Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance

‘It’s nice, isn’t it. The quiet.’ So posted ‘Otto English’, pseudonym of centrist writer Andrew Scott, on July 10 2024, in the days following Starmer’s election. The post gained a notorious status online when, a couple months later, Britain was wracked by a series of racist pogroms across the country – with hotels containing migrants burnt, cars stopped to inspect the occupants’ race, and direct attacks on racialised minorities. The vacuous and inept forces of British liberal centrism who heralded the election of Starmer as the culmination of a return to sensible, reasonable or quieter politics were proved to be detached from reality.

Such a centrist force, claiming the effective technical management of the British state, whether in the figure of Starmer, Cameron, Brown, or Blair, hides underneath it a shared commitment to the continuation of state racism, which can only strengthen the forces of street racism. As Jonas Marvin argues:

Underpinning this cross-party pact on official state racism is the sense that the nation’s ‘household budget’ cannot accommodate new arrivals and must cater to its own, especially in a time of imperial and climate catastrophe. But what drives contemporary British racism is the notion that the Muslim minority is an invasive threat to Western civilisation, its cultural fabric and the innocence of white women and children. The feverishly insurrectionary explosions of the past week may have been sparked by the tragic murder of three children, but the febrile environment which led to these pogroms has long been hardwired into British political culture.

Here, then, we see the maelstrom of counterrevolutionary trends from the impact of the Thatcherite project to the austerity decades of the 2010s: a racist politics constructed with familiar themes of law and order and the practices of border expansion; a gender politics fixated on the defence of women and children from the spectre of non-white men. Expressed in a resurgent English nationalism, sharpened by islamophobia, we have the recipe for the pogroms of 2024.

In such a context, Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution helps us understand how we got into such a mess, and how we might get out of it. While focused on the comparable situation in the US, it unpacks elements of the project pursued by the global North reflected in Britain too. It also, however, recognises the possibility of resistance and breaking out of the crisis we are in - in contrast to the pessimistic narratives of Britain as a ‘rainy fascist Island’.

Family Values, Cooper’s 2017 work, explored the alignment of neoconservative defences of ‘traditional values’ with neoliberal arguments against the institutions of the welfare state, and how there emerged a common defence of the family as a necessary site of social reproduction. Counterrevolution continues this critique and expands it – exploring the relationship between the transformation of American politics in the late twentieth century and detailing the key players at the level of the state, civil society, and theory, who all pushed forward the neoliberal offensive.

Disentangling the elements in Cooper’s account of the counterrevolutionary offensive in the US, allows us to better understand this moment in Britain, too. This review assesses the parallel but not identical processes which have occurred in both countries, reshaping the state apparatuses and class terrain.  

The wage is dead, long live the asset

The first two sections of Counterrevolution provide a historic overview of the ascendancy of state policies which protected the ever growing value of financial assets, such as real estate, investment funds, and business investments. It follows the dizzying story of how different figures – from Alan Greenspan to Donald Trump – reinforced and profited from a system of economic policies made to perfect asset growth. In particular, businesses were not just given direct tax cuts, but fiscal and monetary policies were developed which increasingly shielded and supported the accumulation of assets with minimal taxation. The result created a cycle of wealth centralisation:

If sustained by the right combination of tax shelters and accommodative monetary policy, the wealth generated through asset price appreciation is liable to become self-reinforcing, all the while remaining completely invisible to the IRS and national income accounts. (p. 32)

More generally, Cooper suggests such fiscal and monetary regimes shift the traditional centre of accumulation in the US:

I would argue, real estate emerged as a primary investment class at the point where capital itself switched from a regime of accumulation, organized around production and measurable in terms of growth, to a regime of asset price appreciation, pivoting around capital gains. (p. 68)

While I would continue to argue that the production of commodities and the growth of production remains foundational to capitalism, the emergence of asset appreciation as a key element cannot be ignored. In fact, it is often the relationship between these very elements which explains contemporary economic crises – growth can appear exceptionally high, the FTSE can be ‘doing wonderfully’, but the realm of wages and production is one of disaster. This was clear in the 2008 crisis, when serious delinquency on subprime mortgages ‘increased from about 5.6 percent in mid-2005 to over 21 percent in July 2008.’¹ This delinquency didn’t come from nowhere, but from the combined effect of three decades of limited wage growth² which could not provide a sustainable basis for the scale of residential mortgage provision as housing values grew endlessly. To use Cooper’s language, the regime of asset price appreciation is in a constantly destabilising relationship with the traditional regime of accumulation through commodity production.

The same policies track closely with the economic situation in Britain, which has increasingly been characterised as a kind of ‘rentier capitalism’.³ A significant amount of Britain’s macroeconomy is based on the appreciation of asset values, particularly where there is monopolistic or oligopolistic control of infrastructures or resources, rather than wage growth. This leads to a variety of destabilising relations, such as ever growing housing bubbles and the spatialisation of commodity distribution referred to as ‘the death of the high street’.⁴ In 2023, the median house price was 8.3 times the median income, and house prices had increased at a rate of four and half times their 1997 rate, compared to a mere doubling of the median wage in the same time period.⁵ These elements interact and intensify crisis tendencies, not least as climate breakdown provides structural pressures through rising costs of producing and distributing basic commodities.

Cooper goes on to argue that the particularly intensive end-result of these economic policies is the return of dynastic politics into class politics. The US ruling classes are represented at their apex by families like the Kochs, Waltons, and the Trumps. This analysis, in part, following Family Values, recognises the contemporary family unit as one of the major sites of the reproduction of class relations across generations through inheritance systems. Of course, at its most extreme it produces dynasties but more generally we see the reformulation of a whole host of relations between the intermediary classes of the imperial core, who increasingly rely on the inheritance of family transfers for entry into asset ownership. This is particularly striking given the increased value of assets passed on, as ‘the average reported estate was worth just £95,000 in 1979 (in 2021/22 prices), by 2020 it was £352,000.’⁶

This regime of asset appreciation is one side of the story of American public finance, while the other is the collapse of wage growth in the late 20th and early 21st century. Partly, this was due to the intentional confrontation between the American state and trade unions, with Cooper exploring Reagan’s focus on conflict with public service unions like the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (PACTO), similar to Thatcher’s attacks on the National Union of Mineworkers and others.⁷ But such an offensive not only has a negative element, attacks on institutions of collective worker power like unions, but also a positive one: asset owners emerging out of the working classes in the form of homeowners and small business owners, who each became increasingly empowered over the previous decades.

The emergence of asset ownership and appreciation as a method of reframing and destabilising the working-class coalitions of the post-war period is something we saw intensively in Britain. In 1918, 76% of households were privately renting which, through home-ownership and the development of social housing, was reduced down to 11% by 1981. Home-ownership peaked at 69% in England and Wales in 2001, declining since then as such homes are increasingly taken back into the rising private rented sector. The removal of barriers to capitalisation through reprivatisation and removal of municipal control over social housing through ‘Right to Buy’ created a system wherein housing assets were expected to continually rise, to the benefit of the class coalition who owned their homes.⁸  

This is not to argue that there was a generalised ‘embourgeoisement’ as a result of rising home ownership – though we should be more honest that it did partially happen, particularly in the emergence and spread of small-landlordism – but to argue that the kinds of political crisis of subjectification and its demands saw new relations which the political right were adeptly capable of acting upon.⁹ The subjects who experienced widespread state provision, Keynsian economic policies, and the expansion of consumer markets could not be satisfied by traditional social-democracy nor visions of intensified economic planning. There emerged a desire for a kind of freedom against both capital and the state, which reached its peak around 1968. This impulse could also be contained, co-opted, and incorporated into a drive towards new opportunities of consumption and economic activity. This rush to ‘enrich ourselves’ created new relations of asset ownership, which in turn also brought their own forms of domination. One example being the crisis of care, which has seen older British homeowners – often facing chronic conditions from the bodily impacts of work – become responsible for the cost of their own late-life healthcare, financed through the sale of their homes and belongings. Now, this process is increasingly reaching its limit through the growing number of non-asset owning older workers, with private renters aged 50 and over doubling over the past 20 years (a process particularly exacerbated on racialised lines).

Cooper points to legislative changes which empowered both large businesses and individual workers to modify the legal status of their employment relations. Where workers are increasingly pushed into contractor work and made to become ‘self-employed’, employers can rid themselves of various secondary obligations won through working-class struggle. At the same time, the new contractor may take advantage of a different tax regime that begins with the emergence of the small trader but culminates in processes of outsourcing and ultimately the emergence of what we today call the ‘gig economy’. As such:

The long-term effect of the Republican war on labor was to multiply the number of workers toiling under the direct authority of small business owners and to sharpen the class divide between them, making it increasingly difficult for misclassified workers to assert their bargaining powers qua wage workers, let alone accede to the position of owner-manager. (p. 160)

Similarly in Britain, contrary to some of the more simplified assertions of Marx vis-a-vis the intermediary classes, we have not seen the disappearance of small businesses but instead an elaborate proliferation of intermediary class relations.¹⁰ Services that would have previously been managed ‘in-house’ are instead supplied by a series of ‘small businesses’, sole traders, temp contractors, and more. Often these opaque relations conceal dependencies we’d traditionally associate with the working classes, as in the case of gig economy delivery drivers who are repeatedly presented by their parent company as entrepreneurs. But they also produce, in turn, changes to the self-understanding of class amongst the population, particularly those who spin out of waged employment to start up businesses.

In the US, the culmination of this process of breaking blue-collar coalitions of labour through the production of asset-owning and small business-directing intermediary classes is the emergence of the Tea Party. For Cooper, the Tea Party, the insurgent right-wing movement in the US following the 2008 economic crisis, should be understood ‘in a long lineage of small business conservatism which has always seen the administrative state and large corporations as partners in crime.’ (p. 179) Cooper goes on to show that despite self-identifying as workers and the working class, the movement was predominantly made up by small business owners and older homeowners. Their negative experience of the 2008 housing crash was tangible, but not the free fall of most workers; in fact what they felt from the crash were anxieties about the end of the boom of asset raises which they had benefited from. As such ‘it was asset depreciation, not historical or recent asset dispossession, that spurred the Tea Party into action.’ (ibid)

Much could be said here for the similarities with our own racist and ‘new Right’ movements. As Richard Seymour has argued, against those who present the recent pogromists as some authentic ‘left-behind’ white working class unable to express some class rage:

Meanwhile those drawn to this ethnonationalist politics steadfastly refuse to be particularly poor or marginalized. They may have experienced relative class decline or inhabit declining regions, but they are as likely to be middle-class as workers. Racism does not so much express misplaced class grievance as organise the toxic emotions of failure, humiliation and decline.

This is not to deny that such movements, in the US and Britain, have significant elements of the working classes in them. Nor is it an attempt to deny the realities of racist politics amongst the British population which are not reducible to manipulation ‘from above’. However, it is to state that the politics of the riots are dominated by the anxieties of the intermediary classes in alliance with state racism. Tea Party’s outrage and British pogromist actions are not simply expressions of working class rage, but are instead a distinct project of historic alignment in which ‘racism from above’ is complicated in turn by the failures of socialists to follow the processes of class composition and decomposition which Cooper has attempted to map.

This prevents us really getting to grips with some of the tensions in the political project of the contemporary political right. Cooper argues that the base of Trump’s political coalition constitutes ‘a shift in the political center of gravity of American capitalism, which has appointed the once marginal form of the family-owned business to the newly central position in economic life at every scale.’ (p. 195) This new emergent intermediary coalition in turn conflicts with the realities of the large corporation so central to late 20th century capital accumulation. This returns us to Brett Christophers’s analysis of ‘rentier capitalism’ in Britain, wherein tensions between different sections of the ruling class reflect the different accumulation strategies pursued by coalitions of rent-seeking forces and those engaged in traditional commodity production. Whereas Christophers’s wide theorisation of rent, applying to everything from traditional landlordism to outsourcers like Serco, demonstrates the tension at the heart of value relations and national economic strategy, it is Cooper’s exploration of the concrete class fractions pursuing these different forms of value at different scales that allows us to understand the contemporary right far more substantially. Of course, such tensions between sections of the ruling class ‘from above’ are not novel. They are, as Poulantzas argued, precisely one of the things the contemporary capitalist state attempts to deal with.¹¹ What Cooper allows us to do – moving from the new forms of accumulation to their expression in the various intermediary and ruling classes– is produce a picture of the bloc necessary for the defeat of them.

The task of the political left is not to reclaim the intermediary classes in a bastardised form of the Eurocommunist ‘broad-democratic alliance’, wherein workers are expected to unite organisationally with petit bourgeois elements. In fact, it is precisely this panicked turn to the middle classes, alongside loyalty to the British state, which undergirds much of Starmerism’s rightward drift. But it is to recognise, as the possibilities and anxieties of the intermediary classes emerge more and more, as the crises of care are exacerbated, and as interest rates rise, that this destabilising tension will likely only continue. This will provide a space for the left to manoeuvre. Such an understanding of the breakup of political class forces has been theorised most directly in Burton-Cartledge’s analysis of the breakup of traditional Toryism,¹² however – in this context – the inability to articulate an anti-racist politics of working-class freedom will only increase the strength of the right in projects like Reform, bolstered by what Valluvan strikingly calls ‘unholy alliances’ between neoliberals and nationalists.¹³

Baked-in policies

What follows in Cooper’s account is an exploration of the interplay between the system of juridical state relations in America and the reproduction of this model of accumulation. As Marvin reflected, considering neoliberalism in Britain, ‘the “roll-back” phase of neoliberal counter-revolution prided itself on crushing both industrial struggle and experiments in municipal socialism’. It is this latter project in the US which Cooper is so interested in, the foreclosing of attempts at a kind of municipal and most importantly state-level redistributive spending as prefiguring the counterrevolutionary project at the national level. At one point, the idea of ‘permanent fiscal counterrevolution’ is posed by Cooper (p. 288) as a way to understand the right’s dogged function in attacking the possibility of any redistributive fiscal policy at every level. In particular, Republicans have aggressively decried public debt and attempted to enshrine legislation regarding balanced budgets into American legislatures for much of the last 60 years.

Cooper’s most urgent intervention is to situate this legislation for the ‘balanced budget’, along with related attacks on any democratic control of public finance, in the long history of the racial politics of the US; everything from the excessive use of filibustering to the use of constitutional conventions is a strategy used by the modern right previously perfected by racists following Reconstruction. In Cooper’s account, the successes of the civil rights movement forced the right to focus on the terrain of fiscal policy, particularly in attacks on public expenditure – the redistributive effect of which was access to desegregated schooling, healthcare, and other spending. Cooper argues that, having effectively enshrined a kind of racial capitalist state policy, the new Right is able to turn again to attacks on formal rights:

Today’s Republicans have taken minority rule several steps further than southern Democrats a century earlier. They now wield a minority veto not only in the Senate, where they have transformed the filibuster into a formidable tool of systemic obstruction, but also in the House and the Supreme Court, where an unelected minority seems intent on sanctioning every Republican transgression. This has enabled them to renew and radicalize the agenda of outright economic disenfranchisement that southern Democrats were forced to give up on in the 1960s. (p. 302)

The similarities with the state fiscal policies of Britain, despite the absence of a written constitution, are clear: the Thatcherite project, and its subsequent consolidation, have seen the emergence of a ‘common sense’ of public finance, codified through Bank of England separation from the Treasury around monetary policy under Gordon Brown, and the attacks on local rate setting and decentralised fiscal policy which Thatcher pushed through.

In the early 1980s, Ralph Miliband, in Capitalist Democracy in Britain, one of his neglected texts, spent a significant amount of time musing on the importance of local government to British class struggle, and particularly stuck on the question of why there was not greater municipal working-class intransigence against  Westminster, believing it would intensify in the coming years.¹⁴ This proved prescient, with the emergence of the rate-setting conflict between local authorities like the GLC, Militant Liverpool, Blunkett’s Sheffield, and elsewhere.¹⁵ The Thatcherite victory was to effectively make local government so dependent on Westminster as to undermine its real force as an institution of local decision making around fiscal matters.

Despite this, there remained – particularly during the Corbyn years – a certain nostalgic invocation of municipal socialism by left councillors and movement figures, particularly in the ‘Preston Model’.¹⁶ One of the significant failures of socialist forces at this time was to recognise that the preconditions for such a model had been significantly dampened by nearly half a century of constitutional reformulation from central government. The left was further reluctant to confront that one of the major causes of the breakup of the historic bloc of Labourism was the poisoned chalice of local government, where Labour were seen as responsible for decades of local mismanagement and ultimately austerity due to their inadequate fiscal powers. 

In February of 2024, over half of senior council figures warned that they expect their councils to go bankrupt in the coming five years. What precisely will the Starmer government response be to this? Most likely, a further undermining of local democracy and authority powers with a further elaboration of written spending and taxation limits on councils. Cooper refers to this as ‘constitutional austerity’.

In particular, in her analysis of Ferguson and the anti-racist uprising there, Cooper shows how the fiscal austerity placed onto local government led to attempting to fill its coffers through fines and other individualised taxation policies which, in turn, intensified the role of racist policing from the state, leading to the necessity of resistance. As Cooper argues:

To the extent that fines are generated for the exclusive purpose of plugging holes in revenue, their relationship to public service provision becomes ever more tenuous. Taxation, in this context, loses any redistributive pretensions and becomes a pure act of confiscation, indistinguishable from punishment. If we can speak of a public service here, it has become so threadbare as to consist almost entirely of the act of extracting tax itself. (p. 242)

Here in Britain, we too today see the aggressive council officer, attempting to get money out of you if you drop a cigarette, or the mega-politics of council parking fees – these more punitive, intrusive and ultimately classed forms of governance are reinforced by decades of fiscal austerity and the undermining of local democracy. Rather than attempting to desperately claw together a local ‘governing project’, in the end providing a kind of left-relation with the state bureaucracy which the New Left warned about in the 1960s, we could consider returning to Miliband’s desire for a new Poplarism, an oppositional politics of the local state as the route out of this crisis.

The moral panic of austerity

So far, Cooper paints a picture that has many similarities with the current state of Britain – with asset inflation as a replacement of wage growth and attempts to remove fiscal and monetary policy changes from even limited democratic control. If such an account were to end here, this would merely be an effective history of the neoliberal offensive in the United States. But we are, of course, left with a question – namely, how consent for such a regime is maintained over the majority of the population. Herein lies Cooper’s insight that it is precisely the mobilisation of contemporary racism, sexism, and nationalism in response to questions of redistribution that reinforces and allows the pursuit of such policies from the right. The culmination of this in the US are the attacks on bodily autonomy and access to safe abortion which have emerged in recent years. This analysis recognises that the US right is not just the alignment of neoliberal forces interested in reduced welfare expenditure with neoconservative defences of the family, there are also various institutions of the new Christian right. Cooper then traces how, despite an assumption of the political retreat of Christian institutions at various points over the last 50 years, the new religious right have mobilised a moralising campaign against access to safe abortion, emerging most openly in the wider Tea Party project and its afterlives in Trump’s government.

In short, a wing of the Christian right, in an uneasy and changing alliance with the Republican Party, increasingly campaigned around state-funded abortion access which naturally aligned with wider opposition to any publicly funded healthcare. From various Clinton initiatives, all the way to ‘Obamacare’, forces of the right used the image of publicly funded abortion as a wedge to not just defeat safe access but also to undermine public health expenditure in general. So called moral concerns and fiscal concerns merge inseparably. Consequently, the sexist politicians of the new right mobilise moral objections but are also ‘outraged that hardworking taxpayers are expected to subsidize the abortions of future American citizens. Isn’t this equivalent to aborting the American nation?’ (p. 306)

The counterrevolutionary imposition of the new right-wing Supreme Court, which all but secured the legal reversal of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson, then only reflects the culmination of a state and federal project of classed sexism which has removed fiscal support for access to safe abortions. In Cooper’s terms:

It is easy to forget how central the fiscal issues of government healthcare spending and taxation have been to the religious right’s crusade against abortion. Long before the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, however, Christian conservatives had already succeeded in making abortion, birth control, and other sexual-health services as hard to access as possible. The moral counterrevolution arrived in fiscal form, before an ultraconservative Supreme Court imposed it by judicial fiat. In the wake of Dobbs, these economic constraints have become more decisive than ever, as women in anti-abortion states are faced with prohibitive travel costs and missed wages, not to mention criminal prosecution, when they need to terminate a pregnancy. (307)

The lesson for us in Britain is recognising the unity of moral and fiscal crises in the various political projects of the right. This in turn means we must reject a certain argument which suggests that the left should focus on bread and butter issues rather than being drawn into ‘culture war’. This is impossible; they are inseparable.

This should not be a novel insight, but it bears repeating. Perhaps the classic example of this in British history is the caricature of the ‘loony left’ with the cartoon, from the Sunday Express, representing Neil Kinnock as mini-Napoleon, backed by various horrific caricatures of ‘lesbian power’, ‘anti-racist power’, ‘gay power’ etc. Perhaps even more relevant to our moment is Hall et al.’s analysis of the ‘crises’ around ‘mugging’ in the late 1970s. In asking, ‘what do you really mean by mugging?’ they ended up asking:

To what social contradictions does this trend towards the 'disciplined society' – powered by the fears mobilised around 'mugging' – really refer? How has the 'law-and-order' ideology been constructed? What social forces are constrained and contained by its construction? What forces stand to benefit from it? What role has the state played in its construction? What real fears and anxieties is it mobilising? These are some of the things we mean by 'mugging' as a social phenomenon.¹⁷ 

It is ultimately to this kind of inquiry which Cooper demands that we return to, to think through the fiscal parameters of bourgeois politics and its relationship to manufactured crises that justify their class interests. It is here that differences begin to emerge between the US and Britain. Albeit with the exception of the long and ongoing history of restriction to abortion access in the occupied Six Counties, attacks on access to abortion in England, Wales, and Scotland have been far less prominent as mobilising points for the right than other issues. But, of course, there are similarities: attacks on migrants, smearing of those who oppose the genocide in Palestine, and performative resistance to anti-racist politics. These are not just narrowly performed projects to a baying reactionary crowd, but reflect a complex intermingling of forces ‘from above and below’ which reinforce counterrevolutionary approaches to capitalism by the British state.

The closest analogue to the US discussion of abortion is the increasingly transphobic consensus across the British state apparatus. Mobilising with professed concern for children as their initial wedge, what has rapidly emerged following the Cass Review – along with the wider underfunding of NHS provided gender transition – is the right’s model healthcare system, which would see ever decreasing public spending and reliance on private provision discretely expanded so as not to present a challenge to the structures of the family. As Lisa Leak argues, understanding the complex intermingling of the ‘concerned parent brigade’, ‘commentators’, campaign groups, MPs, and the state itself, is crucial to recognising this is a wider wedge against a particular emancipatory and at the minimum redistributive politics:

A feminism which is trans-exclusionary also excludes the fight against state violence, the critique of state-sponsored formal equality, the role of difference and debate within the sisterhood of women, and many other fundamental core tenets of the revolutionary, fighting feminism we need today.

Returning again to the contemporary xenophobia and racism of the recent pogroms, we would not go wrong to consider Valluvan’s articulation of the alignment of contemporary xenophobic racism with a particular neoliberal nationalist project:

It is a type of nationalism that disavows the motifs of blood and soil in favour of enterprise and productivity. It is a type of nationalism that disavows the gentility of lost idylls in favour of consumer metropolitan shine. It is a type of nationalism that is anti-migrant while managing to seem receptive to qualified immigration. In sum, it is a nationalism that is uniquely its own.¹⁸

Crucial here is recognising that this outward project of disavowal does not mean the street racism empowered from below is not that of the ‘blood and soil’ – especially when it sees indiscriminate assaults of people of colour. The real kernel of how this system operates becomes clear when the smoke clears, as the very elements of the state which have spent years stoking nationalist sentiment in Britain – which can only be racist – look at the destruction. At this moment they talk of calm, of legitimate concerns, and push forward a particular state project of austerity, bordering, and racial capitalism.

Conclusion

The experience of reading Counterrevolution (as with Family Values) is dizzying, partly because of the sheer number of academics, politicians, civil society groups, local government institutions and other bodies which the narrative links together. Cooper risks being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, as she attempts to explain the vast historic links between dynastic families of the US Right, academics, Christian fundamentalist groups, various lobbying and campaign groups, and an overarching counterrevolutionary project to an ever more nervous spectator. Luckily, Cooper is a better writer than most.

The same lens could be applied to a history of the right in Britain – attempting to explain the various networks of right-wing think tanks positioned in 55 Tufton Street, the clientist relationships between media figures and the British state, revolving doors between private companies and elected roles, and so on. Suddenly the complexity of counterrevolutionary projects grows ever more as more pieces are revealed, and it becomes hard to grasp how it all fits together.

It could be argued that what Cooper attempts, with a particular focus on struggles around the juridical, is an account of the various elements of the terrain of class struggle which Gramsci points towards in his Notebooks – exploring fortresses and earthworks.¹⁹ It is Gramsci’s conception of the ‘integral state’, recognising the interdependence of civil society and political society in contemporary state forms, which Cooper utilises.

Precisely the difficulty we have is attempting to orient on such bewildering terrain. However, histories like Cooper’s – in isolating each element and reconstructing them – show precisely how contingent such counterrevolutionary projects have been. At times, various neoliberal economic schools of thought, factions of the Christian Right, and political projects were defeated or receded – albeit temporarily; the integral state is complex, but it is a terrain we must be always mapping.

Our challenge in Britain is to unite a social constituency around a politics of freedom against the emergent regime of private extravagance, a kind of social project which can act as a new pole of recomposition in class struggle against the varied forces of the border guard, the right-wing MP, and so on. In doing so, it must smash apart the attempts to distinguish bread and butter from ‘culture wars’ issues. In her conclusion, Cooper notes an opening – a small consolation:

While the revival of the left has hardly dented the self-fueled delirium of the far right, we have at least retrieved the sense that things could be otherwise. (p. 376)

References

1 Chris Mayer, Karen Pence, and Shane M. Sherlund (2008), ‘The Rise in Mortgage Defaults’, Finance and Economics Discussion Series - Federal Reserve Board, p. 3.

2 Both Britain and the US have seen an extensive ‘productivity-pay gap’ emerging since the 1970s.

3 Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? (Verso Books, 2019). Further work on contemporary debates on rent includes T.F. Purcell, A. Loftus and H. March, ‘Value-Rent-Finance’, Progress in Human Geography, 44:3 (2019), pp. 437-56; and Beth Stratford, ‘Rival Definitions of Economic Rent: Historical Origins and Normative Implications’, New Political Economy, 28:3 (2023), pp. 347-62.

4 On the wider housing system in Britain, there is Nick Bano’s Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis (Verso Books, 2024). On accumulation strategies around wider cities and spatialisation in Britain, a great place to start is Isaac Rose’s The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis (Repeater Books, 2024).

5 Office for National Statistics, ‘Housing affordability in England and Wales: 2023’ (2024).

6 Dan Goss and Ben Glover, A New Age of Inheritance: What does it mean for the UK? (Demos, 2023), p. 9.

7 One of the best recent analyses of how Thatcherism coordinated its attacks on organised labour and restructured the state apparatus is Alexander Gallas, The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis (Haymarket Books, 2017).

8 This argument, linked to a Marxisant account of ‘capitalisation’ is laid out clearly in Bano, Against Landlords.

9 This was most astutely analysed in Raymond Williams’s attempt to explore Britain in the early 1960s, whereby a politics of freedom was unable to be articulated against both the business class and the welfare state. Williams, The Long Revolution (Chatto and Windus, 1961), pp. 293-355. This was also bookended by Stuart Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (Verso Books, 2021 [1988]).

10 An attempt to analyse the intermediary classes was made by Dan Evans’s A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie (Repeater Books, 2023). However, it is less than convincing, for reasons given by Alfie Hancox in Ebb and Jonas Marvin and Gus Woody for rs21.

11 Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (Verso Books, 2014).

12 Phil Burton-Cartledge, The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak (Verso Books, 2023).

13 Sivamohan Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 121-54.

14 Ralph Miliband, Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Oxford Paperbacks, 1984), pp. 131-45.

15 On this period, recent publications include Owen Hatherley, Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London (Repeater Books, 2020); and Helen Jackson’s People's Republic of South Yorkshire: A Political Memoir 1970-1992 (Spokesman Books, 2021).

16 Matthew Brown and Rhian E. Jones, Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater Books, 2021).

17 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978), p. viii.

18 Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism, p. 154.

19 For the best English language exploration of Gramsci’s conception of the integral state, see Peter D Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Haymarket Books, 2010), particularly chapters 4 and 5.