The following essay is drawn from Adolph Reed’s upcoming book, When Compromises Come Home to Roost (Verso). The title inevitably recalls Lenin’s discussion of “No Compromises?” in his famous broadside, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, of 1920. Lenin was taking aim at those who followed a “general recipe or rule” that there are “No compromises!” between communists and capitalists. He was making the case, above all, that with “difficult and complex” cases it was a serious challenge to “properly assess the actual character of this or that ‘compromise.’” Lenin’s point was that there were no rules: compromise was sometimes necessary, sometimes a mistake. The moral of Reed’s story, if there is one, is that the left did not adequately think through some of the most significant compromises with capital going back to the 1940s and 1950s—largely around the status of private property—so that the political situation of today is, in some not too complicated way, the result of bad compromises made back then. This is not a matter of hindsight being 20/20 because, as Reed details, the issues were plainly laid out—often fought out—at the time, but various forces (liberal and conservative) congealed to make the question of class conflict disappear. What is required, Reed concludes, is a “great effort of political education and organizing” to counter “the effects of a half-century of barely challenged neoliberal hegemony.” This essay functions as a lesson in political education, spelling out how we got here and how to avoid these traps going forward toward the creation of an anti-capitalist left. As Reed makes clear, it’s the “anti-capitalist” part that matters because every compromise that has come home to roost was predicated on the idea that one might get along with capital—you can’t, and if you try, you lose.

—The Editors

***

Judith Stein astutely characterized the debate over manpower policy in the early 1960s as a watershed moment for an American social-democratic politics, if not its last hurrah.1 Walter Reuther’s testimony before Sen. Joseph S. Clark’s 1963 subcommittee hearings on Employment and Manpower issued a direct call for the United States government to commit to democratic “national economic planning of the general type that has proved successful in a number of Western European countries.”2 Citing the British precedent, Reuther called for legislation “to prohibit construction of new plants in areas where labor supply, housing, or community facilities may already be overtaxed, and provide tax, loan, and other inducements to encourage location of new plants in depressed areas.”3 He proposed raising “minimum wages under Fair Labor Standards and Walsh-Healey Acts to more realistic levels to deter plant movement motivated by quest for sweatshop wages.” It was within this framework—as an aspect of economic policy—that Reuther situated proposals for specific measures to address employment discrimination and what labor economist John Dunlop described as “case unemployment,” or unemployment most prevalent in specific population groups and regions. Reuther also called for federal fair employment practices legislation and legislation prohibiting discrimination against women and older workers, as well as programs targeting youth unemployment and employment of handicapped workers.4

Reuther’s proposals articulated a coherent response to what he perceived as a problem of chronic, if not intensifying, technological displacement that was endemic to significant sections of the postwar labor market. He offered several measures intended to compensate for shrinking employment possibilities, e.g., legislation establishing a flexible full-employment work week pegged to the overall level of employment, increased and nationally administered unemployment compensation, increased social security payments, and lowered retirement age. He considered social-democratic planning to be a consistent extension of the warrant of the postwar policy consensus inasmuch as structural unemployment was a worsening problem that undermined the central goal of full employment. Nor was he alone in viewing it as such.

As Stein pointed out, Senators Clark and Hubert Humphrey, like Reuther, were taken with European social democracies’ labor market planning policies. Leon Keyserling and other labor-liberals may not have embraced European social democracy but definitely shared with Reuther, Clark, and Humphrey the left-New Deal view that “economic policy should be determined by employment goals.”5 Kennedy Democrats by and large did not share that view and stressed inflation as a limiting constraint on pursuit of growth. That there was a fundamentally ideological element to that disagreement was submerged beneath both technical arguments over whether the goal of full employment could be met without direct intervention in shaping labor markets and the shared presumptions that workers’ and employers’ interests could be harmonized to the satisfaction of each. Kennedy’s Keynesian advisors and others who argued that demand-stimulation was an adequate response did not necessarily see themselves as advocates of employers against workers. No less than Reuther, Keyserling, or Clark and Humphrey, they sought a proper balance between the general social interests in full employment and price stability. Even Reuther, who throughout the postwar period was on the social-democratic edge of labor-liberalism, presumed that acceptable class compromise was possible within American capitalism. In his Clark subcommittee testimony, he complained that in contrast to Sweden where “[t]hey have a Socialist labor movement, a Socialist government and a free enterprise economy, and they all work together on a sensible and constructive basis,” in the United States “we have the only free labor movement in the world, totally dedicated to the free enterprise system, and yet the class struggle is waged … more along classical Marxist lines than any place in the world because of the attitude of the N.A.M. [National Association of Manufacturers] and some big business corporations.”6

It was not unreasonable for Reuther to assume that class antagonisms could be managed, if not overcome, within the framework of industrial pluralism and a gradual expansion of the social welfare state. Business antagonism to labor was hardly uniform. Substantial business interests were committed to the collective bargaining regime at least as a necessary cost of doing business, and others were pragmatically neutral.7 Although labor-liberals’ efforts to expand the social state had been largely stymied, advances in civil rights and consolidation of the collective bargaining system sustained a sense of possibility in the postwar order. Even the Eisenhower administration accepted the industrial pluralist framework and labor’s place within it. After the defeats of the late forties, the fifties seemed to provide political space for solidifying a new modus vivendi within industrial pluralism. That no doubt seemed all the more likely to those who, unlike Reuther, abjured pursuit of more ambitiously social-democratic state interventions in favor of stimulation of growth. The Kennedy administration’s initially ambiguous orientation to economic policy may have reinforced the sense of relatively open-ended possibility for establishing a new center of gravity in the postwar regime in which the federal government would take on a more active role in managing, or at least guiding, pursuit of full employment.

Beneath the rhetorical commitment to pluralist harmony, however, was a deeper tension that technical ratiocination could not overcome. Notwithstanding all parties’ cheerleading for the distinctively American solution of harmonious class relations under capitalism, pursuit of the proper balance between full employment and price stability was ultimately an expression of a contest rooted in capitalism’s irreducible class antagonism. In the 1940s economists Michal Kalecki and Joan Robinson equally forcefully but independently of each other had argued that pursuit of full employment under capitalism would fall victim to those class contradictions. Robinson cut to the heart of the matter in describing unemployment’s function in capitalism:

Any scheme of partial planning which does not abolish private enterprise will run into difficulties as soon as it succeeds in overcoming unemployment. It is not a simple matter to remove unemployment and leave everything else the same, for unemployment has a definite function in the capitalist system. It is the fear of unemployment which makes the workers put up with the authority of their employers. In so far as full employment would make it impossible for any employer who did not offer good conditions to get any hands it would be welcomed by many of the big industrialists who dislike competition from “sweaters.” But it might go further than this and undermine the authority of the big employers also. For this reason many of them (openly or unconsciously) are somewhat half-hearted about a full employment policy, and are inclined to regard a certain amount of unemployment as a necessary safeguard to their position.8

Kalecki similarly discussed capitalists’ aversions to full employment, noting their “I) dislike of government interference in the problem of employment as such; II) dislike of the direction of government spending (public investment and subsidizing consumption); III) dislike of the social and political changes resulting from the maintenance of full employment.”9 He argued that even if that opposition could be overcome politically, full employment could not be maintained because doing so “would cause social and political changes which would give a new impetus to the opposition of business leaders.”

Indeed, under a regime of permanent full employment, the “sack” would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension. It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire; and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But “discipline in the factories” and “political stability” are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the “normal” capitalist system.10

To be sure, the contradictions that Kalecki and Robinson identified as intrinsic to pursuit of full employment under capitalism did not surface openly in mainstream considerations of the full employment/inflation trade-off, and I do not intend to argue that participants in those debates necessarily understood the issues or their own positions, much less articulated them publicly, in those terms. However, class struggle most often is visible only from a broader perspective, as a vector produced by the engaged push and pull of more partial and specific, even mundane, interests. As it took shape over the 1950s and early 1960s, the full employment/inflation trade-off was a node in the pragmatic working out of the post-New Deal modus vivendi. That is, contestation over that trade-off contributed to defining and institutionalizing the concrete boundaries and arrangements of the new regime of capitalist class power that emerged after the defeat of industrial democracy as both policy and ideology.11

From this perspective, the argument that structural unemployment was rooted in an intensifying logic of technological displacement put pressure on the postwar regime’s presumptive harmony. If American capitalism had entered a period in which technological development would increasingly enable employers to “keep up with the normal growth of the market while employing fewer production workers,” full employment could not be attained without significant state intervention of the sort Reuther proposed.12 However, the contention that substantially increased public action was necessary to reduce unemployment to the level of early postwar goals threatened to reopen the conflict over expansion of the social state that had been resolved with the victory of reasserted capitalist power in the late 1940s. Such conflict could disturb the center of gravity of postwar liberalism, not least the Cold War boast that the American Way promised capitalism with no class contradictions.

In addition to opening the door to debate over the need for aggressive federal economic planning and manpower policy, the possibility that accelerating technological displacement was an endemic feature of the postwar economy also could have led to reopening another issue presumably resolved in the new regime of capitalist power, the proper scope and extent of managerial authority in organizing production. The premise that the private collective bargaining system established a properly balanced, if not exactly level, playing field for capital and labor undergirded both domestic industrial pluralism and Cold War liberal American exceptionalism. Imagery of American class harmony also hinged on that premise and the accompanying claim that both employers and workers benefited from negotiating within a framework that recognized determination of production goals and planning as management’s province. But how could the claim of mutual benefit and positive-sum class relations be credible if employers were ever more inclined to pursue productivity increases that resulted in net displacement of living labor?

Such deeper issues did not rise to the fore in the linked debates over the nature and extent of structural unemployment and the full employment/inflation tradeoff in the early 1960s. Because even structuralists like Reuther and Charles Killingsworth shared with the Keynesians the viewpoint that interests of capital and labor were harmonizable and that economic problems were therefore fundamentally technical, the deeper political significance of the differences went unnoticed or at least unremarked upon.13 The effect was to obscure the systemic roots of economic inequality in American capitalism, in fact eventually to render it invisible as inequality. Even those who argued most forcefully that persistent unemployment and underemployment stemmed from deficiencies in the operation of labor markets and that extraordinary public interventions were necessary to overcome an accelerating pace of technological unemployment cast the problem in technical terms, as the addressable byproduct of a strong, dynamic economy rather than an expression of a tendency intrinsic to capitalist labor relations. The postwar taboo against economic radicalism, or anything that sounded like it, precluded systemic critique of capitalist market forces. What Kalecki and Robinson saw from a political-economic perspective as an irreducible political tension, a core expression of class conflict, thus appeared as a challenge for rational administration and management of interest-group relations.

Labor and industrial relations specialists came closest to acknowledging that core tension and, in not quite doing so, illustrated the ideological imperative that enabled finessing it. Unlike Keynesian proponents of demand-stimulation, they were more likely to see technological unemployment as a significant concern and grappled with its implications. In a 1962 collection examining the social significance of automation and technological change, singularly influential labor and industrial relations economist John Dunlop laid out the problem technological displacement posed for the collective bargaining system:

Collective bargaining affects the rate of technological change, and technological change also constitutes an increasingly significant subject … for the parties to collective bargaining and to the government as it seeks to influence the environment of the parties. Does collective bargaining enhance or retard technological change? … How does it reconcile the interests, which may not be identical, of the management, the workers, and the union in technological change? What price are we willing to pay for efficiency? How can the institutions of collective bargaining be better adapted to meet these problems in the public interest?14

Prominent arbitrator and scholar of industrial relations George W. Taylor addressed those questions directly in the same volume. Taylor, another architect of industrial pluralism, responded to the concern that unions’ resistance to introduction of laborsaving technology fueled inflationary pressures by retarding increases in productivity. While acknowledging that unions’ protection of workers sometimes produced featherbedding, or “make-work” redundancies in employment, he defended collective bargaining overall on two grounds, each of which blended political and economic considerations. He stressed the collective bargaining regime’s importance to the Cold War project, noting that the institutionalized framework for harmonizing interests of capital and labor put the United States “in a far better position to assume the role as leader of the democracies” and was important evidence that “our institutions designed to assist accommodation and to provide agreements provide the democratic antidote to the Marxian dialectic process.”15 But his commitment to collective bargaining was not merely a function of concern with the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds.

On the domestic front, Taylor contended that whatever costs were associated with unions’ tendencies to resist technological displacement were outweighed by collective bargaining’s benefits for regularizing industrial relations and reducing industrial strife, as well as for conserving voluntarism in labor relations. He also commended the system for its establishment and expansion of employees’ right “to share in the benefits of higher productivity” (CB, 85). However, Taylor observed, “the new set of standards for sharing the benefits of technology with employees” made “the present technological adjustment problems” more complicated than had been the case previously (CB, 85). Unlike in earlier periods of significant technological innovation when “relatively high public tolerance of unemployment” had enabled employers to reorganize labor processes and shed workers at will, in the postwar regime workers’ rights and protections had to be taken into account (CB, 85). He also recognized that technological displacement strained the collective bargaining regime itself.

Collective bargaining is generally conceived and used by unions as the best method to determine the employees’ share of the benefits of mechanization, to ameliorate the impact of employee displacement, and to promulgate rules governing the manning and operation of equipment. These involve costs to the employer which are sometimes hard to absorb either out of profits or through price increases. It is about the degree of such cost increases that the impasses in collective bargaining arise and public concern over price increases is aroused. Do excessive costs accrue because of an over-emphasis, under collective bargaining, of the rights of those employees who are affected by technological change? That is, are valid rights being protected or unwarranted privileges being granted? Do such costs unduly aggravate inflationary forces? Are work rules essentially of the featherbedding variety and do they, therefore, interfere unreasonably with the attainment of the high production and high productivity necessary for national welfare and safety? These questions, and others of a similar nature, have swelled into a national debate in which collective bargaining is on trial. (CB, 86)

Taylor would hardly express it in such terms, but his argument in effect was that the postwar system was an expression of a new baseline in class struggle. Unlike the period of technological innovation in the 1920s, the moral economy of postwar growth politics and industrial pluralism both lowered the public threshold of tolerance for unemployment and required employers to take some account of workers’ job security. His characterization of the issue immediately at stake as whether unions sought to pursue “valid rights” or “unwarranted privileges” in their efforts to protect workers from technological unemployment reflected one of industrial pluralism’s pivotal mystifications, i.e., the presumption that some objectively reasonable standard existed for determining the distinction between “valid” and “unwarranted,” which, of course, also affirmed labor and industrial relations specialists’ expertise as “informed neutrals.” More significantly, his formulation of the problem in a way that foregrounded a tension between unions’ tendencies to retard introduction of new technologies and a public interest in high productivity and low inflation simultaneously stacked the deck in management’s favor and sidestepped the irreducible antagonism in capitalist class dynamics.

Invoking an abstract public interest as a crucial external constraint on labor relations treated labor and management as equivalent nodes in a larger interest-group system and thus evaded the asymmetrical power that mediated their relation. However, that “public” was a rhetorical fiction, a reified standpoint supposedly disconnected from and logically and morally prior to specific groups’ concerns or agendas, and it was either simply asserted or based primarily on selective, and often arguably circular, extrapolation from opinion poll data. Specifically, that public interest did not include workers as workers and their concerns, which were considered circumscribed within the limits of the industrial relations system. In fact, as Taylor’s formulation indicates, the public interest was posited as alternative to, if not in tension with, workers’ interests as a class. Moreover, characterizing that fictive public’s principal concern as low inflation and high productivity more than wages (including social wage) and job security effectively aligned it with management.16

As I indicate in Chapter 2 of When Compromises Come Home to Roost, the notion of a larger, consensual interest lay at the foundation of industrial pluralism and was continuous with a narrative of an American Way of harmonious class relations that had been prominent since the Progressive era.17 It was a norm grounding struggles between labor and capital during World War II and after, as each side sought to legitimize its claims by characterizing them as the authentic expressions of American national character and consensual ideals. From a left standpoint, operating within that rhetorical frame seemed to make pragmatic sense, even for some committed to a politics of class struggle, into the early postwar years because the battle for hearts and minds appeared relatively competitive. On the eve of the 1944 presidential election, for example, 68% of respondents indicated in a Roper poll that, if no private sector jobs were available, the government should provide employment for all those willing and able to work.18 This suggested, among other things, a base of likely popular support for the Full Employment Bill of 1945.19 But political language that hinged on essentializing or homogenizing notions like the American Way, national character, and the public interest—emphasizing norms of unity and harmony—was better suited to the dominant class than to insurgents, particularly as a mass public information industry took shape during and after the war in part around an explicit project of selling “free enterprise” ideology along with commodities and the advertising industry itself.

By the early 1960s the mass opinion-shaping industry had been concertedly propagating capitalists’ norms, ideological perspectives, and priorities as the neutral, transcendent public interest and the commonsense frame of reference for assessing political and economic issues for two decades. “Though the message varied, both in form and content,” Robert Griffith observes, “from the sophisticated studies of the Committee for Economic Development to the hard sell comic books of the National Association of Manufacturers, the purpose was invariably the same—to arrest the momentum of New Deal liberalism and create a political culture conducive to the autonomous expansion of corporate enterprise.”20 “If consensus did indeed characterize America’s national culture in the 1950s,” Griffith concludes, “it was perhaps to a degree we have not fully appreciated, a consensus manufactured by America’s corporate leaders, packaged by the advertising industry, and merchandised through the channels of mass communication.”21

Thus Taylor could simply declare the overriding public interest to consist in maintaining high productivity and low inflation, notwithstanding public opinion polls that even then suggested a more complicated picture, because the notion was less an empirical claim than a rhetorical construct that affirmed the priority of capitalist property rights and class power. Formulation of what constituted the consensual public interest took place within the closed, self-referential discourse community of business and financial operatives, bourgeois policy elites, the academic and journalistic ideologists who outfitted their pronouncements with the raiment of self-evident incontestable truth, and the public relations specialists who refined and packaged them for mass consumption. In that echo chamber, assertions of a “public right to orderly bargaining and reasonably restrained wage movements” and a “public right to be free from total interruption of vital services” projected employers’ interests and perspective onto an evanescent public without qualification or debate (CB, 97).

Taylor determined that “on balance, collective bargaining has been, and is, quite an effective method of facilitating technological change in a constructive manner under today’s standards” (CB, 86–87). That assessment reflected his recognition of the constraints imposed by the postwar moral economy institutionalized in the collective bargaining system as well as the Cold War imperative, both of which Taylor supported. But he did not see unions’ role in navigating implementation of “technological change” simply as a concession to the realities of industrial pluralism. He maintained that unions played a vital role in securing workers’ “acquiescence” to the “necessary adjustments” (CB, 93). He argued, citing illustrative agreements in steel, coal, meatpacking, and other industries, that unions generally were inclined to accept the workforce reductions that accompanied increased productivity in exchange for improvements in wages and benefits and working conditions for those workers who were not displaced. Their embrace of such a “high wage-low labor cost” approach disposed unions institutionally to acquiesce in technological displacement, most importantly by accommodating their members to it. In this vein Taylor also indicated that the requirements of adjustment to technological displacement, as well as the “enhanced public interest in the avoidance of strikes plus a new interest in the qualitative terms of settlement” suggested the desirability of greater centralization in the structure of union power to increase the weight of national unions over locals because “local union autonomy also carries a high potentiality for precipitating strikes and extreme demands. In my experience in this area,” he reported, “the major function of most national union officials has been to induce local unions to exercise restraint. Not infrequently, such counsel is provided upon request of the employer.”22

Taylor’s characterization of unions’ role in rationalizing technological displacement comports with a strain of leftist criticism of the postwar labor movement for having contributed to its own demise by embracing class collaborationism. As Nelson Lichtenstein makes clear, however, matters were not so simple. Few options realistically existed for unions in the face of accelerating technological displacement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By then labor already had been hemmed into occupational and geographical archipelagoes, and the voluntarist foundation of industrial pluralism, along with the obligation to protect members’ pressing interests, compelled powerfully toward seeking to address such problems privately, at the level of the firm, instead of through public policy. Moreover, the labor movement itself was split over which course to follow. Rather than pro forma illustration of either labor leaders’ perfidy or the evils of union bureaucracy, the accommodationism Taylor lauded was an entailment of labor’s defeat at the end of the 1940s, another compromise—albeit one imposed, metaphorically, at gunpoint—come home to roost. Peremptory managerial authority over production entrenched the asymmetrical power relation between labor and management, which meant that, at the level of collective bargaining, labor could do little more than react to employers’ initiatives and could affect the terms on which labor-displacing technologies were introduced only marginally and only if management agreed to acknowledge union concerns.23

Trade unionists were more likely than others to recognize the extent to which the rhetoric touting American affluence was overblown, including claims that workers had by and large moved into an amorphous middle class.24 They were also much more aware of the reality of employers’ resistance that lay beneath propagandistic boasts of a distinctively American inter-class harmony. At the same time, the promise of continuing economic growth and rising standard of living provided a pathway toward economic security for workers through the framework of collective bargaining. That was the background of the “high wage-low labor cost” approach to which Taylor referred, the basis for the trade-off of productivity-led growth for negotiated workforce displacement. The problem was that, particularly in the manufacturing, transport, and other sectors where industrial pluralism was strongest, the net impact of labor-displacing production technology intensified in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nor was that purely a coincidence.

Pursuit of steadily increasing productivity through “laborsaving” technology is not merely an instrument for increasing profits but also a mechanism and index of enhancing capitalist class power, which depends on production of a disciplined working class through what might be characterized as the logic of enclosure.25 That relation expresses the mundane truth of Kalecki’s and Robinson’s arguments about the impossibility of attaining full employment under capitalism. A decade or so after the manpower policy debate rose to public attention, Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital examined this function of labor-displacing technology through reintroducing Marx’s critique of capital’s tendency to reduce complex labor to simple labor in service to the goal of imposing labor discipline as well as increasing profits. Braverman historicized that critique by examining the development of capitalist labor processes and changing occupational structures in the twentieth-century United States. In doing so he demystified the technological fetishism that was essential to the fiction of fundamental class harmony. Labor and Monopoly Capital thereby exposed a fundamental flaw in growth liberalism’s premise that increasing productivity through labor displacement was a benefit for workers, employers, and the general public alike.26 By the end of the 1970s, as phrases like “outsourcing,” “capital flight,” “runaway shops,” “downsizing,” and “globalization” entered the public lexicon, the consequences of the asymmetrical power relation at the heart of industrial pluralism would become more clearly visible.

Reading Taylor’s assessment with knowledge that employers’ imposition of concessionary bargaining would become much more general and the spearhead of an aggressive anti-union movement in the 1970s and 1980s underscores that his perspective at best rested on wishful thinking that refrained from considering the logic underlying the displacement. In the early 1960s, however, those connections were not so clear or at least did not surface in public debate.

The moment that Lichtenstein and Judith Stein identify as the last direct assertion of American social democracy illustrates the fault line in policy discussion at the time, as well as the pressures tightening on it. Reuther, Clark, Humphrey, and others pushed for an aggressive national manpower policy in response to what they perceived as failure of the promise that a combination of growth politics—driven by Cold War-related defense production and federally supported urban redevelopment—and industrial pluralism could deliver full employment and economic security without positive state economic planning and intervention.27 The persistently high rates of unemployment during Eisenhower’s administration and into Kennedy’s were evidence of that failure. That was the context within which the structural unemployment debate took shape. The unresolved tension over the full employment/inflation tradeoff had become more acute during the Eisenhower presidency, which in its second term tilted increasingly toward emphasizing price stability over full employment. Growing concern about balance of payments problems at the end of the 1950s reinforced business and political elites’ resistance to government actions that arguably threatened to spur inflation and gave that resistance apparent justification, especially to the extent that combating inflation had come to be seen as a primary “public” interest. Elevation of price stability over full employment as the key focus of economic policy even in the face of chronically high levels of joblessness marked the shifting balance of power in de facto class struggle.

This was an important element of the context out of which the 1970s’ “profitability crisis” developed, and that gave rise to a broadscale attack on working-class power and living standards. Thus a nominal crisis for capital was resolved by imposing a broader and deeper crisis on the society at large. The regime thus constituted, first in Great Britain and then in the United States, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan respectively, later would be known as neoliberalism, which I have described summarily as capitalism without effective working-class opposition.28

A point of the book from which this essay is excerpted is that postwar liberalism, including its version of a left, hinged on making capitalism’s fundamental class contradictions, if not capitalism itself, disappear into an ether of ideological mystifications. These included such formulations as industrial pluralism, interest-group politics, race relations, consumer society, affluent society, industrial then post-industrial society, an amorphous and incoherent middle class, homeowner populism, and the American Way. These and other such mystifications became the baseline common sense for thinking and talking about, and acting within, American politics among scholars, political actors and commentators, and the population at large. Despite the standard posture of High Church liberal propagandists inclined to declaim ex cathedra on such airy matters, that common sense did not emerge organically from an essentialized American national character. Rather, it was the product of class struggle, a combination of three-quarters of a century of matter-of-fact proclamation as incontestable truth in predominant venues of conventionalist bloviation29—the academy, corporate newsfotainment industry, popular culture—which project one or another narrative of American exceptionalism, and aggressive ideological warfare that included active suppression of alternative perspectives via red-baiting and other forms of scapegoating, censorship, and coercion for two decades after World War II30 and perhaps again in this moment of emboldened authoritarianism.

In that context, postwar capitalism’s fundamental class contradictions appeared only indirectly—for example, in the pragmatic form of contestation over the full employment/inflation trade-off.31 The absence of an openly anti-capitalist left has meant that there is no credible alternative to a Democratic party that, at least since the Clinton presidency (though Jimmy Carter was the warm-up act for Reagan’s assault on workers, and the Kennedy administration’s shift toward giving pride of place to currency stability over full employment was a germinal step toward neoliberalism), has been little better than a “me too, but not so much” version of neoliberalism.32 Indeed, Democrats’ tendencies to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in their efforts to finesse what Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno identify succinctly as nominally democratic capitalism’s “contradiction between accumulation and legitimation”33 is perhaps nowhere displayed more clearly than in their approach to health care reform, which amounts to criticizing supposed excesses of profit-drivenness and privatization, while intransigently supporting, even encouraging, both in practice.34

Maher and Aquanno note as well that, as the contradiction between accumulation and legitimation sharpened toward a perceived crisis point for capital in the 1970s, a governing class consensus began to form around the need to break entirely with the logic of the New Deal state to facilitate securing class discipline “in order to restore accumulation and resolve the crisis of imperialism.”

For a time, the ongoing strength of trade union resistance, and especially the civil rights movement, served as a check on restructuring. Yet the crisis made clear that capitalism was unable [sic] to support the welfare state or full employment, which would have been necessary to address the socioeconomic roots of racial inequality. Unable to advance an alternative path out of the crisis, civil rights leaders ultimately confined the movement to anti-discrimination and voting rights struggles. At the same time, AFL-CIO unions failed to move beyond wage militancy to fight for the more fundamental changes that would have been necessary to preserve existing gains by challenging capitalism itself. The tragic outcome was to lend very real credence to the neoliberal slogan “there is no alternative.”35

Democratic liberalism’s displacement of class and political economy as a discourse of political differentiation and conflict by a moralistic language of desert based on relative suffering and privilege undercuts cultivation of broad political solidarities constructed around common material conditions. To the contrary, partial or segmented eligibility for social benefits, in the same ways as means-tested ones, can both stigmatize recipients and fuel resentment among those who are not, or who do not believe themselves to be, eligible for them. And absence of clear anti-capitalist critiques of the sources of and remedies for inequalities that capitalism produces has provided spaces for the right to pretend to address popular grievances and anxieties that are rooted in the everyday realities of capitalism’s class contradictions by exploiting the worst, most horridly reactionary tendencies in the society.

I have been asking since the emergence of Trumpism and the rise of a fascist-authoritarian International, what if an entailment of the Great Recession has been to raise the possibility that neoliberal capitalism may no longer be capable of pursuing its commitment to a steadily intensifying regime of regressive redistribution and delivering enough benefits to enough of the population to maintain its legitimacy as a nominally democratic system? What if, that is, emergence of these reactionary tendencies—some of which had been around but sidelined for decades—is a response to neoliberalism’s having run up against the contradiction between its requirements for accumulation and legitimation? Could it be that the bipartisan neoliberalism that has defined the center of gravity of American politics since the late 1980s has exhausted its capacities to navigate that contradiction? In posing that question, I have invoked the metaphor of a T intersection, at which only two diametrically opposed directions are possible.36 What if the only credible political directions in this moment are leftward toward socialism or social democracy, which would identify hegemonic capitalist class power as the source of broadly felt material insecurities and anxieties and seek to counter capital’s ability to realize the agenda of accumulation via dispossession, or rightward toward more open and aggressive authoritarianism and scapegoating in support of naked capitalist class rule?

Democrats’ responses to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns for the presidential nomination made clear that Clintonite party elites were at least as concerned to defeat an internal left insurgency as to hold back Trumpism.37 Their responses to the first months of Trump’s second presidency have been characteristically incoherent, ranging from sounding the alarm regarding Trumpist attacks on public goods and government functions across the board to suggestions of united front alliance with the anti-Trump right. Recall that Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), in her official Democratic response to Trump’s March 4 address to Congress, praised Ronald Reagan four different times. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and James Carville, among other Democratic opinion-leaders, have repeatedly touted consummate neoliberal Democrat Rahm Emanuel, whose approach to building a Democratic congressional majority as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair centered on recruiting Republicans to run as Democrats, as an attractive 2028 standard-bearer. And, lest we forget, Schumer sought out Kyrsten Sinema and actively encouraged her to pursue the Arizona Senate seat. From that quarter an Emanuel-Lynne Cheney National Salvation ticket does not seem far-fetched.

In 1986, political scientist Adam Przeworski observed that capitalists “cannot represent themselves as a class under democratic conditions and do so only in a moment of folly. … Ideologies of the bourgeoisie do not emphasize its specific interests but propose a universalistic, classless image of society, composed of individuals-citizens, whose interests are basically in harmony.”38 When Przeworski made that point, it had scant impact. Many, if not most, left or labor-oriented scholars and activists still clung to the notion that the postwar Keynesian consensus was the new normal from which Reaganite and Thatcherite assaults were temporary deviations, even betrayals of a settled social compact. Nor were they much moved by Przeworski’s reflection that the “crisis of Keynesianism is a crisis of democratic capitalism.”39 All too many remained, at least in their political rhetoric, in thrall to the premise that postwar Keynesianism had institutionalized management of capitalism’s contradictions in line with pluralist democratic values, if it had not transcended those contradictions altogether. Nearly forty years after Przeworski’s argument and a half-century of relentless upward redistribution, accumulation by dispossession, and advancing de-democratization,40 his point may be timelier now than when initially made. (However, Przeworski’s own continuing move away from class analysis and embrace of formalist political theory apparently led him away from the importance of his earlier insight.41)

Trumpism and the other fascist-authoritarian tendencies are from one perspective expressions of neoliberalism’s success. They are partly responses to the popular immiseration and insecurity that neoliberalization produces. For that reason, this reactionary turn, reprehensible and dangerous as it is, may be more like neoliberalism 2.0 than a wholly new political development.42 Neoliberalism 1.0 (and I do not intend to argue for adoption of that terminology) would refer to the historically specific capitalist counterattack beginning in the 1970s and 1980s to undercut the gains workers had made via de facto class struggle during the postwar decades, gains that had been won within the already narrowed framework imposed by the capitalist counterattack that pushed back against the momentum toward socialization generated by the successes of the working class between the Depression and the end of World War II. Among the features of neoliberalism 1.0 that make it distinct is that postwar Keynesianism had encouraged, or at least permitted, growth of a sphere of public goods and presumption of a substantial public sector to provide them. Neoliberalism 1.0 therefore involved ideological attack on the notion of public goods and the public itself, as well as the practical program of regressive redistribution, which included the privatization agenda that effectively turned the public sector into the equivalent of Locke’s primeval forest.43

Then as now, the revanchists could depend on their priestly caste retainers to obscure the fact that the class offensive was what it was. Samuel P. Huntington found a self-destructive “democratic distemper,” which encouraged too much political participation; the Trilateral Commission, likely created in part for this purpose and of which Huntington was a minion, inveighed against a “crisis of governability” in advanced industrial democracies and the bane of “hyperpluralism”—the circumstance that the citizenry wanted more from government than the ruling class felt comfortable giving—all were expressions of a high-theory version of the pickpocket’s dodge.44

Neoliberalism 2.0 is, from this perspective, an attack by another element of capital aligned with another, stronger iteration of the reactionary quasi-fascist and libertarian right that provided ideological shock troops for Reaganism/Thatcherism, as well as the postwar capitalist counteroffensive. My point in using the neoliberalism 1.0/2.0 labels is to stress that we are dealing with a “natural” response of dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries and sections of the capitalist class who believe they should tighten the screws on the generic working class with or without an “objective” threat from below, which would be in the eyes of the beholder anyway.

What all this adds up to is, first, that it is absolutely necessary for Democrats to gain control of at least one house of Congress in 2026; otherwise, there will be no restraint on Trumpists’ destructive inclinations or capacities, as shown daily in the administration’s ruthless pursuit of kayfabe Gleichschaltung, or on the human carnage they will inflict. It is also the case that even a Democratic sweep next year followed by winning the presidency in 2028 will not be an adequate counter to the fascist-authoritarian threat. Barring Trump’s running the economy off a cliff, the dispositively influential elements of the capitalist class, which are in any case biased toward stability, will find a modus vivendi with the new regime. And Trump, a con artist who depends on cunning and bluster, is unlikely to risk alienating them, as his going back and forth on tariffs and his abrupt decision to exempt agribusiness and hospitality (likely to be joined before long by construction) industries from ICE terror, show. Democrats will not address the roots of the political crisis, which lie in that contradiction between the capitalist order’s requirements for accumulation and legitimation. The former impel toward marketization of more and more of social life, which undermines the order’s legitimacy to the extent that it impoverishes and spreads insecurity. Democrats will, as they have done at least since Clinton, attempt to kick the can down the road, pretending to harmonize opposites and inventing basically victim-blaming just-so stories to make the flimflam seem to work. The right will do worse and be prepared to exploit every Democratic contradiction.

Countering the effects of a half-century of barely challenged neoliberal hegemony will require a great effort of political education and organizing to combat the weaponized lies and subterfuge that define American politics today. This will have to be conducted largely through slow, face-to-face processes that rely on establishing relations of trust and standing with others not already on our side. (On the electoral front, non-candidate, issue-based ballot campaigns can be a useful component of such organizing, as they can do political education and issue-shaping on a wider scale and facilitate making direct contacts with workers. And left-oriented initiatives have been instructively successful even in states that routinely spurn Democratic candidates.) As the late Jane McAlevey argued and demonstrated so forcefully, there can be no shortcuts in building the sort of movement necessary to challenge the dangerous forces arrayed against us.45 The effort required is therefore not reducible to electoral dynamics; we cannot elect our way out of this horrible moment. We can hope only to keep the worst at bay while we organize the alternative political force. And I shall disclose here the not-so-secret punch line of my book, which the last eighty years of American political history demonstrate and with which I know Jane would also agree: there is no effective substitute for an anti-capitalist left. And the most serious political work ahead of us for the foreseeable future is to throw everything we can into generating one.