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Spring 2025

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New in Jacobin
A Review of Counterrevolution by Melinda Cooper

For a recent issue of Jacobin, Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno review Counterrevolution" Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance by Melinda Cooper. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance represents a step forward in theorizing contemporary capitalism. Cooper offers a rich historical account of how the American state came to simultaneously enact extravagance and austerity: ‘printing money’ and undertaking massive expenditure to support asset price appreciation, primarily benefiting an uber-wealthy elite, while imposing strict austerity on workers. This, she argues, was the outcome of a ‘counterrevolution’ through which capitalists and their affiliated ideologues seized control of the fiscal and monetary capacities of the state amidst the 1970s crisis. Even as the end of the gold standard eliminated all economic constraints on state spending and created new opportunities for the expansion of social democracy, she claims, the power of a narrow oligarchy was secured through central bank ‘independence,’ which served to block unwanted popular demands to use its capacities to finance social programs.”