In the weeks following the 2022 us midterms, the mood in the intellectual penumbra of the Democratic Party swung wildly from impassioned handwringing to euphoric self-congratulation. Dire warnings of a ‘red wave’ delivering large congressional majorities to the Republicans gave way to jubilation at the salvation of democracy. In reality the results were decidedly mixed. The Republicans took the House with a narrow majority, while Democrats retained their slim hold on the Senate. The Republicans swept Florida and flipped a handful of districts in New York. Reproductive rights had a fairly good night, but Democrats continued to fare very poorly with non-college-educated whites––according to one poll, Republicans won over 70 per cent of white men without a college degree.footnote¹

Various explanations have been offered for the weaker than expected Republican performance, in the context of a deeply unpopular President and high inflation. Among the leading hypotheses is the poor ‘candidate quality’ of many Trump endorsees; the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional guarantee of the right to abortion with the Dobbs v Jackson ruling this summer; and—at 27 per cent—the relatively high turnout among young voters. All these points have some plausibility, but they miss the larger issue. American politics has undergone a tectonic shift over the past twenty years, linked to deep structural transformations in the regime of accumulation. These transformations have not been adequately sketched and theorized as yet; the unforeseen midterm results are a good occasion to begin to do so.

What we offer here is not a finished argument but a set of seven telegraphic theses, flanked by empirical evidence, intended to provoke further discussion of these critical questions. To that end, we begin with a brief sketch of the current conjuncture and a clarification of terms.

For most of the twentieth century, us political parties represented different coalitions of capitalists, who appealed to working-class voters on the basis that they would promote economic development, expand job opportunities and generate revenues to invest in public goods. This was the ‘material basis of consent’ that determined party success at the polls: a local version of the politics that shaped most capitalist democracies during the long post-war boom. In the us, this produced significant electoral swings, and big congressional majorities for the winning side: Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972. That political landscape has now disappeared. Beginning in the 1990s, and definitively since 2000, Republican and Democrat rule alternates on the narrowest of margins. Winning an election no longer involves appealing to a vast shifting centre but hinges on turnout and mobilization of a deeply but closely divided electorate.

This new electoral structure is related to the rise of a new regime of accumulation: let us call it political capitalism. Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’.footnote² These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s cares Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and chips Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act.footnote³ All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.footnote⁴ This new structure is the real basis of Piketty’s main finding: that the rate of return on capital now outstrips the rate of growth (although Piketty himself, in our view incorrectly, presents this as a return to capitalist normality after the exceptional period of the long boom).footnote⁵

The rise of political capitalism has profoundly reconfigured politics. At the elite level, it is associated with vertiginous levels of campaign expenditure and open corruption on a vast scale. At the mass level, it is associated with the unravelling of the previous hegemonic order, for in a persistently low- or no-growth environment––‘secular stagnation’—parties can no longer operate on the basis of programmes for growth. They cannot therefore preside over a ‘class compromise’ in the classic sense. In these conditions, political parties become fundamentally fiscal rather than productivist coalitions. Before going on to hypothesize how these coalitions work, we should first clarify the terms we use for class analysis.

Social classes, in our view, are structural positions linked by relations of exploitation. The dominant class extracts labour effort from—that is to say: ‘exploits’—the subordinate class. That labour effort is the basis of the dominant class’s control over the social surplus, which in turn accords it a leading role in determining the overall developmental dynamic of the society in question. Different class structures emerge from the qualitatively distinctive ways in which dominant classes extract the labour effort of their subordinates. For example, under capitalism, owners of means of production typically extract labour effort from workers in the production process after the purchase of labour power—the capacity to work—in a market. In contrast, under feudalism, lords typically do not extract labour effort in the actual production process but subsequent to it, through the application or threat of force. Several points follow from these general positions.