The American Right: From Margins to Mainstream

The American right, never on the ropes for very long, is on the march again. In some sense, this resurgence is hard to understand. If you buy the thesis that the right is driven by a defense of hierarchy and privilege and draws its energy from opposition to a strong left, its strength is almost incomprehensible. It’s hard to think of a time when American capital and capitalists were so politically secure. During the first Gilded Age, the sleep of the moneyed was often troubled by populist and socialist agitation. Armouries were built in major American cities to house National Guard units meant to suppress strikers and demonstrators, something that seems unimaginable today

Before and After Crisis: Wall Street Lives On

My assignment for this volume was to write about Wall Street before and after The Crisis. My first thought was, that’s easy. Before The Crisis, Wall Street was the most powerful economic, political, and social force in the US. After The Crisis, Wall Street is the most powerful economic, political, and social force in the US. Ok, next essay. Actually I must confess to being a little surprised at this outcome. I’ve never been one to believe – and I do mean believe, in the sense that it’s often a faith for which supportive arguments are mobilized after the fact rather than a logical conclusion following an evaluation of the evidence – in the fragility of the capitalist order or the tenuousness of US imperial power. The left is full of crisis mongers who’ve seen one coming every day for the last thirty years. But I did think that Wall Street was, to turn its own jargon back on itself, in for a bit of a haircut after the financial crisis and the ensuing recession. I’d assumed that its power, prestige, income, and freedom to manoeuvre would be scaled back, if not to the levels of the early 1950s, at least to something less than the lordly dominance it’s enjoyed since the bull market in stocks took off on the afternoon of August 12, 1982. But that seems not to have happened. Wall Street has used the crisis, if not to enhance its power at least to demonstrate it. This essay will examine several dimensions of Wall Street’s rise to pre-eminence over the last few decades, it's exercise of class power through the crisis, and the prospects of the left in the aftermath of the crisis

La “comunidad de negocios”

Estados Unidos puede estar poblado por aproximadamente 300 millones de mónadas aisladas pero amamos la palabra “comunidad”. Para la izquierda, nunca se trata de “negros” o “judíos” sino de “la comunidad negra” y “la comunidad judía”. Pareciera que hay algo brusco y casi descortés en los sustantivos simples monosilábicos; entonces, agregar unas sílabas que suenan a latín suaviza el golpe. Pero el uso de la palabra también puede ser leído como el cumplimiento de un deseo, una ilusión de que una comunidad que en realidad no existe en ningún sentido como tal pueda crearse en el acto de nombrarla

The 'business community'

The US may be populated by nearly 300 million isolated monads, but do we ever love the word 'community'. On the left, it's never 'blacks' or 'Jews', it's 'the black community' and 'the Jewish community'. Presumably there's something abrupt and almost impolite about simple monosyllabic nouns, so the addition of a few Latinate syllables softens the blow. But there's a way in which the use of the word reads like a wish fulfillment, a hope that a community that doesn't really exist in any for-itself sense can be created in the act of naming it. But, beyond the left, it's also a popular formulation in mainstream American speech. Examples I've collected over the years include the reality TV community, the military community, the air-hijacking community, the mortgage community, the Alzheimer's community, the cybernerd community, the Phish community, and the copyright community. Of particular interest to readers of this volume might be one of the more ubiquitous examples: 'the business community'

Clinton's Liberalism: No Model for the Left

The U.S. economy has become a model for the world, with the most minimal of welfare states, the weakest of regulations, and the maximum of freedom for private capital to do as it pleases. The IMF and World Bank have brought the model to the South, and the architects of European economic union are bringing it - slowly, and not without popular resistance - to the cosseted welfare states of the EU. Maybe Henry Luce was right about the American Century after all. Not only has the U.S. economy become a model for the world, at least among elite academics and policymakers, the U.S. political system is even gaining admirers. And Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party have become objects of study, and even admiration, for left-of-centre parties. What exactly does this mean?

Trump and the New Billionaire Class

It’s hard to think clearly about Trump and his change he represents. Is it too distressingly moderate to say that there’s more continuity in Trump than the screamers say, but that he does mark a turn for the worse? Decades of economic and geographic polarization have produced a harder, meaner edge to American politics (not that they were ever absent). The working class no longer enjoys the rapid income growth it did from the end of the Second World War to about the time Nixon resigned in disgrace. Entire regions – former industrial cities like Detroit, the inner suburbs of older cities, much of the hinterlands – are in varying stages of decay. The old WASP ruling class that ran the US into the 1970s has faded, replaced by a horde of new plutocrats who made their fortunes in tech and finance. The WASPs were a relatively coherent, stable formation, concentrated in the Northeast, married from the same pool, belonged to the same clubs, and had some capacity for thinking about the future. (It was this class that designed the post-Second World War structure of the American empire.) But their fortunes declined with the old-line industries and companies they were rooted in. The new class, which came into being with the boom of the 1980s – a milestone in its development was freebooting oilman and takeover artist Boone Pickens’ 1983 attempt on Gulf Oil, a pillar of the old Pittsburgh corporate establishment – is a much less organic thing. It’s more geographically and socially diverse and less inclined towards noblesse oblige than its predecessor. That new class – or class fraction, if you want to be wordy – has had a heavy role in transforming the Republican Party, once a coalition of liberals, moderate, and conservatives, into the rightmost mainstream party in the First World

The Global Political Economy of Israel (Radio Interview with Jonathan Nitzan)

Jonathan Nitzan on the political economy of Israel, the Middle East and global accumulation