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.
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
As political reaction grows, every argument which supports the notion of fixed racial and national differences, acquires a new relevance. It provokes powerful divisions within the masses of the people, who are becoming more articulate and aggressive in their demands for a decent living and control over their own lives. The basic antagonism of worker toward capitalist, debtor toward creditor, is diverted into channels of racial antagonism, which weakens and confuses the masses, but leaves untouched the original relations of rich and poor.
In both Max Beckmann’s Falling Man, painted in 1950 shortly before the artist’s death that same year, and throughout Carl Einstein’s early-twentieth century writings on art, the opposition between “ground” and “groundless” is complicated through a dialectical suspension of the two terms. Caught between falling and landing, Falling Man presents us with an image that neither plummets to earth nor hits the ground but floats between states. Much like Einstein’s reading of a sailor scaling the rigging in the sky of Hercules Seghers’ 1625 print Mountain Gorge by a Road, Beckmann’s not-quite falling man hovers midway between what Einstein calls the fixed ground of the “tectonic” and the unformed flux of the “liquid living movement” below. Beckmann and Einstein, it turns out, share common ground in the ungrounded abeyance that lies between falling and crashing down.