What is the likelihood that the incoming Joe Biden administration can be pushed to pursue a progressive policy agenda? An assessment of the prevailing economic conditions in the United States reveals both opportunities and obstacles that the Left will face in its efforts to move policy toward the widely popular agenda of the Bernie Sanders campaign. This article argues that the current condition of US capitalism makes a major change in direction toward progressive policies possible. At the same time, the consequence of a failure to move US policy away from decades of neoliberalism would likely be an even more retrograde future.

Understanding the current economic conditions and the possibilities they generate requires taking account of the interplay of continuity and change in capitalism over time. Capitalism has taken a series of discrete institutional forms, or “regimes,” over time. The monopoly stage of capitalism arose around 1900, superseding the previous small-business competitive capitalism. After World War II, regulated (or social democratic) capitalism emerged and lasted until the 1970s. Then, around 1980, the contemporary neoliberal form of capitalism arose.¹ In each period, the system remained capitalist but, at a more concrete level, many of the institutions, as well as the dominant ideas, changed from one regime to another.

The institutions and dominant ideas of each previous form of capitalism promoted capital accumulation and economic expansion for several decades, but eventually the contradictions of each form gave rise to a structural crisis in which the existing regime no longer promoted normal accumulation. Such structural crises have brought some combination of prolonged economic stagnation, a falling rate of profit, and heightened economic instability. History suggests that a structural crisis continues until a new institutional form of capitalism emerges that again promotes normal capital accumulation. Hence, each institutional form can be called a social structure of accumulation (SSA).²