Are We Still in Neoliberalism?

[MUSIC] Welcome to confronting capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashek and I'm here as always with Vectibir, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a Journal of Theory and Strategy. So V, we're far enough into Trump's presidency now that we have a good sense of what his agenda actually is. Did you ever picture it looking like this? I didn't think he would change that much from his first presidency, from his first administration. So I kind of knew what kind of policy he'd pursue, but the chaos of it and the aggressiveness and the kind of mania that he brings with it, I don't think anybody expected it to be at this level. So it's a combination of, yeah, he's doing what we expected, but he's doing it so much more aggressively and single-mindedly now that it's really shaken up the political economy and the culture. Yeah, well, I think what's interesting is if you look at Trump supporters, there is a portion of his base that couldn't be more pleased, probably because they were not necessarily expecting him to go to the links he has and then he did. And then another portion that was sort of betting the whole time that his presidency was going to be basically a carbon copy of his first term and so are kind of pissed off at him that he's actually doing all this stuff. I mean, within his base, there's a call to upend the system, to tear things down, to smash the institutions and this time he came prepared to do it. And if that's what you wanted to see, yeah, you have to be happy with it. I think if you were Trump supporter. Yeah, I think that's right. If you really believed in taking him out of his word, but I think a lot of people didn't. And I think what's interesting this time around is that not only the intensity of his agenda and his policies, but also the links to which he's going have made some people start to question, is this some sort of turning point within not just American political history, but in the entire global economic system, specifically this idea that perhaps Trump and his new agenda signify some end of neoliberalism. I would say there's a turning point in many ways. Many people now believe that you get this feeling that there's no going back to the Bush Obama era capitalism that there has been a shift in the political culture, but also in the kinds of policy packages that we can expect to see now. So I believe there's been a shift on the issue of neoliberalism. It's a little more clear. So let's try to get into that a bit. Yeah, so with that in mind, do you think Trump is actually the end of neoliberalism? I don't know if Trump is the end of neoliberalism. I do believe we're in a phase of capitalism. Or I guess people are calling it now the term is late stage capitalism, which I'm not really sure what it means. Yeah, at a certain point, we're going to run out of like later stages. In the 80s, there's a term called late capitalism. And Ernest Mandel wrote a book in the 70s called Late Capitalism. And somehow it morph into late stage. And it makes it sound like it's about to die or something. That it's in its final stages and we're just watching it slowly curl up into a ball. But late stage, it's metastasized capitalism. So it does feel, I think, like we are at a something of a watershed in our political economy. And neoliberalism, as a word, is used to describe all these various dimensions of the political economy. The global dimension, the domestic dimension, its political components, its economic policies, the labor relations, all these things come under the rubric of neoliberalism. And it starts to become something that is so encompassing that it doesn't have a lot of analytical traction. So let me just briefly say the sense that it conveys and then how and why I think we're seeing some important shifts in it now. So at the rock bottom, what people mean by neoliberalism, I think, is just a turning away from the kind of redistributive regulatory regime in the 50, 60, 70s, which also had a place for labor in it. Right. Also known as the postwar economy. The golden age of capital. Yeah, the golden age of capital. So broadly speaking, social democratic capitalism. Turning away from that towards a more unregulated, market-based economic distributive regime, right? It's called neoliberalism because it's a new form of liberalism. So what is the liberalism? What they mean by that is not political liberalism, the liberalism of rights and of strong political inclusion. But what they mean is a unregulated economy of the kind you had in the 19th century. So neoliberalism means a new version of the 19th century capitalism, which gave rise to all those gigantic social movements, which gave us the welfare state, right? Okay. So neoliberalism is supposed to mean broadly speaking, a turn towards marketized forms of exchange and distribution without the heavy hand of the state intervening either in market transactions or in income distribution. Okay. If that's what we mean by neoliberalism and we're asking, is this the end of it? Answer is no. Why the answer is no is interesting. There's a partial way in which something has come to an end. And that's what I think people are pointing to when they say could neoliberalism be ending. One is the social support for all these policies. And the second is the global dimensions of those policies. Yeah. So what do you mean by the social support of neoliberalism? Perry Anderson wrote this article. I think it was in 2000 when the new left review relaunched. And he was relaunching it because they thought that we are in what could be a very, very long era of capital's dominance. Perhaps called neoliberalism. And the idea was that that's going to require an entirely new intellectual agenda to make sense of it. And at that moment, in that article, Anderson made this observation that he thought that the ideology of neoliberalism, which is the ideology that celebrates markets, celebrates individualism, that celebrates a very minimalist state. That ideology of neoliberalism is so hegemonic, he compared it to in the early modern era and middle ages, the power of the Christian Church. So Anderson thought that neoliberal ideology was extremely powerful. And what that suggested at that time was that neoliberalism was successful as a political program in part because it had garnered the support of the population through this ideology. So when we talk about the social supports of neoliberalism, what it conveys is the sense that there was not only a consensus within the ruling classes and the political establishment for a kind of marketized political economy, but that it had also won the consent of the masses through a variety of means. And now that support is collapsed. How is it collapsed? Well, starting at around the time of Occupy Wall Street, what it made clear was that the enormous inequalities that had grown in the era of the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s, those inequalities had become so stark that there's a general cultural revulsion against it and a general sense that people should not only have political rights but also economic rights. Now that goes against the neoliberal ethos, which says, your only rights are political rights. In the economy, you get what the market gives you. That's the ideology of neoliberalism. Now my view is I don't think there was ever a great deal of social support for neoliberalism. I think people always hated it. I think people hated having to fend for a job constantly, having to struggle for their wages. I think they hated the insecurity that came with it, the rolling back of the welfare state. So what changed starting in 2010 wasn't that the support for neoliberalism fell apart. It was that the anger against neoliberalism finally came together. And in my opinion, leftists and critical theorists in the 90s and the early 2000s who were trying to have this Gramscian theory of how consent is generated in capitalism and how neoliberalism and fatturism generated consent, they were completely off base. So one question I have for you about that is it's not as though there has been no political resistance up to this point. Throughout this era, there's been consistent attempts, especially by the Republicans to basically threaten to roll back these benefits in particular social security. And whenever that happens, for example, there's always a big push of nonprofit groups and groups of elderly Americans to go to town halls to tell our Republicans, don't you dare touch my benefits and to then vote against them in the midterms as a sort of punishment. How is this sort of political tension now distinct from those previous battles to, for example, protect the welfare state from rollbacks that would have been in line with neoliberalism? There haven't been any big social mobilizations since the 1980s, whether in support of social security or anything else, the resistance to unwinding it has almost entirely been electoral and lobbying. The lack of success on the part of the Republicans and the Democrats in shrinking the American welfare state is not because the electorate or working people banded together and launched massive campaigns and rolled back their agenda. It was because every time they tried to do it, they lost at the hustings. They lost in the elections. They lost in midterms. And this is what we're seeing right now in the fight about Medicaid in Trump's tax agenda. Now, that's a different kind of resistance. That's a resistance to unwinding certain policies. There's a different kind of resistance to capitalism, which has a positive agenda, which is not only just to throw sands in the wheels of liberalizers, it's to actually gain some new rights within capitalism that you didn't have before. That's what the new deal had done, right? My view is that it's inaccurate to say that the support for neoliberalism has collapsed. It's more accurate to say that the toleration for neoliberalism has collapsed. There was never support. There was never a mass view of working an ordinary people that faturism and Reaganism is a good thing. What there was was a grudging acceptance at best, but mostly there was a sense of resignation to it. I think that goes well with your comments about the distinction between social movements and electoral behavior, because the common cited example of that actually this was a popular decision that was made to have something resembling neoliberalism. I don't know that people exactly vote for that, but the working class vote for Reagan is a big cited example that, oh, well, this is what people wanted. They actively ascended to this. No, there was no ascent to Reagan's economic program. There was no ascent to what came to be known as Reaganism. There was a revolt against the Democrats. There was a revolt against the Volker shock. The massive increases in interest rates, the unemployment that had generated, but there was never a sense that what we want to have is a rolling back of our economic rights and a rolling back of the welfare state. That's a talking point of certain liberal intellectuals and the right, but it's profoundly mistaken. But I want to get back to what I was talking about earlier. I think the accurate way of describing what's changed is that the public is no longer willing to tolerate what it was fed for 30 years. That's neoliberalism. And there's an anger within the culture. A demand for some kind of shift, some kind of change, which is different from what we saw in the 90s and the 2000s. So while it's a mistake to describe it as a collapse and the support for neoliberalism, that description does get at something, which is that political elites cannot take for granted that they can just get away with the marketized social policies that they had implemented the last 30 years. They know that now. Now that's an important change because there's a churning within the political culture in which it's understood that political elites are going to have to in some dramatic way change the way they've been going about doing their business. Does that mean that they're going to move away from the Reaganism, the Thacherism, what we know is neoliberalism? The answer to that is largely no. There's one component of it that they are changing. And that's what we call globalization. I would say however that the end of globalization, if we want to call it that, is not the end of neoliberalism. It is simply a change within one dimension of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism had two dimensions, right? There was a domestic front and there was the international front. The international front was one that tended to things like trade, exchange rates, things like that. That is undergoing an important change. No doubt about that. But in terms of how states and how the capitalist class deals with a domestic economy, how it accumulates capital, how it makes its profits, how it deals with labor and the welfare state, there's zero indication that that's going to change. Yes. Can you talk a little bit more about your second point about the base of neoliberalism, specifically the political base of neoliberalism? Yeah. So once we understand that neoliberalism was not brought about because the mass is demanded it, the question is how did it come about? Well, it came about because in the United States, we just stick with the United States. It was a shift within the American political and economic establishments understanding of how to revive growth and how to revive profits. Starting in the late 60s, all the way through the 70s, the American economy had been pretty stagnant. And the consensus by the late 70s in the business community became the way to revive growth is, first of all, to revive profitability, corporate profits. Corporate profits were being dragged down, they said, because of all the excess costs that the welfare state and the trade unions had imposed upon it. The welfare state with the high levels of taxation on the rich with its great deal of social insurance, which they thought created a disincentive for workers to work. And then of course, the trade unions with all the demands they made on corporate revenues for higher wages, for pensions, for benefits, things like that. So the idea was we need to regain the initiative, we being the business community, so that by pushing back against all these costs, we can recoup more of our revenues and keep them as profits. And once we have those as profits, we can reinvest them and that reinvestment will lead to higher levels of growth. Now this was a establishment, this is an elite perspective. In order to pursue that perspective, they had to deal with the fact that the trade unions would be opposed to it. So the first item on their agenda was you got to weaken or even get rid of the trade unions. So in the 70s, what we see is a wholesale assault on the trade union movement and it's done for two reasons. It's an end in itself. You get to scale back the power of the unions and through that you increase your own power in the workplace as a manager and you increase your profits because there's fewer demands of unions and make on you. But the political benefit too, which is once the unions are gone, the main source of support for the welfare state is gone. And now you can start pushing back against all the costs that the welfare state is imposing upon you as well. That was the essence of it. That was not brought into office through some sort of mass working class desire for neoliberalism. It was imposed on them. And once it's imposed on them, well, they wanted to fight back. But if you don't have trade unions, if all your social institutions are being dismantled, how are you going to fight back? There's nothing left. So all you have left is the elections. So once all they had left was their vote. It actually made the job very easy for the political parties because in between those elections, for those four years and between the elections, you've kind of got a free hand to do whatever you want because the trade unions aren't there and the social institutions aren't there. So that consensus within the ruling class for this new kind of market economy has more or less been in place for upwards of 40 years now. So what you're laying out is that over the course of neoliberalism, there's been a central consensus that corporate profitability is being harmed by the welfare state and that in turn, if we want to enhance that profitability, we have to remove a major obstacle to reforming the welfare state, which is the labor unions. It's Trump in some way challenging that entire consensus because he's somebody who ran basically both elections on let's keep the welfare state untouched. I'm not going to do anything to take away your benefits. And even if he was not explicitly pro-union in the way Bernie Sanders was, he was not campaigning on an anti-union agenda at all. And in fact, in his first term, he was working with labor unions to keep their jobs here in the beginning of his second administration. A lot of Hubelow was made about the fact that he was appointing a labor secretary that was for the pro-act. So is Trump or other politicians like him, such as Josh Hawley, somehow something different? This is a good question. And it should be dealt with at I think two different levels. The first level is could these politicians be harbingers of a kind of elite skepticism towards neoliberalism? Again, by neoliberalism, we mean the unfettered rule of markets over our social institutions. And the second level is, well, even if they are skeptical towards that, are they skeptical towards the underlying issue, which is the prioritization of corporate profits and managerial power over the interests and the lives of the rest of the population. I think that distinction is often lost in these conversations. So let's just start with the first question. Is it possible that people like Trump, people like Hawley are skeptical about traditional free market rule? And I think the answer to that is, yeah, they're skeptical in the sense that they are willing to move away from some components of it in the interests of the larger class project to which they're committed. Now, that larger class project is what I'll deal with in the second dimension that I talked about. But the very fact that they're interested at all in questioning it should not be, I think, a lighted or minimized. I think it's a big deal. And it's resonated with the population. The reason it's resonated with the population is because, as I said earlier, they're very angry. They are now no longer willing to tolerate the traditional regime. The dilemma that the American ruling class faces and in Europe, the European ruling class face is that they are not the ones who want to move away from the 40 years of neoliberalism is being kind of thrust upon them by the population. So what they're trying to figure out is how can we maintain the broader aspects of our power over the population while reengineering the institutions in some way to absorb all of the attacks and the criticism and the resentment of the electric. Right? That's what they're trying to do. Now, towards that, sure, you can get someone like Holly coming around and saying, we need to preserve the social safety net. You can get someone like Trump saying, I won't touch Medicaid and Medicare. But understand what those things are. They are not, in any way, a revitalization of the welfare state. What they're doing is at the very, very, very top of it at the very best they're saying, we will keep its status quo anti. Status quo anti is what's caused all the anger among the population in the first place. So it is not much of a solution. All they're saying is we won't keep with the accelerated pace at which we have been dismantling everything and forcing markets down people's throats. Okay, but from the people's standpoint, it's not nothing. It's something, right? And they're so desperate right now for some kind of relief from 40 years of misery that a large section of the electorate sees that as something you can hold on to. So it is quite possible that you will find elements of the Republican party and in Europe, elements of the right even coming around some kind of support for a weak redistributive program. And by what that means, some kind of weak welfare state, that's entirely possible. Right. What they're doing is just not continuing to attack. That's right. We should, I think, understand that as slowing down the pace of the dismantling rather than reversing the dismantling. Right. And it's notable that Trump's not getting compared to FDR here. No. And you know, populism at one time meant massive attacks on elite power. Today's populism simply means slowing down the attacks on the working class. That's all it means. Okay. But look, it's not insignificant. Even Holly, people point to him as a harbinger of changes within the Republican party, but he's pretty isolated. It's a very small contingent within the Republican party now that is interested in preserving the social safety net. They're literally about a dozen, maybe 18 Congress people and one senator. So we're not talking about a major change in the party. Right. But again, we shouldn't ignore it. It's not insignificant. And if it weren't for them, right now you would see in Trump's tax bill, you would see a wholesale attack on Medicaid. Now, there's a deeper issue, which is suppose that version of the Republican party, that wing of the Republican party, that wing of European right does grow to some extent. And we do see a turn towards trade unions and we do see a turn towards some kind of move away from free trade and things like that. Does that mean an end to the last 40 years of class dominance of employer power? The answer to that has to be no, which means in my opinion, neoliberalism is not the issue. Remember, we started by saying the essence of neoliberalism is a turn to the kind of 19th century rule of markets, right? Now, the point is what a fully fledged democracy requires is not so much scaling back of markets in and of itself. But the full participation of ordinary people in the political institutions that rule over them. It is possible that you can have an unfettered rule of capital in a situation where you have core protest institutions. Can you explain what a core protest institution is and why that would be consistent with capitalist power? Yeah. What we're trying to understand is what do working people need in order to pursue their interests in a situation where their interests are not aligned with the interests of the wealthy? The reason working class people fought for democracy is that they thought democratic institutions, the right to vote, would be one more arrow in their quiver to try to fight for decent lives in a situation where they don't have much control over the key institutions of society, the workplace, the government, things like that, right? Okay, so they thought the vote is one very important element of that. Trade unions are a very important element of that. Now, the desire on the part of the ruling class to roll back all these institutions like trade unions and the other social institutions was that they wanted to exercise unilateral dominance over politics and over economics. Now, there are several ways in which they can exercise unilateral dominance. One way is through free markets, but they can also do it by organizing civil society into what's called corporate bodies. Corporate body basic, it's not corporations, it means collective entities that organize people's interests in some way. Trade unions are a corporate body. Civic associations are a corporate body. Political parties can also be a corporate body. It is forgotten quite often that in the 1920s and 30s, when the far right held the most power that we've seen in the last century, it didn't do it through free markets. It did it through what's called corporate institutions. That meant they were trade unions, they were civic associations, they were citizens groups, all of these things which we kind of associated with the thriving democracy can also be instruments of capitalist power. The class against it was fascism. In fascism, it wasn't the rule of free markets. It was the rule of corporations through things like civic associations, citizens bodies, they even took control of the trade unions. The reason I make this point is this, what democratically minded people with the left ought to be fighting for is not an end to free markets per se, although that's important. It should be the end of corporate hegemony over society. That hegemony of the employer class can be exercised through free markets, but it can also be exercised through things like company unions. It can be exercised through things like right wing neighborhood groups whose actual function is to watch over the citizens. It can be exercised through a media that on the face of it is a free media, but in fact is thoroughly captured by their private owners who use it as instruments of propaganda. Now that means then when we see the Republican Party moving formally towards supporting such things as some kind of trade unions, some kind of social institutions, don't take that as a victory for the left because in the context of employer and corporations hegemony over politics, these signals, these overtures towards unions, etc, can be turned towards employer interests and not towards workers interests. So right now when we see someone like Trump or Hawley saying we should move away from neoliberalism, that doesn't mean that they're saying we should move towards workers' empowerment. It could simply be saying we need new forms of social control and those new forms of social control formally on the surface can actually look like the kinds of institutions that we associate with the thriving democracy. If we look historically the polar opposite of a democratic society which is fascism, they had all sorts of institutions that were anti-free trade, anti-free market, none of which went towards labor's interests. Yes, I think your comments lend a lot of clarity on the state of the political situation, but probably the biggest phenomenon that people point to when they say this means neoliberalism is ending is the attacks on globalization and the supposed deglobalization that Trump is instituting. How legitimate do you think that is? Are we deglobalizing? Yeah, I think that you can say we're deglobalizing if by that we mean that the continuing expansion and integration of the global economy is coming to an end. Now it's not that the integration is coming to an end but the continuing expansion of the integration is coming to an end and that actually if we understand deglobalization to mean that it's actually been underway for about 15 years now since the 2008 crisis, what we see since the 2008 crisis now is the level of integration if we measure it quantitatively of the global economy has flattened out. It was from about 1980 to 2010 it was moving upward. The global economy was becoming more and more and more integrated. At around 2010 it leveled out which means it didn't disintegrate, it didn't dismantle the integration but it just entered a holding pattern with the existing level of integration remained more or less the same. Now that means an end to the expansion of global integration. Right now is it possible that we could actually start seeing a reduction in the degree of integration? It's definitely possible but if I had to guess I would say what you'll see is a slight reduction in the level of integration and then a new plateauing out. That is to say you won't see a continuing deglobalization over time which you'll see is a ratcheting downwards of the level of integration and then plateauing after a point. The reason for that is simple. The degree of integration is so great that unwinding it so that you had a substantial return to national isolated economies would be so disruptive that governments wouldn't be able to sustain it. Do you think that Trump's trade policies are at all responsible for this dynamic? Yeah for sure. It's been a cataclysmic event. Now it's still early in the game and Trump has backtracked on so much of what he's done but you know it's in typical Trump fashion. He raised the tariffs to ungodly levels so it seemed like we were going to have a global catastrophe and now he scaled it back to simply really high levels which don't appear to be cataclysmic but they're still quite high by historic standards. Right. Right. And nobody knows where it's going to end up but we have to expect a distinct possibility of some degree of winding down of that integration. Right. The extent to which I've heard speculation about where we'll end up is just this vague ominous we can't go back and that kind of goes hand in hand with this comment about how Trump has irreparably damaged America's reputation. Going back to our episode on soft power, the implication there is that what Trump is really doing is essentially unraveling the American empire and that's then posed as another data point to say we'll look neoliberalism is definitely ending because neoliberalism has always coexisted with American empire. Yeah there's a certain amount of confusion and all that stuff and that's because again neoliberalism has become this catch-all that encompasses everything. So I think there is a scaling back of the American empire but it's not because of Trump. I said this several episodes ago what Trump is doing is simply recognizing a fact which is that American geopolitical power is no longer unchallenged the way it was 30 or 40 years ago. Geopolitical power ultimately rests on economic dominance and American economic dominance in the global economy is simply not what it was today as it was say 40 years ago. There are countries now that succeeded in moving up the economic ladder globally China is the best example but not just China. In Latin America economies like Brazil you have South Asia in the Indian economy you have obviously Russia which has managed to fend off all of Europe coming to the aid of Ukraine. All of this shows that the United States can't just unilaterally call the shots anymore in the global economy and that means then that it has a choice. It can either continue with the fantasies of the kind that Biden had which is that you're going to remain a global political hegemon even though economically you just can't call the shots anymore or you bring down your global political ambitions in line at the same scale as your economic ambition as your economic capacity and I think if it hadn't been Trump if it had been anybody else they would have had to do the same thing the US just can't call the shots anymore. So there is a scaling back of America's reach globally. Does that mean American empire is shrinking? Yeah it has to because empire is simply your influence over other countries that's going to shrink there's no way around that. Does that mean that American imperialism is ending? Absolutely not. It's just going to be a weaker imperialist power than it was 40 or 50 years ago. So when we say tariffs are bringing about an end or dismantling of one aspect of neoliberalism does that mean that the tariff regime is something American workers should support the answer is no not really because it goes back to the point I made earlier which is neoliberalism is not the issue. The issue is do ordinary people do working people have any real say in what's going on around them? What tariffs are really a gift to is not workers but to capital. What tariffs do is decrease the amount of competitive threats that employers face from their rivals in other parts of the world. Now that is a gift to the employers. Is it a gift to workers? No. There is a section of the left that thinks if you somehow bring back manufacturing that will mean you can unionize again. It cannot. If you just look at these new workshops of the world whether they're in China or in parts of India or in parts of Latin America where capital is flowed in the last 20 years to revive manufacturing over there or to build manufacturing those are workshops from hell. The work conditions there are worse than we've ever seen in manufacturing anywhere in the world worse than the 19th century manufacturing that you saw in England and Germany. Manufacturing does not mean the revival of trade unions organizing means the revival of trade unions and the fact of the matter is the corporate class has learned from the last 80 years how to immunize itself from organizing efforts within manufacturing as well. There are about four or five decades ahead of the left which still lives in this fantasy world of 1930s and 40s where if you could just have manufacturing you will repeat the histories of the 30s and 40s. You will not because the forms of managerial power and control have evolved astronomically since that era and we're going to have to come up with the entirely new organizing strategies even in manufacturing. So even if therefore even if the Trump tariffs bring back some degree of manufacturing in the US which they probably will to some degree they will it doesn't mean it's going to bring back trade unions that depends on organizers learning the new landscape not just in the services but also in manufacturing and there's no reason to assume that in this new landscape bringing back manufacturing raises the likelihood of trade unions and organizing trade unions there's simply no reason to believe that because the power the managerial forms of control in manufacturing today are simply not what they were in 1930 they're completely different we're going to have to reinvent what organizing means which means then the end of neoliberalism internationally in the global regime should not be seen as a panacea or even as a gift to the left or to workers per se it is in the first instance a gift to capital we are still in the era of the unchallenged unchallenged dominance of capital the fact that it's experimenting with new institutional forms should not dilute us. So it's what you're saying that there have been some significant political changes over these past 10 years or so while our politics have been so heavily characterized by Trump and his presence but those changes have not actually altered the fundamental power dynamics in society they've just actually sort of been instituted to reinforce them. They are signs of a ruling class and a political establishment that's very anxious that's worried about the fact that the tranquil waters of a pacified and dejected and cynical population can no longer be taken for granted. So they're experimenting with new social institutions new economic institutions that might do two things in some way quell all of the anger and the resentment within the population but secondly still preserve the basic power imbalance between the holders of wealth and the rest of the population and what we as leftists should not do is be confused by the fact that they're using the rhetoric of anti neoliberalism and the rhetoric of anti-free trade we shouldn't confuse that with the rhetoric of social empowerment. For that it's never going to come from on high it's never going to come from the right wing sort of lifting the scales from his eyes and saying well now we want to be a party of the working class that's only going to come if working people and ordinary citizens impose on these power centers their own vision of what a more democratic society would look like and insist that the institutions that their building be free of the control of the employers, free of the control of their corporate and political overlords and be subject to their own dictates their own democratic decision making. None of that is on the agenda in all of this right wing populism even on the democratic parties populism because as I said earlier the fight right now between the Democrats and the Republicans is the Democrats want a more multi-racial, a more socially heterogeneous political class that rules over people and the Republicans are happier with a wider more traditional political class that rules over people. Neither of these two parties is thinking about the bottom 80% of the population and until that happens you might get a move away from what's called neoliberalism which is the rule of markets but you won't get a move away from class dominance of the wealthy and the elites over the population because they can do it through a variety of different institutions only one of which is free markets. Confronting capitalism is produced by catalyst a journal of theory and strategy and published by Jacobin magazine with help from Kale Brooks and Melissa Nashek. Connor Gillies is our audio editor our music is provided by Zonkey thanks for listening