalist crisis sequence since the 1970s, there seems a real possibility of a new, if temporary, settlement of social conflict in advanced capitalism, this time entirely in favour of the propertied classes now firmly entrenched in their politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry.footnote<\/span>44<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The pressing question posed by \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 is thus the one Kenta Tsuda voiced in an appraisal of degrowth as a solution to ecological deterioration, though it could equally apply to the alarming resurgence of inter-imperial rivalries: \u2018How will humanity change who wields political power, displacing the forces that veer towards civilizational destruction?\u2019footnote<\/span>45<\/sup><\/a> If at issue is not the politicization of the economy per se<\/em>, but the fusion of economic and political dominance, the answer to the problem of \u2018political capitalism\u2019 may be political, first of all.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

1<\/a> Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, \u2018Seven Theses on American Politics<\/a>\u2019, nlr 138, Nov\u2013Dec 2022; Matthew Karp, \u2018Party and Class in American Politics<\/a>\u2019, nlr 139, Jan\u2013Feb 2023; Tim Barker, \u2018Some Questions about Political Capitalism<\/a>\u2019, nlr 140\/141, Mar\u2013June 2023; Aaron Benanav, \u2018A Dissipating Glut<\/a>\u2019, nlr 140\/141, Mar\u2013June 2023; see also inter alia<\/em> J. W. Mason, \u2018Yes, Socialists Should Support Industrial Policy and a Green New Deal<\/a>\u2019, Jacobin<\/em>, 6 April 2023 and Jamie Merchant, \u2018The Economic Consequences of Neo-Keynesianism<\/a>\u2019, Brooklyn Rail<\/em>, July\/August 2023.<\/p>\n

2<\/a> Perry Anderson, \u2018Homeland<\/a>\u2019, nlr 81, May\u2013June 2013, p. 31.<\/p>\n

3<\/a> \u2018Economic News Release: Employment Situation\u2019, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7 July 2023.<\/p>\n

4<\/a> Robert Brenner, \u2018Escalating Plunder<\/a>\u2019, nlr 123, May\u2013June 2020; Dylan Riley, \u2018Faultlines: Political Logics of the us Party System<\/a>\u2019, nlr 126, Nov\u2013Dec 2020; Robert Brenner, \u2018Introducing Catalyst<\/em><\/a>\u2019, Catalyst<\/em>, vol. 1, no. 1, spring 2017; Robert Brenner, \u2018The Economics of Global Turbulence\u2019, nlr i\/229, May\u2013June 1998.<\/p>\n

5<\/a> The latter was the subject of Riley\u2019s \u2018Drowning in Deposits<\/a>\u2019, a provocative appendix to \u2018Seven Theses\u2019 published in Sidecar <\/em>on 4 April 2023.<\/p>\n

6<\/a> In the month before the midterms, Biden\u2019s approval ratings were at 38 per cent, down from the mid-50s in the months after his inauguration. Clinton was polling at 41 per cent before the 1994 midterms in which the Republicans swept both chambers. Although inflation had crested in June 2022 at 9.1 per cent, in October it remained above 7 per cent, with food prices still rising by nearly 11 per cent. See Amina Dunn, \u2018Biden\u2019s Job Rating Is Similar to Trump\u2019s But Lower Than That of Other Recent Presidents\u2019, Pew Research Center, 20 October 2022; inflation rates, broken down by month, are tabulated at us Inflation Calculator, using the Consumer Price Index provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.<\/p>\n

7<\/a> Riley, \u2018Faultlines\u2019, p. 49.<\/p>\n

8<\/a> Karp, \u2018Party and Class in American Politics\u2019, pp. 133\u20134.<\/p>\n

9<\/a> One senses that Riley and Brenner object to identity-based explanations not only because they are descriptively inadequate, but because they are politically unhelpful, entrenching the very dynamics they purport to account for. \u2018Idealist\u2019 explanations, Riley explained in an interview on Jacobin<\/em> radio, foster a \u2018politics of moralism\u2019 with each side denouncing the other as irrational or prejudiced\u2014whether the xenophobia of benighted \u2018have-nots\u2019 or the hyper-wokeness of supercilious liberal elites. To show that contrasting political loyalties arise not from insuperable differences of culture or values fanatically held but from the \u2018material interests\u2019 inhering in each class fraction\u2019s \u2018objective situation\u2019 might seem a prerequisite for renewing cross-class solidarity: \u2018Dealignment? w\/ Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley\u2019, Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman<\/em>, 15 February 2023.<\/p>\n

10<\/a> Brenner, \u2018Introducing Catalyst<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

11<\/a> Riley and Brenner, \u2018Seven Theses\u2019.<\/p>\n

12<\/a> In seeking to dispel a \u2018misconception: that the Democratic Party has been an electoral failure in recent years\u2019, do Riley and Brenner overstate the strength of the Party\u2019s non-class strategy of appealing to the \u2018credentialled\u2019? As a recent report for Jacobin<\/em> points out, \u2018in four of the five states Biden flipped in 2020\u2019\u2014Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona, crucial for keeping control of the Senate\u2014\u2018the white non-college-educated electorate was larger than the white college-educated, black, and Hispanic electorates combined.\u2019 In the House, too, over 86 per cent of \u2018competitive districts are majority non-college-educated\u2019: The Center for Working-Class Politics and YouGov, \u2018Trump\u2019s Kryptonite: How Progressives Can Win Back the Working Class\u2019, Jacobin<\/em>, June 2023.<\/p>\n

13<\/a> Matthew Karp, \u2018The Politics of a Second Gilded Age\u2019, Jacobin<\/em>, February 2021.<\/p>\n

14<\/a> Karp does raise some crucial caveats too, however, noting, for example, the way increasing numbers of non-white workers are also drifting towards the Republicans, which at the very least complicates Riley and Brenner\u2019s argument that \u2018nativeness\u2019 and whiteness are the gop\u2019s principal means of \u2018social closure\u2019. Riley and Brenner register this trend in passing but do not adjust their schema in light of it. Some estimates point to a 33-point decline in Democrats\u2019 advantage among non-white workers between 2012 and 2022: \u2018Trump\u2019s Kryptonite\u2019.<\/p>\n

15<\/a> The different timeline may partly be an effect of Riley and Brenner focusing not on immediate evidence of class dealignment\u2014such as the contrasting political journeys of Hibbing and North Oaks\u2014but on its more indirect impact on the nature of elections: the rotation of rule on the \u2018narrowest of margins\u2019.<\/p>\n

16<\/a> Barker asks \u2018why manufacturing profits should be especially important given that manufacturing currently accounts for only 11 per cent of\u00a0value added in the us economy\u2019. Nicholas Crafts, in a symposium about The Economic Global Turbulence<\/em>, raised the same question: \u2018it is really surprising to me that Brenner places so much emphasis on manufacturing profitability . . . Manufacturing is a small sector in today\u2019s advanced economies and its profitability surely does not determine the rate of technological progress in services\u2019: Nicholas Crafts, \u2018Profits of Doom?<\/a>\u2019, nlr 54, Nov\u2013Dec 2008, p. 60. One reason for manufacturing\u2019s outsized and ongoing significance is its amenability to rapid productivity growth, which makes it what Benanav has termed a \u2018major engine of overall growth\u2019\u2014perhaps an irreplaceable one.<\/p>\n

17<\/a> The huge fiscal transfers during the pandemic, for example, not only further enriched the richest but also helped the poorest workers to cope with surging prices, as C\u00e9dric Durand has pointed out: \u2018in spite of declining real wages, this facilitated a change in the dynamic of employment in favour of low-wage workers\u2019: C\u00e9dric Durand, \u2018The End of Financial Hegemony?<\/a>\u2019, nlr 138, Nov\u2013Dec 2022. Except for claiming that Bidenomics, by fuelling inflation, has led to the Administration\u2019s \u2018deep unpopularity\u2019, Riley and Brenner also do not consider the effects policies can have on the field of politics itself, however uncertain their macro-economic consequences\u2014building or consolidating electoral alignments, altering the balance of class forces. Adam Tooze, for example, has described the ira, in its attempt \u2018to build a new coalition of green capital, progressive environmentalism and organized labour\u2019, as \u2018real socio-political-economic engineering\u2019: Adam Tooze, \u2018The ira (& the Fed) Debate\u2014Bringing Hegemony Back In\u2019, Chartbook<\/em>, 121, 17 June 2023.<\/p>\n

18<\/a> Riley, \u2018Drowning in Deposits\u2019.<\/p>\n

19<\/a> Mason, \u2018Yes, Socialists Should Support Industrial Policy\u2019.<\/p>\n

20<\/a> Grey Anderson, \u2018Strategies of Denial<\/a>\u2019, Sidecar<\/em>, 15 June 2023.<\/p>\n

21<\/a> Merchant, \u2018The Economic Consequences of Neo-Keynesianism\u2019.<\/p>\n

22<\/a> In his analysis of the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, David Kotz defines a regime of accumulation as a set of institutions and \u2018dominant ideas\u2019 which promote capital accumulation by facilitating \u2018a high rate of profit, growing total demand and long-run productive investments.\u2019 Political capitalism, from this point of view, resembles more a protracted intensification of the \u2018structural crisis\u2019 of neoliberalism Kotz diagnoses than a new regime that has transcended it (\u2018the contradictions of each regime eventually bring about a structural crisis and a period of struggle over the restructuring of the political economy, leading to a new social structure of accumulation\u2019): David Kotz, \u2018End of the Neoliberal Era? Crisis and Restructuring in American Capitalism<\/a>\u2019, nlr 113, Sept\u2013Oct 2018.<\/p>\n

23<\/a> In Brenner\u2019s Catalyst<\/em> editorial, for example, the idea of \u2018politically founded upward redistribution\u2019, if not the term \u2018political capitalism\u2019 itself, crops up in a section headed \u2018What is neoliberalism?\u2019, and later Brenner writes that \u2018In retrospect, the shift to neoliberalism has had two fundamental aspects\u2014austerity on the one hand and politically driven direct upward redistribution on the other\u2019: Brenner, \u2018Introducing Catalyst<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

24<\/a> There is even some vacillation in \u2018Seven Theses\u2019\u2014perhaps more verbal than substantive\u2014about whether political capitalism constitutes a \u2018new regime of accumulation\u2019, or \u2018a deep structural transformation in the regime of accumulation\u2019, which might imply a mutation within the existing neoliberal one.<\/p>\n

25<\/a> The mixed epistemological parentage of \u2018political capitalism\u2019 does not help. Branko Milanovi\u0107 uses it in Capitalism, Alone<\/em> (2019) to refer to the Chinese economy under ccp command, while, as Barker notes, Gabriel Kolko defined it as belle \u00e9poque<\/em> \u2018business control over politics\u2019 in The Triumph of Conservatism<\/em> (1963). Weber\u2019s original coinage, describing corruption in Ancient Rome, muddies the water further.<\/p>\n

26<\/a> Brenner, \u2018Escalating Plunder\u2019; emphasis added.<\/p>\n

27<\/a> Thomas Meaney, \u2018Fortunes of the Green New Deal<\/a>\u2019, nlr 138, Nov\u2013Dec 2022.<\/p>\n

28<\/a> \u2018America\u2019s Government Is Spending Lavishly to Revive Manufacturing\u2019, Economist<\/em>, 2 Feb 2023.<\/p>\n

29<\/a> \u2018News Release: Employment Projections\u20142021\u20132031\u2019, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8 September 2022. See also Derek Brower, James Politi and Amanda Chu, \u2018The New Era of Big Government: Biden Rewrites the Rules of Economic Policy\u2019, Financial Times<\/em>, 12 July 2023. On the job-creation potential of the original thrive agenda, a more ambitious precursor to the Build Back Better programme that included major investments in the care economy, aimed at supporting low-waged women and people of colour, see Robert Pollin, Shouvik Chakraborty and Jeanette Wicks-Lim, \u2018Employment Impacts of Proposed us Economic Stimulus Programmes: Job Creation, Job Quality and Demographic Distribution Measures\u2019, peri, UMass\u2013Amherst, 4 March 2021.<\/p>\n

30<\/a> Gopal Balakrishnan, \u2018Speculations on the Stationary State<\/a>\u2019, nlr 59, Sept\u2013Oct 2009, p. 6.<\/p>\n

31<\/a> \u2018America\u2019s Government Is Spending Lavishly to Revive Manufacturing\u2019, Economist.<\/em><\/p>\n

32<\/a> Reviving American manufacturing competitiveness as the basis for a sturdier and more equitable kind of growth has been a key motif of Biden\u2019s speeches. In September 2022, Biden told Detroit auto-makers that \u2018we\u2019re rebuilding an economy\u2014a clean energy economy, and we\u2019re doing it from the bottom up and the middle out. I\u2019m so tired of trickle-down; I can\u2019t stand it\u2019. \u2018My economic agenda has ignited a historic manufacturing boom here in America . . . American manufacturing is back.\u2019 In December, at the site of the Taiwanese chip-maker tsmc\u2019s planned plant in Arizona, Biden similarly spoke of \u2018the broad story about the economy we\u2019re building that works for everyone . . . one that grows from the bottom up and middle out, that positions Americans to win the economic competition of the 21st century\u2019: \u2018Remarks by President Biden on the Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Boom in America\u2019, 14 September 2022 and \u2018Remarks by President Biden on American Manufacturing and Creating Good-Paying Jobs\u2019, 6 December 2022, both available at whitehouse.gov.<\/p>\n

33<\/a> Riley, \u2018Faultlines\u2019.<\/p>\n

34<\/a> \u2018Dealignment? w\/ Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley\u2019, Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman.<\/em><\/p>\n

35<\/a> Robert Brenner, \u2018The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case\u2019, in Mike Davis, Fred Pfeil and Mike Sprinker, eds, The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook<\/em>, vol. 1, London 1985, p. 42.<\/p>\n

36<\/a> In \u2018Structure vs Conjuncture\u2019, for example, Brenner argues that \u2018the underlying reason for the Democrats\u2019 precipitous retreat from a reform agenda\u2019 after the collapse of profitability in the 1970s, \u2018was that, with the economy gone sour, the corporations on a rampage, and the unions wilting under fire, they found themselves operating in a transformed socio-political environment\u2019, later adding: \u2018Just as the corporations and the Republicans had been obliged to adapt to a context defined by the liberalism of the Democrats\u2019 New Deal\u2013Great Society project and the residual power of the labour movement during the postwar boom era, so from the mid-70s the Democrats, in a period defined by economic stagnation and the ever-increasing power of business, would accommodate to the Republican-driven push to the right\u2019: Robert Brenner, \u2018Structure vs Conjuncture: The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift<\/a>\u2019, nlr 43, Jan\u2013Feb 2007, pp. 43, 49.<\/p>\n

37<\/a> Karp, \u2018The Politics of a Second Gilded Age\u2019.<\/p>\n

38<\/a> In 2017, Brenner suggested this crisis of legitimacy \u2018made for an enormous political opening\u2019\u2014\u2018Capitalism can no longer secure the positive adherence of working people to the system because it does not provide for their needs, and everyone knows that\u2019\u2014though he also foresaw capitalist states\u2019 ramping up repression in the face of popular resistance, increasingly swapping hegemony for domination: Brenner, \u2018Introducing Catalyst<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

39<\/a> \u2018While states used to be terrified that market liquidity would dry up\u2014a typical feature of crises from the 1990s on\u2014the configuration is now reversed: the financial community is on a permanent public lifeline to ensure liquidity, smooth market clearing and provision of assets. This socialization of fictitious capital as the new normal is beginning to alter the balance of power between state and markets\u2019: C\u00e9dric Durand, \u2018The End of Financial Hegemony?\u2019.<\/p>\n

40<\/a> Robert Brenner, \u2018The Problem of Reformism\u2019, Against the Current<\/em>, no. 43, March\/April 1993. Wolfgang Streeck made a similar point in 2011, pointing to \u2018an apparently irrepressible conflict between the two contradictory principles of allocation under democratic capitalism: social rights on the one hand and marginal productivity, as evaluated by the market, on the other\u2019; \u2018a lasting reconciliation between social and economic stability in capitalist democracies is a utopian project\u2019: Wolfgang Streeck, \u2018The Crises of Democratic Capitalism<\/a>\u2019, nlr 71, Sept\u2013Oct 2011, p. 24.<\/p>\n

41<\/a> Brenner \u2018Introducing Catalyst<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

42<\/a> Balakrishnan sees cause for \u2018some optimism\u2019 in a new \u2018Pikettyan\u2019 conception of class as \u2018a straightforwardly political category, even a fiscal one . . . with numerical designations of the rich\u2014the top 1 or 10 per cent\u2014and corresponding statistical conceptions of the working class or people.\u2019 Among the advantages of this \u2018more abstract\u2019 conception of class struggle as being waged between the rich and the poor, Balakrishnan argues, is that it \u2018does not depend upon strong footholds in the system of production\u2019 or \u2018older forms of industrial working-class organization and agency\u2019. This might be particularly important in the era of political capitalism in which profits are increasingly acquired through political means rather than \u2018profitable production\u2019\u2014a change which, one would assume, considerably weakens workers\u2019 structural power, rooted in their ability to disrupt production and with it profits: Gopal Balakrishnan, \u2018Swan Song of the Ultraleft\u2019, Sublation<\/em>, 30 May 2022.<\/p>\n

43<\/a> Riley, \u2018Drowning in Deposits\u2019.<\/p>\n

44<\/a> Streeck, \u2018Crises of Democratic Capitalism\u2019, p. 29.<\/p>\n

45<\/a> Kenta Tsuda, \u2018Na\u00efve Questions on Degrowth<\/a>\u2019, nlr 128, Mar\u2013Apr 2021, p. 130.<\/p>\n

Go to Original – newleftreview.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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