Several commentators have taken Trump’s departure from office to mean that the so-called populist tide is ebbing and that we are witnessing the return to a pre-2016 “old normal.” In fact, Joe Biden’s campaign implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—promised the restoration of Obama-era technocracy, returning the reins of power to the “experts,” as seen in his choice…
Read MorePiketty’s earlier thesis, which all but disappears in the new book, was that the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth threatens to undermine not only democracy but capitalism itself. Piketty, however, had little to say about the deeper political-ideological dynamics driving these trends. This latest book is an attempt to fill that gap. Capital and Ideology aims to explain not only what has happened but why. In particular, the book focuses on the relationship between inequality…
Read MoreThe Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci coined the term “organic crisis” to describe a crisis that differs from ”ordinary” financial, economic, or political crises. An organic crisis is a “comprehensive crisis,” encompassing the totality of a system or order that, for whatever reason, is no longer able to generate societal consensus (in material or ideological terms). Such a crisis lays bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the…
Read MoreThe West is currently in the midst of an antiestablishment revolt of historic proportions. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the rejection of Matteo Renzi’s neoliberal constitutional reform in Italy, the European Union’s unprecedented crisis of legitimation—although these interrelated phenomena differ in ideology and goals,…
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