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Triumph of Capital, Crisis of Democracy

Stephen Maher, Scott Aquanno

We argue that Trumpism arose from a political and social crisis generated by the success of accumulation. This crisis resulted not from the decline of capitalism or the exhaustion of accumulation but from the state’s inability to contain the fallout of capitalist triumph. Indeed, it only intensified with the economic recovery as profits reached record heights. Trumpism was therefore not a “card” played by a capitalist class seeking to reverse its declining fortunes but resulted from the mobilization of a contradictory class coalition amid an uncontrollable crisis situation.

Introduction to Capitalism 1996–2026

by nonsite

Triumph of Capital, Crisis of Democracy

by Stephen Maher & Scott Aquanno

The Logic of Austerity

by Clara Mattei

Neoliberalism and the Periodization of Capitalism

by Sam Gindin

The Neoliberal Roots of Contemporary Authoritarianism and Fascism

by Damien Cahill

Matisse at the Grand Palais

by Todd Cronan

Neoliberalism and the Periodization of Capitalism

Sam Gindin

The postwar decades continue to be presented as an inspiration for progressives today. The essay challenges how progressive it really was and notes that it was precisely in the Golden Age that the American Empire emerged as the most ambitious neoliberal project in history. This leads to a discussion of how this impacted the Golden Age domestically, and how this globalized neoliberalism both matched and differed from the neoliberalism we speak of today. The conclusion stresses the polarization of options in the present moment and the implications for the politics of the present.

The Logic of Austerity

Clara Mattei

It’s time to stop buying into the idea that, within a capitalist society, it makes sense to discuss economic policies according to the criterion of “right” and “wrong” for an elusive common good. Our economic machinery is structured not to meet the needs of ordinary people but to increase the rents and profits of the few capital holders. Economic policies cater to these priorities. What critics point to as “problems” of the system—poverty, inequality, and unemployment—are actually its precise “solutions.”

The Neoliberal Roots of Contemporary Authoritarianism and Fascism

Damien Cahill

Across the globe, markets were deregulated, entailing removal of restrictions governing how capital could operate and move across borders. Perhaps most significant in this regard was the deregulation of finance and the floating of exchange rates, making states much more vulnerable to movements in bond and currency markets and therefore subject to their discipline. Key supranational institutions became repurposed to oversee the new neoliberal rules governing cross-border trade, in which sovereign decision making was assumed to be the exception rather than the norm and corporate rights were elevated.

Jesse Jackson’s Crossover Moment and the Dilettantish Turn in the Postwar U.S. Left

Adolph Reed, Jr.

Opinion-shaping black elites’ embrace of underclass ideology during the 1980s and 1990s provided them a niche in the emerging neoliberal order in packaging punitive approaches to social policy as their special responsibility for racial rehabilitation and uplift, later recast as programmatic antiracism. It is also commonly overlooked that black political elites’ symbiotic allies in racial transition in urban politics in the 1960s and 1970s were mainly their redevelopment-oriented, proto-neoliberal white political elite counterparts.

Tool or Colleague? The Case against Personhood for AI

Lisa Siraganian

Should AI have legal rights? Arguments defending ePersonhood—legal personhood for AI, LLMs, and supposedly autonomous robots—have appeared recently and are taken seriously. Siraganian examines what exactly this could mean, showing how ePersonhood erroneously adapts arguments from corporate personhood and rights for nature. Considering the claims of philosophers, legal thinkers, AI theorists, and Google engineers, as well as the production of social robots like “Sophia” and “Ai-Da,” Siraganian argues that the current deceptive language of AI is really a symptom of the tremendous, still unbridgeable gap between human life and our AI reality.

Introduction to Capitalism 1996–2026

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If, we take seriously, as the contributors to this issue argue we must, the idea that capital has reached the point where it can no longer afford to (and so no longer understands itself as needing to) legitimate itself in the terms of liberal democracy, then we must also take seriously the idea that the most we can currently get out of our elections is what the ruling class will allow us to get.

Matisse at the Grand Palais

Todd Cronan

Matisse’s extraordinary late works—paintings, drawings, cut-outs, books—are conflictual through and through. The recent exhibition at the Grand Palais makes a surprising case for the centrality of Matisse’s late paintings as some of the most representative works of his career. Above all, Matisse’s late interiors show how the pursuit of the modernist ideal of a unified picture plane was as much a constraint as a liberation.

From Rolling Mill to Drone Factory: The Sight of Work

T. J. Clark

Between the VW by the water tower and the masked chicken processor, then, there seems to me a deep connection. The one prepares the ground for the other. Labor under capitalism can eventually proclaim its full visibility because labor is now so thoroughly elided and misrepresented, left behind as a lived conflicted reality—because it has been fully subsumed into the order of the commodity. Or such is the claim. I am with Castoriadis, needless to say, in believing the claim to be necessarily—or at least, empirically—false. We would all like to know what day-to-day detailed struggle of labor against capital goes on in the Deda Processing Plant.

Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality: The Farce this Time

Respondents, Stephen Best, Colleen Lye, Christopher McAuley, Andrew Hartman, Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth Warren

Best takes great pains to describe race as many things: “inheritance,” “legacy,” “lineage,” “affinity,” “subjectivity.” But he avoids the painful truth that race is ideology and that, more particularly, it is the ideology of those who champion such notions as “the black radical tradition” or the “racial wealth gap,” which is to say, those for whom the inadequacy of class analysis for understanding inequality must be stipulated as a point of departure inquiry. What we mean by ideology is not something like “false consciousness” but rather the mechanism that harmonizes the principles you want to believe you hold with what advances your material interest.

Does ChatGPT refer with Names? Design Intention and Derivative Reference in Large Language Models

Samuel Wheeler III

Many writers discussing Artificial Intelligence argue that what a Large Language Model produces are not sentences with truth-values but rather “stochastic parrotings” that can be interpreted as true or false, but in the way that Daniel Webster interpreted the Old Man in the Mountain as a sculpture by God with a message for humanity. Steffen Koch has argued that names used by LLMs refer in virtue of Kripkean communication-chains, connecting their answers to the intended referents of names by people who made the posts in the training data. I argue that although an LLM’s uses of names are not connected to human communication chains, its outputs can nonetheless have meaning and truth-value by virtue of design-intentions of the programmers. In Millikan’s terms, an LLM has a proper function intended by its designers. It is designed to yield true sentences relevant to particular queries.