Issue #55: Capitalism 1996–2026 (Part One)

We live in a world where what look to many like social problems (inequality, unemployment, poverty) function in fact as economic solutions. This special issue of nonsite—Capitalism 1996–2026—shows how capital’s successes have made opposition more difficult but even more essential with essays by Sam Gindin, Steve Maher and Scott Aquanno, Damien Cahill and Clara E. Mattei. Also, a review of Matisse at the Grand Palais by Todd Cronan.

Introduction to Capitalism 1996–2026

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.

The Logic of Austerity

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.”

Neoliberalism and the Periodization of Capitalism

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.

Triumph of Capital, Crisis of Democracy

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.

Matisse at the Grand Palais

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.

The Neoliberal Roots of Contemporary Authoritarianism and Fascism

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.

Issue #54: On Modernist Painting

This issue features a range of contemporary views on modernist painting: T. J. Clark addresses images of labor from Menzel to Burtynsky; Julian Bell discusses the nature of “escapism” in Bonnard; John Elderfield looks at Frankenthaler’s special attitude to the past of painting; Larissa Dätwyler considers Matisse’s treatment of pentimenti; and Gordon Hughes interprets Max Beckmann’s Falling Man. We also reprint a little-known essay by Meyer Schapiro on Race and Nationalism in art with an introduction by Todd Cronan and Marnin Young. Finally, Adolph Reed considers the life and death of Jesse Jackson and what it means for politics today. This issue was edited by Todd Cronan.

Bonnard and Escapism

Violently, but also with his intellect. Still life artists in the same great easel painting tradition—Chardin, Cezanne—had pondered what kinds of logic related appearances to objects. Chardin’s glazes and impastos and Cezanne’s so-called passages were in a sense structured answers to those enquiries. Bonnard, as an artist who remained a dedicated reader of Mallarmé, seems to have become skeptical that there was any structured answer at all. The more that he thinks, the more he aims to un-know.

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

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.