New Left Review 142 (2023)

Dylan riley and Robert Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, published after the us midterms last winter, has outlasted its immediate occasion in striking fashion. The article sparked a thoughtful, expansive, at times technically intricate debate that has ranged beyond the pages of New Left Review—drawing responses in Jacobin and Brooklyn Rail, spawning Substacks and podcasts—and spanned the generations. Riley and Brenner’s interlocutors in the journal so far—Matthew Karp, Tim Barker and Aaron Benanav—are part of a cohort of radical intellectuals shaped by the fallout of the 2007–12 crisis; the richness and rigour of today’s discussion far surpasses what left analysis could muster a decade ago.footnote¹ The proximate purpose of ‘Seven Theses’ was two-fold: first, to explain the Democrats’ unexpectedly robust performance in the midterms, and, second, to assess the ideological complexion and macro-economic consequences of ‘Bidenism’—the Administration’s fiscal stimuli and eco-nationalist neo-industrial policies: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, and the chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, both passed in the summer of 2022. Riley and Brenner’s assorted theses—‘rough’, ‘unfinished’ and ‘proposed in an experimental and provisional spirit’—were ‘intended to provoke further discussion’. Before revisiting them in detail, it is worth reflecting: why did they succeed?