In her last book, Melinda Cooper envisions the several decades of neoliberal hegemony as a successful counterrevolution. The Australian sociologist recounts that, by the mid-1970s, American business circles and their allies in the academic world had come to see the ongoing social unrest, in their country and beyond, as an existential threat to capitalism itself. They thus concluded that the postwar neo-Keynesian compact, which they had hitherto tolerated, had become a Trojan Horse for socialism and needed to be jettisoned.
More than to restrain the State from redistributing resources and covering risks, Neoliberalism seeks to change its priorities. On the one hand, governments are required to give precedence to price stability over the pursuit of full employment, which compels them to profess an undying allegiance to balanced budgets. But on the other hand, the deflationist consequences of their vow to curtail demand entices them to opt for so-called supply-side policies. According to the neoliberal doctrine, in other words, pursuing economic growth can only be achieved through measures such as tax cuts, deregulations and subsidies, which are meant to sustain the confidence of capital owners in the profitability of investments.
Combining austerity for wage earners with extravagant generosity toward asset holders, counterrevolutionary neoliberalism seems, since the financial crisis of 2008, to have entered an era of fatal turbulence. However, as Melinda Cooper explains in the interview she gave us, the regime that is in the process of taking its place looks neither like the neo-Keynesian compact that preceded it nor like the post-capitalist future that neoliberals were determined to ward off.
Encouraged by the measures meant to ensure the stagnation of wages and the appreciation of capital, the more audacious exponents of the neoliberal creed did not wait for the waning of their own legitimacy to take on the third pillar of postwar managerial capitalism: along with their assault on the Welfare State and labor unions, they set out, if not to destroy, at least to transform the type of firm that had come to represent US business culture, namely the publicly traded corporation where property is dispersed among a large number of shareholders while power is exercised by salaried managers.
Under the guise of fighting technocracy and democratizing finance, Melinda Cooper argues, what these reformers successfully brought about is a new “gilded age” of capitalism, where property and power are once again reunited, either in the hands of one single individual or shared by a small group of associates. Such is the case of tech corporations that were born as startups and remain under the control of their founder even after they go public, but also of private equity funds whose partners are licensed to restructure, chop up and sell the companies that they subject to leveraged buyouts.
Now, as it turns out, these new “robber barons” happen to be the close guard surrounding the newly elected president of the United States. Far from satisfied with the tax breaks and loosened regulations distinctive of the counterrevolutionary period, they harbor much greater ambitions: what these oligarchs want from Donald Trump is for his administration to dismantle the public agencies in charge of social programs and public services and to grant them the management of the tasks that the federal state is no longer capable of administering.
To be able to sell public institutions at auction, however, the 47th president of the United States needs the same free rein that his cronies enjoy in their own companies. Hence the so-called “Unitary Executive Theory”, according to which the powers of the president supersede those of all the other branches of government. The return of patrimonial capitalism is thus intimately linked with the advent of an autocratic presidency – a regime that Melinda Cooper no longer calls counterrevolutionary neoliberalism but revolutionary conservatism.
Read more on the website of ‘Diagrammes’.
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