The long 1970s crisis demonstrated that Keynesian “managed capitalism” was no longer viable. The accumulating contradictions of that order demanded a restructuring in the form of neoliberal capitalism. The rise of finance in this new regime was critical for supporting globalization, restoring class discipline, increasing the rate of exploitation, and boosting profits — even as fewer American workers were employed in industrial jobs and working-class life became ever more precarious. These historic shifts spurred the development of a range of new theories, from speculation that the nation-state was in decline at the hands of all-powerful multinational corporations, to notions of the “hollowing out” of the productive economy as a parasitic and/or unproductive financial sector replaced commodity production with the accumulation of “fictitious” value. Both theoretical strands tended to minimize the role of interconnected state and financial power in restoring accumulation.

Most emblematic has been the work of the historical sociologist Robert Brenner, who has strangely persisted in claiming that the 1970s crisis was, in fact, never resolved. Instead, he insists, we have been living through a five-decade-long (and counting) crisis. More recently, he has argued (alongside coauthor Dylan Riley) that this has culminated in “political capitalism,” in which the profligacy of central banks props up an unproductive financial sector that does little more than extract value from the “real” industrial economy. What we have seen since 2008, he claims, is not so much economic recovery, but rather “escalating plunder” at the hands of the state and a parasitic financial elite. Brenner was in fact merely the first mover in a new academic industry; writers such as Cédric Durand, Jodi Dean, and even Yanis Varoufakis soon followed suit, claiming that capitalism is giving way to a “neo-feudalism” in which the extraction of rents, rather than surplus value production, is the primary nexus of exploitation.

Ostensibly, Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance represents a step forward in theorizing contemporary capitalism. Cooper offers a rich historical account of how the American state came to simultaneously enact extravagance and austerity: “printing money” and undertaking massive expenditure to support asset price appreciation, primarily benefiting an uber-wealthy elite, while imposing strict austerity on workers. This, she argues, was the outcome of a “counterrevolution” through which capitalists and their affiliated ideologues seized control of the fiscal and monetary capacities of the state amidst the 1970s crisis. Even as the end of the gold standard eliminated all economic constraints on state spending and created new opportunities for the expansion of social democracy, she claims, the power of a narrow oligarchy was secured through central bank “independence,” which served to block unwanted popular demands to use its capacities to finance social programs.