ProgressPopulism

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Created: 2017-12-29

When populist outsiders challenge oligarchic insiders, the oligarchs almost always win. How could they lose? They may not have numbers, but they control most of the wealth, expertise, and political influence and dominate the media, universities, and nonprofit sectors. Most populist waves break and disperse on the concrete seawalls of elite privilege.

Managerial elites are bound to dominate the economy and society of every modern nation. But if they are not checked, they will overreach and produce a populist backlash in proportion to their excess. By a misguided policy of suppressing wages and thus throttling mass consumption, unchecked managerial elites may inadvertently cripple the technology-driven productivity growth responsible for their rise and accidentally cause the replacement of managerial society itself by a kind of high-tech rentier feudalism.

Managerial society works best when there are not only concessions to national working-class economic interests—the bribes to the “losers” of neoliberalism—but also genuine economic bargaining power and political power wielded by the many. Far from undermining managerial regimes, Burnham’s “juridical check” and Galbraith’s “countervailing power” make them more legitimate and sustainable.

my def of neolibrlism - taken in by ideologies that attribute their struggles to poor individual performance rather than to systemic disadvantages

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/new-class-war/

Differnt Article from same Jounal

Like every form of capitalism, this one is no mere economic system, but something larger, an institutionalized social order. As such, it encompasses a set of noneconomic background conditions that are indispensable to a capitalist economy: for example, unwaged activities of social reproduction,

  • which assure the supply of wage labor for economic production;
  • an organized apparatus of public power (law, police, regulatory agencies, and steering capacities) that supplies the order, predictability, and
  • infrastructure that are necessary for sustained accumulation; and

  • finally, a relatively sustainable organization of our metabolic interaction with the rest of nature, one that ensures essential supplies of energy and raw materials for commodity production, not to mention a habitable planet that can support life.

Financialization of Capitalism

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2013.853865