The Left’s standard theoretical tools are inadequate for making sense of US politics in the current period. They give us little leverage to explain the threat of authoritarian or neofascist politics from grassroots groups closely aligned with right-wing politicians. Concepts of monopoly capitalism do not help us understand a business class that is politically fragmented and fractured, and whose more moderate elements are under attack by Republicans for being “woke capitalists.”¹ Finally, the Joe Biden administration has launched a surprisingly large program of state-led economic transformation to address climate change, infrastructure, and the accelerated development of new industries. This effort goes well beyond the familiar terrain of corporate liberalism.

To make sense of this conjuncture, new concepts and new analyses are needed. One promising start in this direction is the effort by Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner to identify a new stage of accumulation that they label “political capitalism.”² They argue that a growing share of profits come not from building better mousetraps but from forging a relationship with the state that guarantees earnings through direct subsidies, indirect subsidies such as funding research and development, protecting monopoly power, or providing generous government contracts.

One immediate objection to this analysis is that all stages of accumulation have been political. From the start, capitalism has been racial and patriarchal, and the state has always been integrally involved in the extraction of profits. Karl Polanyi was right when he said, “The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.”³ Riley and Brenner might simply respond that capital’s dependence on the state has risen to levels more similar to the era of primitive accumulation than what was typical in the twentieth century.