Philosophical Apprentice comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jul 15, 2025

Headline: ‘I appreciate depreciation’ Katrina Forrester

Sub-headline: Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance
by Melinda Cooper. Princeton, 564 pp., £28, May 2024, 978 1 942130 93 2

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/katrina-forrester/i-appreciate-depreciation

Editor: the quotation of the final paragraphs of Katrina Forrester’s review of Melinda Cooper book, does not even approach the value of these two invaluable Public Intellectual, to the toxin of Neo-Liberalism. And the exhaustion of the whole of America’s Political Class in the Age Of Trump, and its political precusors, offered as bearers of a kind of ersatz revelation over time?

…

Cooper’s​ account of the family – not only a reproductive unit or a means of pooling income, providing care and maintaining authority, but a tax shelter and vehicle for holding assets – is part of a larger story about the selective application of austerity and extravagance under neoliberalism. Today, she writes, capitalism is no longer based on returns on industrial investment, a ‘regime of accumulation organised around production and measurable in terms of growth’. Instead we have a ‘regime of asset price appreciation’ – managed largely through tax exemptions and expenditures, and based on capital gains – in which the private family wealth fund rivals the public corporation. The rentier and the debtor: this is, Cooper’s analysis suggests, the primary class division of 21st-century capitalism.

The scale of this transformation may be overstated. The family has long been a key organisational unit of capitalist social relations; the corporation persists, and public asset managers remain more powerful than private firms; and there have always been wealthy dynasties, though profitable new financial instruments have been made available to them. Public incentives to private investment were part of the logic of postwar American liberalism from the beginning, and were inscribed in earlier tax codes. Older class divisions endure, and the accumulation of capital continues through old-fashioned means of production, which coexist with the novel monetary and fiscal environments described in Counterrevolutions. Although Cooper understates these continuities, she also rejects the common diagnosis that capitalism is in a long downturn. This diagnosis is made across the ideological spectrum, from economic liberals to social democrats to the Marxist left (to which Cooper is otherwise sympathetic). Her response is that we are overlooking the boom that followed the crisis of 2008 and putting too much emphasis on long-term decline because we use outdated economic indicators that were developed to measure growth during the Fordist phase of capitalism. It is true that savings rates and industrial investment have plummeted, but new forms of investment have replaced them, and these can only be revealed by accounting for capital gains (especially those that remain unrealised).

The point of this argument is as much political as diagnostic. What Cooper wants to show is that state fiscal decisions have always been the product of antagonistic struggle – over the extent of the social wage, state debt, and the actions that capitalist actors and institutions are willing to permit. Austerity is a choice. The protection of the family at the expense of other ways of living is a choice. The transfer of public wealth to private wealth is a choice – it’s a choice to make housing a financial asset, for example. Is abundance possible for all? Cooper thinks it is, if only we can realise the possibilities afforded by control of the money supply.

While politicians have long insisted, in Theresa May’s words, that ‘there is no magic money tree’ – that we need to balance the books and live within our means – what Cooper wants us to learn from her history of the battles over the tax code in the US is that those limits are not as they are presented to us. ‘We do not lack the means,’ she writes, ‘to collectivise public debt issuance, to monetise that debt, to channel that money into collective spending on education, healthcare, welfare and the transition to renewable energy, or to redistribute the ensuing social wealth. What we lack is the political will.’ Historically, the terms and occasions on which balanced budgets can be transgressed have been set by capital, not labour. But what if we shook the magic money tree and distributed its fruits fairly: if we seized the instruments of wealth creation and socialised finance, could we finally find a way of getting everything for everyone?

The trouble, as Cooper well knows, is working out how to move towards supply-side socialism in a situation where the radical left is a long way away from power (with the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of what was once Trump’s New York, perhaps it is closer than one might think). But limiting the power of capital over the state isn’t just a matter of changing the ruling party, or limiting the influence of neoliberals, as Cooper sometimes seems to suggest. The relation of the state to capital runs deeper, and though there are political choices to make, they are rarely made in circumstances of our choosing. The project of using technocratic means to achieve radical abundance is beset with structural constraints. And, as Cooper’s book shows, the daily struggles of economic life under capitalism remain as much about the organisation and control of time, work and sexuality as they are about the supply and distribution of money. What her account documents is that the horrors of austerity have been the flipside of a commitment by the state to asset-owners; a commitment that could end. ‘Extravagance for everyone’ is a rallying cry that gets at the true meaning of the right to life – a demand long distorted by the anti-abortion movement. Call it the hope or the dream – too long deferred – of public luxury.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/katrina-forrester/i-appreciate-depreciation

Philosophical Apprentice.