A Basic Programmatic Framework for a Post-Neoliberal Political Economy

Neoliberalism marked a high point in the extent to which markets were per­mitted to extend to every corner of production and to operate unmoored from solidaristic social relations.

FIRST PILLAR: PARTIAL DECOMMODIFICATION OF BASIC

NEEDS AND CAPABILITIES—FREEDOM FROM WANT

Understanding the political economy of market societies requires us to focus on market reach as much as on market power. Transformation requires partial decommodification of the basic necessities of life so that more people have a chance to keep body and soul together without being forced to sell their labor and maximize its monetary value.⁸¹ The most comprehensive proposal for such a reform is Sitaraman and Alstott's synthesis of ongoing debates in American politics: over Medicare for all or a health care public option, free higher education, a jobs guarantee, postal banking, or increased public hous­ing. All reflect a fundamental drive to shrink the domain of the market, par­ticularly as it relates to provisioning of basic needs and capabilities.⁸² These calls for state-centric alternatives to markets are complemented by calls for strengthening and expanding the role of nonprofit, commons-based, and co­operative enterprises, all of which are part of this broader push to expand the domain of nonmarket production and reduce the imperative to go to the market for everything.⁸³

SECOND PILLAR: ACTIVELY COUNTERACTING STATUS-SUBORDINATION

The core lesson of the history of status-subordination in market societies is that no workers and working families are secure unless all are secure.

THIRD PILLAR: ACTIVE INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN TO

REDISTRIBUTE POWER IN THE ECONOMY

A central implication of political economy is that institutions play a central role in shaping power in the economy, and power, in turn, determines pro­ductivity and justice in both the short and long term. Institutional design must therefore incorporate into consideration the coalitions it will bring into being and the configuration of power they will facilitate over time, rather than aiming purely at the end-state it seeks to enact. Efforts like the Clean Slate Project to transform labor law, the Open Markets Institute to transform antitrust, or proposals from presidential candidates Senators Elizabeth War­ren and Bernie Sanders to transform corporate governance with board labor representation or worker ownership, all represent the kinds of fundamental institutional transformations intended to redistribute power in economic relations.

FOURTH PILLAR: PARTIAL DECOMMODIFICATION OF LABOR

AND CAPITAL AND EMBEDDING PRODUCTION IN SOCIAL

RELATIONS OF SOLIDARITY AND MUTUAL OBLIGATION

Proposals to increase worker ownership and board representation are clear examples. These are complemented by efforts to leverage the state's fiscal power to support cooperativism, such as Senator Sanders's bill to create an employee ownership bank and employee ownership centers to provide both financing and mentorship. These state-led efforts should support the already- existing revival of interest in cooperativism, particularly efforts to leverage digital platforms, as we see in the platform and open cooperativism efforts that Schor and Eddy describe in their chapter. In parallel, we see alternative efforts to reshape the ideological bases of market production itself, empha­sizing relations of mutual solidarity and obligation, as in efforts to revive stakeholder capitalism and establish a newly central role for firms as purpose- driven organizations, as Henderson's and Salter's chapters underscore.⁸⁶

FIFTH PILLAR: REBUILDING STATE CAPACITY

TO STEER AND BUFFER THE ECONOMY

The Green New Deal frame offers an example of redefining the state's role as central to macroscale steering of technological and industrial policy; other examples are proposals for a good jobs guarantee or universal care cradle- to-grave as a major intervention in gender equality. In this category we can think also of technology policy that aims to steer certain critical technolo­gies: supporting the evolution of labor-complementing rather than labor­displacing automation, and reorienting algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) toward instrumenting corporate accountability, monitoring and using the instrumented environment to deploy economy-wide exploitation detec­tion and reporting. Rodrik and Sabel's chapter on good jobs and Rahman's chapter on building state capacity are the most obvious contributions in this volume along these lines.

SIXTH PILLAR: DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY

Understanding the inherent fallibility of the market and the consequent embrace of revived public engagement in the economy should not come at the expense of preserving the hard-earned lessons about the major sources of state fallibilism—oligarchic capture, bureaucratic decay, and elite group- think. Many contemporary proposals for democratic reform, such as ensur­ing proper political representation and significantly restricting the influ­ence of money in politics, go directly to efforts to contain oligarchic capture. Dealing with bureaucratic decay and elite groupthink is marked by proposals such as Rodrik and Sabel's, as are experimentation with cooperative regula­tion combining civil society and public participation and various forms of municipalism of the type Stears describes. No revival of the state and the public will succeed if it does not assume fallibilism and build accountabil­ity, responsiveness, and adaptive learning into these newly revived public systems.

Notes

I owe particular acknowledgment to Talha Syed, whose work in progress on his draft manuscripts under the titles Capital as a Social Relation and From Imperative to Opportunity: Radically Restructuring Markets I have read and extensively discussed with him over the past three years. Central elements of the framework I outline here, as noted in specific footnotes, are based on or influenced by his arguments.

I am also grateful to my coeditors for comments on this chapter and all the contributors to this volume during the Political Economy and Justice workshops, as well as to Sam Bowles, Oren Bracha, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, Amy Kapczynski, Bill Lazonick, Katrina Pistor, Brishen Rogers, Juliet Schor, Kathleen Thelen, and participants in the East Coast Political Economy Consortium and the Harvard Law School faculty workshop.

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