Trump, the State, and Global Capital

A conversation with Steve Maher and Clara Mattei

In the early weeks of the Trump administration in the United States we have seen on-again, off-again tariffs, bluster against longstanding allies and friendly approaches to erstwhile foes, alarming threats to civil liberties and press freedom, accelerating deportations of immigrant workers, mass firings and layoffs of Federal employees, dismantling of key Federal agencies, and indifference toward threats of measles and bird-flu epidemics – and that’s only a partial list. Looking at all this through a Marxist lens presents a major challenge, but who better to meet it than Steve Maher and Clara Mattei, whose historical analyses of finance capital and the capitalist state have garnered well-deserved praise. Join us as we engage Steve and Clara in an open-ended conversation aimed at bringing some clarity to the burgeoning chaos that is shaking up U.S. and global capitalism and the imperialist state system.

Stephen Maher is Assistant Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland, and Co-Editor of the Socialist Register. With Scott Aquanno he is the co-author of The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to Blackrock. Steve also authored Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power.

Clara E. Mattei is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. She is Professor of Economics and Director of the recently inaugurated Center for Heterodox Economics (CHE) at The University of Tulsa. She previously taught at the The New School for Social Research and was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies.