Heading into the last U.S. mid-term election of 2022, progressives feared that the Democrats were in for a drubbing. True, after the implosion of the Bernie scene, an embittered fringe of the American Left had warily come around to seeing the Republicans as the lesser of two evils and were wishing for some well-earned retribution to fall on the heads of the hated shitlibs. When it was clear that the party of Biden and Pelosi had dodged the bullet, the progressives exhaled relief while the malcontents were left to pound sand once again. Although the significance of this anticlimactic, now forgotten mid-term result hardly seems obvious, the renowned Marxist scholars Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley reflected on its wider significance in their recently published theses on contemporary American politics.¹ Despite their occasionally sharp criticisms of left-liberals for their illusions and misconceptions about today’s Democratic Party, their recollection of the reaction in the room election night says something about the milieu they are writing for:

Dire warnings of a “red wave” delivering large congressional majorities to the Republicans gave way to jubilation at the salvation of democracy.

The response that follows to their portrait of a new American political landscape will address their arguments and facts head on but will also be pitched to those who felt somewhat differently.

I

What do they say explains this mid-term outcome? Many now expect the Democrats to fare poorly because they are losing working class support—so the narrative goes—but Brenner and Riley seek to show that they have actually done well recently and are in good shape to continue. Their argument is that despite hemorrhaging support from workers who have not gone to college, the Democrats have more than made up for this loss by the increase in support they get from those who did go to college, particularly so in midterm elections when turnout from the latter, more civic-minded group is higher than from the former.

Given the character of the mass bases of the Republican and Democratic parties, it is unsurprising that Democrats now seem to outperform the Republicans at midterm elections. They will undoubtedly continue to do so because the Democrats’ base, being more educated, is more likely to be engaged in electoral politics. 

This last observation is persuasive and suggests that the Democrats are far from the dire straits their progressive wing frequently bemoans. But the factual basis for the larger electoral pattern that forms the premise and occasion for their theses is at best questionable. According to Brenner and Riley, the results of the 2022 mid-term election were the expression of a new electoral dynamic that itself arose out of a deeper structural transformation in the nature of the capitalist system. In critical responses to their piece, the boldness of this latter claim seems to have overshadowed any scrutiny of the factual basis of their account of a new electoral dynamic. Let’s consider the evidence they offer for a change in American electoral behavior before turning to their speculations on the new kind of capitalism they posit to explain its emergence. 

The authors distinguish a pattern of sudden swings in the control of Congress supposedly characteristic of the post-WWII decades of rising real wages from another pattern that emerged two decades after the onset of a slowdown of growth beginning in the 1970s and supposedly characterized by a greater stability of partisan allegiance and fewer swing elections. What was the distinguishing pattern of the earlier electoral dynamic in their view?

In the US, this produced significant electoral swings, and big congressional majorities for the winning side: Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972. 

On this point, our authors appear to have gotten some basic facts wrong. Although Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon won by large margins in those years, in none of the elections they mention—1956, 1964, 1972—was there a swing from Democratic to Republican control of either house of Congress. In fact, from the 1930s to the 1990s the Democrats held onto control of both houses throughout with only a few interruptions. In what elections did Republicans wrest control of Congress from the Democrats during this period? Republicans captured the majority in the House in 1946 with Truman in the White House and lost it in 1948 with Truman’s reelection, won it back in 1952 on Eisenhower’s coattails and then lost it again in 1954, and thereafter failed to regain it until 1994. That last stretch amounts to forty years of no swings. As for the Senate, the Republicans took it in 1946 only to lose it two years later, then regained it in 1952, lost it again two years later, and thereafter remained the minority party until 1980. That amounts to twenty-six years of no swings. The first sustained break in the Democrats’ dominance of congressional elections was under Reagan from 1980-1986 when Republicans held the Senate, presaging the electoral realignment of the South that brought an end to their legislative dominance from the 1990s on. As everyone knows, in the 1990s the American South finally abandoned its vestigial Civil War era historical allegiance to the Democrats in congressional elections resulting in a profound realignment of the electoral map. 

Since the Civil War, long periods of one party in control of both houses of Congress and a majority of state governments were the norm. While the Republicans never secured anything close to the legislative dominance from the 1990s that the Democrats enjoyed for most of the preceding sixty years—and the Republicans over the sixty years before 1932—their clear-cut before and after narrative has no factual basis. After all, the two biggest mid-term swings since 1938 were the losses the Democrats suffered in 1994, giving control of both houses to the Republicans, and then in 2010, bringing the House back into their hands after holding it for most of the intervening years. The claim that decisive electoral swings in the control of Congress were more characteristic of the preceding era prima facie is at best misleading and puts in doubt the contrast they make with the subsequent one. 

All that to one side, in their account of a historic shift in American electoral behavior they do point to one new trend of considerable significance.

That political landscape has now disappeared. Beginning in the 1990s, and definitively since 2000, Republican and Democrat rule alternates on the narrowest of margins. Winning an election no longer involves appealing to a vast shifting center but hinges on turnout and mobilization of a deeply but closely divided electorate.

The American electorate has long stood out among Western democracies for its high levels of abstention, but since the 1990s turnout has ticked up and in the volatile atmosphere of the last presidential election leapt up to an unheard of 63 percent. Could rising turnout be explained by the government’s supposedly greater control over who gets what under the new capitalism? Brenner and Riley fail to mention this striking development although it seems relevant to their theses. 

All they note is that on this new terrain of increased turnout and mobilization, the Democrats have done well: “the question is not why the Democrats haven’t won more seats, but why they have done so well in the last three cycles, since 2018.” While it may seem perilous to posit the existence of a whole new political pattern on the basis of the experience of only a few elections, this is essentially what they’ve done, and then gone ahead to advance a very bold thesis to explain it.

The two propose that the changes in the electoral arena they point to stem from a transformation in the very nature of capitalism. The authors argue that the previous American electoral dynamic was rooted in an expanding economy encouraging expectations of a rising standard of living. All advanced capitalist countries experienced this secular trend, but in the US it unfolded within a distinctive political context characterized by the absence of any mass socialist or labor party. Less subject to the polarization of capital vs. labor, the US electoral system became a staging ground for regional-sectoral divisions within the capitalist class.

For most of the twentieth century, US political parties represented different coalitions of capitalists, who appealed to working-class voters on the basis that they would promote economic development, expand job opportunities and generate revenues to invest in public goods…a local version of the politics that shaped most capitalist democracies during the long post-war boom.

We saw that their account of the history of congressional elections is factually mistaken. But even speaking hypothetically, it is unclear why they think this context of economic expansion would have been more prone to big swing elections—as opposed to modest, incremental shifts in electoral support for parties offering the same public goods. 

In any event, on this uncertain evidence, Brenner and Riley propose that American voters now dance to a different tune because late capitalism has fallen into a deep stagnation from which it can’t get up. In lieu of any possibilities of further economic expansion, capitalists have been compelled to resort to state power to take a larger share of the pie from workers who make up most of the rest of society. In their view, this predatory turn is not a phase that will eventually restore the preceding normality of capitalist growth but is the genesis of a new order governed by another politically-driven logic of accumulation. 

This new electoral structure is related to the rise of a new regime of accumulation: let us call it political capitalism. Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return.

The claim that “raw political power” is the main source of the return on capital in the US (it is unclear whether they think this transformation in the regime of accumulation is a wider development) represents a complete departure for Brenner. The irony is that for Marxists Brenner’s name is almost synonymous with a notion of capitalism hinging on the sharp separation of the political from the economic. Safe to say, the old Brenner would have scorned the very term “political capitalism” as an oxymoron. In his influential study on the transition from feudalism to capitalism from a half century ago, he showed that one of the main conditions of this epochal change was the uprooting of coercive, feudal means of extracting surpluses from producers by a sovereign public power claiming a monopoly of all legitimate violence.² Deprived of any direct political or communal means of support, the now private owners of the factors of production were subject to the rigors of exchange dependency. Ceaseless competition forced the producers of commodities to specialize, reduce costs by using the most cost-efficient means of production, and reinvest the profits of this cost reduction either directly in one’s own line or by lending it out at interest to profit-maximizing producers in other lines. 

In his subsequent work on the world economy from the 1970s, Brenner argued that the social relations that compel this incessant profit-maximizing, cost-reducing investment generate virtuous cycles of rising productivity and income but by the same momentum periodically flip over into vicious cycles characterized by protracted periods of overproduction that reduce rates of profit and thus levels of investment and employment. This was what he claimed caused the passage from three decades of post-war expansion to the Long Downturn of the 1970s that we are supposedly still in.³ He argued that such downturns were eventually surmounted by the elimination of higher cost producers by more efficient competitors clearing the space for a restoration of profit rates and a new phase of expansion. The old Brenner held that as long as the social relations of capitalism remain in force, crises will eventually generate renewals; in fact, they are the means by which the capitalist system renews itself. 

A few years ago, he seems to have abandoned this earlier prognosis and came around to the view that this expansionary dynamic of development is at an end. He now holds that the Long Downturn that began in the 1970s is never going to unleash a new phase of sustained growth. Whereas capitalism was previously conceived as inseparable from an expansionary pattern of development, “political capitalism” presupposes that stagnation is here to stay. For permanent stagnation compels the owners of capital to tear down the separation between the political and the economic. 

This would seem to entail the need for a different or at least modified conception of capitalism, but strangely they do not seem to have recognized this obvious logical consequence. Critics have pointed out that Brenner once argued forcefully against the notion that varying regulatory regimes fundamentally modify the general logic of capitalist accumulation.⁴ Should we now conclude on the basis of this new conception that Nazi Germany, for example, was capitalist in conformity with this general logic but that contemporary America has somehow broken the mold and is now subject to a different one? It is not clear how Brenner’s new conception of political capitalism can be reconciled with his older view hinging on a sharper separation of state and capital, and it seems that it can only be reconciled if we assume that political capitalism is capitalism in its final stage, on its way to becoming another order. 

Brenner and Riley don’t offer their own proof for this controversial claim here and instead point to the following, more circumstantial evidence for the existence of a new regime of accumulation. 

This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of “politically constituted rip-off.” These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s CARES Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Critics have complained that the two have falsely characterized today’s feeding frenzies at the public trough as historically unprecedented. These critics also object that they have misleadingly characterized recent legislation as only upwardly redistributive, failing to see that the populace has also been the beneficiary of an immense largesse.⁵ The first criticism looks persuasive in the absence of evidence to the contrary, but however much trickling down there has been, clearly none of the acts these critics (more sympathetic to Bidenism than are our authors) mention have benefited workers at the expense of capitalists—and that after all is what downward redistribution would do.

Under political capitalism, government is stripped of its previous role as a more or less autonomous umpire of the interests of capital, and becomes an instrument of accumulation for the capitalist class as a whole. But this capture of the state by capitalists as a whole would necessarily unleash a struggle between different groups of capitalists. Why? The old Brenner asserted that competition for market share is capitalism’s motor of accumulation, and if political capitalism is still capitalism, profit-taking would presumably have to result in a political competition at the top between different groups of capitalists at least as fierce as economic competition used to be. Based on Riley’s scholarship, one might assume that under political capitalism, beleaguered industrialists battle against FIRE, with IT maybe at the top of the heap.⁶ The new order operates as an enormous orgy of corruption with the most powerful alpha capitalists using their control of government to line their pockets at the expense of all the betas—the capitalists and workers of declining sectors and regions.

Brenner and Riley do not show how the mechanism of competition between different groups of capitalists works under political capitalism. Instead, they shift the focus to competition between different groups of workers with distinct if not opposed interests. They hold that the electoral dynamic of a stagnant political capitalism is driven by the antagonism of material interests between the progressive, college-educated worker and the regressive, more poorly educated worker. Political capitalism pits different groups of workers against each other on ostensibly cultural grounds, but in reality, in accordance with their distinct material interests that they attempt to secure by voting for the party whose leading capitalists can protect them, mainly from the other, opposed group of workers.

Thus the two main US political parties no longer appear as alternative growth models, but rather as different fiscal coalitions: MAGA politics, which seeks to redistribute income away from non-white and immigrant workers, and multicultural neoliberalism, which seeks to redistribute income toward the highly educated.

Brenner and Riley are to be credited for proposing a bold revision to how Marxists have traditionally understood by a class analysis of politics, by putting the conflict between different groups of workers at the center of how elections in the US have come to work with other Western democracies following in tow. “There are profound divisions within the working class—divisions which have never been adequately mapped within the Marxian tradition.” Their notion of class sweeps away all previous centrality given to industrial workers by including not just all service workers but small business owners and most professionals as well: “Workers are all those who do not enjoy income from rents, dividends or interest payments.” Marxists have left behind their older sectoral notions of who does and doesn’t belong to the working class and now plump for a more universal, ownership and income-based one. This higher level of abstraction arguably makes it possible to see the basic structure of society more clearly than obfuscating sectoral conceptions of class. Here it allows us to portray the mechanism of a new political dynamic that animates capitalist democracies. 

In order to understand the contemporary American electoral dynamic, we have to recognize it as a conflict between these two groups of workers based on real material interests, i.e., not on mere ideological or cultural antipathies. Right away one might pause and ask how we would know the degree to which cultural-ideological factors were exaggerating this material conflict, thereby precluding other ways of resolving it. The authors do not tell us how to weigh the material and ideological factors in play here. Older Marxists explained politically crippling divisions within the working class as stemming from false consciousness, holding out the prospect that such divisions might be overcome. They might be implying that in order for that division to be overcome an alliance of progressive and reactionary workers would have to be worked out in a political form that would be able to outcompete electorally the material pull of both groups towards their respective capitalist benefactors. But under today’s political capitalism there can be no opening within the capitalist-steered two-party system for such solidaristic policies. It would seem to follow that significant redistributive measures could only then be achieved by a non-capitalist led party mobilizing both groups of workers. While it is not clear how one would distinguish between reform and revolution under political capitalism, it would seem to follow from their premises that substantial redistributive reforms would immediately endanger the surplus that capital now appropriates politically. In other words, under current conditions, redistribution on any significant scale would immediately open the door to a transition from political capitalism to political socialism. Perhaps they foresee a new variant of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” unfolding under these strange new conditions.

II 

After summarizing we can now more closely scrutinize the facts and logic supporting their theses. In their published form these were presented in such a confusing, and indeed convoluted, form that it will be helpful to turn the seven they propose into a clearer, more streamlined three (Theses One, Three, and Seven), the first having several parts. Much of what follows will take a closer look at what’s been said above, before turning to consider an alternative perspective on the current political scene.

Thesis One: A new non-class, but robustly material, politics has emerged since the 1990s.

In elaborating upon this thesis, they argue that “the parties, at their apexes, minister to different fractions of capital, but at their bases are oriented to different fractions of workers.” 

Let me begin by addressing this latter claim. Its first part assumes that the capitalist ruling class is politically divided. This seems to fly in the face of the widely recognized fact of decades of nearly unanimous bipartisan support for policies that benefit capital and the rich more generally speaking. Let us assume they know this and that their thesis does not convey their recognition of what is, after all, obvious. This happens. What then do they think is fueling all the white hot civil-war rhetoric coming from both parties if it’s not a conflict of interest at the top comparable to that which once pitted the rulers of the American North and South, for example? 

While the two start from the assumption that different parties represent distinct material interests, and while they begin by referring to the competition between different groups of capitalists, they quickly drop the topic. As Marxists they might shrink back from the consequences of a conception of a capitalist electoral system whose driving dynamic is a material conflict between two groups of workers, and so the gesture to different fractions of capital might simply be the vestige of an older concept of class politics. Whatever the reason, nothing more is said about these battling apexes. All the emphasis of their analysis is placed on the second part of the thesis—i.e., the conflict between different fractions of workers. This disproportion of emphasis seems to imply that in today’s electoral arena competition between different fractions of capitalists is subordinate to the competition between different fractions of workers. I’ll often just call them groups from now on. Is it plausible that a political system under capitalism could be driven by conflicts of material interests between opposing groups of workers? This would seemingly be most likely to happen when there’s next to no threat to their shared class interests coming from below, which arguably is our situation today. But Brenner and Riley would have it that political capitalism gives rise to a political system divided at the bottom and at the top, so let us think about how this system as they conceive it might work. 

How would the apparently ideological, but in reality, material conflict between different groups of workers relate to the presumably more nakedly material conflict between different groups of capitalists? One assumes that the latter must be the ones doling out the goods which they take from others under the new regime of accumulation. In the struggle between fiscal coalitions, one group of capitalists would take from another group of capitalists, as well from the workers that support them, and give some of what they take to their own workers. While all this is conceivable, they neither identify the mechanism of this antagonistic political appropriation nor its logic of development.

Their notion of how this struggle within the working class unfolds under political capitalism is derived from their general income-centered conception of class. They define workers as essentially all those who are not owners of capital assets, making it possible to comprehend US and increasingly Western electoral politics more generally as powered by an antagonism between the two groups of workers who make up the vast majority of the population. Within society’s working-class majority, fractional, or group, interests abound and differentiate themselves ideologically. 

The various fractions of the working class organized to protect the value of labor tend to coalesce as what Weber termed “status groups,” deploying political-ideological means to manage competition. 

This is apparently true under both political capitalism and what came before it, in other words: both the older (economic) as well as the newer (extra-economic) drivers of competition between different groups of workers promote rampant politico-ideological, status group “fractionalism.” Of course, “fractionalism” is not what is usually meant by the class struggle, but they explain that it is nonetheless a very material struggle. As Marxists they recognize that in order to win big, workers must break out of this fractional mode and organize on a class-wide basis to best advance their shared interests. This is where they revise the traditional concept of class politics. For Brenner and Riley, class politics is only in play when different groups of workers ally with each other through the political system to implement redistributive measures: “workers pursuing a class strategy link redistributive demands to a broader attempt to exert political control over the social surplus produced by workers and appropriated by capital.” What would it mean for workers to exert political control over the social surplus?

In their view, even the broadest strike waves for unionization and by unions to improve wages and conditions do not rise to the level of class politics, so defined. They would be what Lenin called “economistic.” Of course, Lenin was contrasting this lower economic level of the class struggle to the higher political struggle for state power on the assumption that the latter was conducted by a revolutionary party aiming to overthrow the state. Although Brenner and Riley seem to rely on the older Leninist distinction between the economic and political levels of the class struggle, they don’t ever specify the telos of what they call “class politics.” “Exerting political control” could encompass everything from progressive taxation to the expropriation of the capitalist class. 

Brenner and Riley argue that working-class politics in the sense of acts that exert control over the social surplus has been a highly unusual occurrence in US history; in fact, there were only two brief spells of it in the twentieth century. The first, which ran from 1934 to 1937, saw the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that was then gutted in 1948. The second, extending from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, brought the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society programs. The implications of their definition of class politics are counterintuitive. While large-scale collective action by workers for higher wages and better conditions—if it broke out now without allies in either party—would not be class politics, the passage of Johnson’s Great Society programs does count, even though no significant collective action on the part of workers led to it. The upshot is that the possibility of class politics depends on the mediation of the political system and in the US seems to depend on the Democratic Party—its donor class—tolerating this potentially disruptive expansion of working-class power.

Thesis Three: The hypothesis of “class dealignment” is an inadequate framework for understanding American contemporary politics.

The class dealignment thesis is the view that at one time US politics was more about class but now is preoccupied with identity and culture war appeals. 

This position both over-emphasizes the class character of American politics prior to the collapse of the New Deal coalition and under-emphasizes its robustly material but quite obviously non-class basis in the current period.

Our authors chastise the American Left (here they have in mind the DSA and those like them) for their naïve belief that the Democrats would be electorally stronger if only they appealed to the American working class in terms of their interests. They point out that the Democratic Party has never been open to a solidaristic working-class politics, even in their New Deal heyday when one of its core constituents were the rulers of Old Dixie. But we just learned that the only authentic cases of American class politics took place under and depended on Democratic Party-dominated governments. Why then wouldn’t it be reasonable for the American Left to demand that the Democrats return to their New Deal roots? This is what political capitalism supposedly rules out, but the reason why it was possible to win big reforms in the depths of the Great Depression through the political system but not now is far from obvious. As was pointed out earlier, if politics now decides who gets what, reforms could slide into revolutions.

If reforms on this scale are ruled out, it follows that different groups of workers can best protect their material interests through influencing one of the existing political parties. 

This shift of white workers without a college degree to the Republican Party is best understood not as a process of class dealignment, but rather as the consequence of the GOP’s successful bid to appeal to the interests of a particular fraction of the working class in nativist and racist terms.

But why has this appeal succeeded? The culturalist assumption that white workers vote Republican because they have been bamboozled by culture war appeals supposedly fails to recognize the rational perception of material interest that is involved.  

The organization of the white working class as white, or native workers as native, is in many ways a rational strategy for those workers who have the opportunity to constitute themselves as such, in a context where class identity is nowhere evident. 

One might wonder what the Republicans have actually done to shore up the declining “wages of whiteness.” It should be noted that Brenner and Riley uncritically accept the liberal characterization of their opponents as racists and then assert that this racism appeals to the material interests—and not just the values—of white workers. Since there is barely a trace of objectivity left in contemporary usages of the term, it is often hard to verify or contest them. I am thus forced to appeal to the authors themselves, who likely share with me a sense of its meaning. They will know that white workers, including the ones who voted for Trump—a sizable number of whom had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012—are now simply far less racist than they were in the good old days when political parties “appealed to working-class voters on the basis that they would promote economic development, expand job opportunities and generate revenues to invest in public goods.” In a brief footnote, they acknowledge that the role of racism in US politics might actually be declining. “It is likely that ‘nativism’ will become more prominent than ‘racism’ if Republicans manage to exploit their appeal to the entire non-degree-holding fraction of workers.” The claim that native workers have some material interest in limiting immigration is more obviously sound and amply borne out by the history of anti-immigrant parties in many countries. But in the US, the material side of this conflict between native workers and immigrants would tend to pit Black or already established immigrant recipients of scarce public resources against recent Latino immigrants more than it would their native white counterparts who mostly live and work elsewhere. Of course, the existence of material conflicts within the non-white working class is a topic from which almost all of the Left understandably stays clear. 

Be that as it may, Brenner and Riley do not prove but merely uncritically assert that white non-college-educated workers are being mobilized on the basis of a hoped-for wages of whiteness but provide no evidence that these workers have actually materially benefited from voting this way. They make much out of the most recent national elections, but this kind of story-telling can be turned against them with another hot take: as was noted at the time, more Blacks and Latinos voted for Trump than for Romney or McCain, suggesting a different trend than the one their model would predict. They will be aware that in the last presidential election, college-educated white males were the only demographic that voted Democrat in greater numbers than in the previous one. A scientific interest in what might explain these strange developments would dictate a harsher attitude towards the prejudices of their milieu that make it impossible to understand or even see what’s going on.

Our authors nonetheless distance themselves from the progressive academic and media discourse on white racism—now an effective tool for denouncing remnants of an older Left—by applying the same logic of identifying a motivating material interest to those relatively highly educated workers who vote for the Democrats. “This is a step that very few analysts take. They tend instead to argue, implausibly, that the college-educated are motivated by ‘values’ rather than economic interests. But the core ‘values’ that these voters espouse chime remarkably well with their material interests, which lie in the valuation of expertise.” The opinion that the college educated—“the professional-managerial class”—have a material interest in progressive politics is apparently not so often heard in their circles, but outside the latter it is now a rather loud refrain. 

Having posited a rational basis in material interest to the partisan alignment of ethno-racially distinct groups of workers, they then go on to put that basis in doubt. “This is not to imply that such a strategy is based on an accurate analysis, or that it is likely to succeed.” But if it is not to any considerable extent based on an accurate analysis and consistently fails to bring in any tangible benefit, then perhaps we should consider bringing “false consciousness” back to the table. Since the truth this classical conception of false consciousness implies has become unbelievable, we are now asked to accept that nearly everyone is in possession of the truth regarding not just their own immediate interests but apparently also the aggregate interests of those shifting, contending collectives of strangers to which they belong.

Thesis Seven: Bidenism is stagnant Keynesianism and ideologically descended from Progressivism and so cannot be bent to more social-democratic ends.⁷ 

We now return to the latest developments in American politics and seek to understand them in the light of a longer history. Brenner and Riley claim that for an accurate characterization of Bidenism, we first need to acknowledge not only its ambitious scale but also two peculiarities relating to its historical context and its ideology. 

The first concerns its conditions of emergence. Although the American version of the Keynesian welfare state was never the direct consequence of class politics—it had at least as much to do with wartime mobilization—historically, it was premised on a prior wave of working-class militancy. 

They claim “every other Keynesian welfare state has been based on a booming economy,” although surely the German (Hitler) and American (Roosevelt) Keynesianism of the 1930s was not. “Bidenomics, in contrast,” they maintain, “is a programme of deficit spending without growth,” but that in itself would not distinguish it from Trumponomics or Obamanomics. We recall that the only two cases of successful class politics were the struggles that led to the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, when the economy was not booming, and the Civil Rights protest that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which was not preceded by a prior wave of working-class militancy.

The second relates to its ideology. They argue that Bidenism most strongly resembles late nineteenth-century Progressivism of the Teddy Roosevelt variety in its vigorous promotion of the moral values—the sense of fairness—of the educated middle class. “The Administration’s social ideal is a market economy undistorted by monopolies and managed by an open, meritocratically recruited and diverse elite.” Of course, an obvious difference between our time and the era of the Rough Riders is that not much store was put in diversity back then. In both periods, meritocracy and racial diversity tended to be seen as opposed value orientations, but while the progressivism of the past valorized meritocracy and disparaged the diversity of non-whiteness, today it is more the reverse. 

They mention, in passing, another, even more fundamental shift. This was the establishment of new executive powers that effectively socially engineered the transformation of the white male-dominated society of an earlier era into the more gender fluid and equalized, officially anti-racist and multi-cultural society of today. 

The tool used to implement this vision is the regulatory state, including a metastasizing diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy which has the side benefit of providing well-paid perches for members of the educated working class itself.

Christopher Caldwell has argued that the Civil Rights Act was the fulcrum of this constitutional quasi-revolution that has provoked periodic backlashes but continues to advance remorselessly.⁸ The metastasizing bureaucracy they refer to imposes its equity and diversity mandates on the public and private sector alike. Bringing it into focus reveals an asymmetry in Brenner and Riley’s account of the weight of material interest at stake in today’s electoral battles. White workers without a college education have barely seen any benefit from the policies and the politicians that supposedly protect their interests, lacking a powerful bureaucracy to promote those interests. Consequently, they have only the diminishing returns of past privilege. Lacking good material reasons, their preference for the Republicans and now Trump bears the sad aspect of false consciousness. Establishment liberals and their left-liberal allies, on the other hand, are in command of a powerful instrument that provides well-paid perches for members of the educated working class itself and punishes all those who fall afoul of its codes. Occupying these seats of moral governance, progressives currently bask in the favor of the most powerful lords of capital, though this might change in the event of a strong enough backlash.

Who have been the principal beneficiaries of this progressive agenda? Revealingly, Brenner and Riley fail to mention the well-known gender gap in American politics or reflect on its significance. Although progressive discourse constantly problematizes racial and gender normativity, it is well known that over the longer term the new governance has disproportionately benefited America’s plain Janes—college-educated, professional white women. Naturally the latter provide the core mass electoral base for the Democrats and set its ideological tone. 

The symbolic logic of hegemony dictates that narrower interests get dressed up as wider ones. This insight can help us understand the material and ideological relationships that bind together the progressive demographic as a political force with norm-setting and patronage powers. For members of those designated by the acronyms BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ constitute the subaltern allies of this formidable white female, college-educated demographic. While these subalterns get an allotted portion of the available sinecures, they do not amount to much electorally. Progressive people of color espouse views that are often far from those held by the vast majorities of their descent communities, for the latter benefit very little from this set-up except perhaps indirectly via the uplifting inspiration provided by the progressive few. And the so-called communities based on alternative gender identities are electorally negligible quantities however much they punch above their weight in the ideological sphere. 

As one might expect, all is not peace and love under the rainbow. Members of groups claiming racial and gender victim status seem to have been given license to ridicule and abuse white women professionals and their hapless male allies, who both lead and provide the mass base of contemporary American progressivism—controlling them from below as it were. The highest white echelons of wealth and power stand above the fray and, shielded by a pragmatic embrace of progressive mandates, look down with either indulgent resignation or grumble a bit. It is not they but working class white males and their deluded female supporters who hate American liberals—and the feeling is mutual. Putting aside the conflict of material interest involved, the animating ideological polarization of politics and media is college-educated white women vs. high school-educated white males. Again, asymmetry reigns here for the latter are the losers, condemned by the new spirit of capitalism to fade away. In a nutshell, such is the dreary ideological world of “political capitalism.”

The undue emphasis the authors place on a material conflict between the progressive and reactionary wings of the working class lead them to neglect the continuity of Bidenomics with Trumponomics. What is their common denominator? Looking at the purely domestic dynamics, both arose as emergency measures taken in response to the recent pandemic. They took on an expanded and unexpected significance for social policy, loosening neo-liberal strictures and raising the prospect of large public expenditures and redistributive measures. Most of this story can be told without reference to the division at the center of their analysis. 

III 

How to sum up? Brenner and Riley’s theses presume a narrative of an electoral shift that is factually unsupported, a theorization of a transformation in the nature of capitalism that is incoherent, a conception of class politics narrowly tailored to a handful of twentieth century examples of legislative acts of redistribution depending on the support of the Democratic Party establishment, and, lastly, an account of the conflict between distinct reactionary and progressive fractions of the working class that uncritically reproduces progressive misrepresentations of Trumpism as the politics of white working-class privilege, ignoring the asymmetry of material benefit that accrues to these contending fractions, as well as the gender dimension of this antagonism. 

These failings of their argument pale in comparison to their decision to not even mention the enormous and mounting scale of American military ambitions in Europe and Asia. One would think this would bear directly on their conception of US domestic politics for the more spent on guns, the less on butter. The fiscal priorities of empire simply rule out the kind class politics they support but the obstacle fails to register. A little more than a hundred years ago, Social-Democracy failed to avert the catastrophe of world war when it may have been in its power to do so. What remains of this tradition can barely bring itself to mention the manifest drift into disasters on a scale that bears comparison to the great wars of the previous century. During the Iraq War, there was an outpouring of attempts to theorize the geo-political logic of the US-led neo-liberal order, but war in the Ukraine has failed to galvanize a comparable response. Most of the Left—after drawing up a few worthless moral score cards—has retreated into silence, a resounding testimony to their theoretical exhaustion and political bankruptcy. We often hear of the fall of the workers’ movement, but less is said about the demise of anti-war politics, and the sorry before and after story that might be told about that. Subordination to the establishment liberal mindset takes many forms as it exerts an influence over almost all of what calls itself the Left.  Here it has led to two scholars of impeccably radical credentials—with heretofore only a few illusions about the Democrats—to simply ignore the primary evidence for what could pass as “political capitalism” in a piece positing the latter as the cause of a great domestic transformation. Whatever one thinks of their claim that the latter amounts to a new regime of accumulation, burgeoning military budgets, a metastasizing security and surveillance regime blatantly deployed to neutralize unruly politicians, and an audacious attempt to restructure the entire global economy around US strategic goals are all developments that could have lent better support for their thesis—and are of greater significance than the results of the last midterm election. 

I would like to propose an alternative picture of the historical conjuncture based on Brenner’s earlier work but with due regard to the significance of the geo-political dynamics that his conceptions of the history of capitalism always tended to push to the margin, theoretically speaking. The capitalist system has economically restabilized after the financial crisis of fifteen years ago, and a modest confidence in its future has been restored by the onset of advanced technologies promising growth amid a transition to cleaner energy sources. But the skies are still cloudy as this American-led re-stabilization is weighed down by the low profit rates and levels of investment that have long plagued the advanced economies and reduced world economic growth from its post-war norm. Several decades of stagnation and low wage growth punctuated by bouts of innovation have made it possible for central banks to bail out and debt-finance without fear of triggering off the kind of wage-price spirals that bedeviled the system in the 1970s, in the modest confidence that these acrobatic financial operations are sustainable and will eventually release new spurts of growth. All this is likely to change soon. Another financial crisis is due, and in its wake, the familiar boom and bust pattern of the neo-liberal era will likely to come to an end under the impact of a headwind stronger than persisting low profits in the manufacturing sector. There is a broad structural shift afoot, though it is unlikely to result in the emergence of a new “regime of accumulation.” One can now foresee that the relationship between the system’s potential advanced technology-driven paths of growth and its manifest counter-tendencies to stagnation may no longer play out through the operation of some unifying world economic logic as the consequences of strategic delinking unpredictably unfold. The US is stepping up hostilities against states that it once warily accepted as junior partners of open-door capitalism and attempting to transform its alliance structures into the nucleus of a new geo-economic order. The strategic imperatives driving its ever-expanding sanctions regime converge with the need to create an inter-state framework capable of withstanding the next financial crisis. These geo-political developments are contributing to the halting formation of a new relation of the advanced states to national capital and the world market. Neo-liberalism is being phased out but with no clear alternative model of capitalism and the interstate order. For better or worse, this is a widening horizon. A breakthrough in thinking about the next stage of capitalism along the lines of what Lenin’s Imperialism was for its own time has arguably become imperative. Sadly, the Marxists—once so confident in their totalizations and periodizations—have had little of any consequence to say about it so far.

1. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, “Seven Theses on American Politics,” New Left Review 138 (November–December 2022). ↩︎
2. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 (February 1976). ↩︎
3. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (London: Verso 2006). ↩︎
4. Tim Barker, “Some Questions About Political Capitalism,” New Left Review 140/141 (March–June 2023). ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Dylan Riley, “Faultlines,” New Left Review 126 (November–December 2020). ↩︎
7. This thesis has been rephrased to bring together points they make separately. ↩︎
8. Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). ↩︎