2021-02-04 :: by Leighton Woodhouse <https://web.archive.org/web/20210422124242/https://n2pe.berkeley.edu/podcast/robert-brenner-and-dylan-riley/>

Inflection Point is a podcast that asks whether the neoliberal economic order is done, and explores what might come to replace it. This is the third and last part of a conversation between UC Berkeley sociologist Dylan Riley and UCLA sociologist Robert Brenner. Here, Brenner describes the trajectory that capitalism is on today, in the 21st century.

* Tags: capitalism, Dylan Riley, neoliberalism, Robert Brenner

Notable Quotes:

* This marks the culmination of two trends: ever-weakening investment, employment, GDP, and productivity—and a response that's explicitly not about fixing it…

* The response isn't about getting employment back, or investment back, or output back—it's about using political power to turn income to the top 1%, or rather the top 0.01%…

* The Fed's intervention ensured that corporations could borrow, not to invest or innovate, but to fund stock buybacks and dividends…. We've seen an almost beyond-belief separation of the process of upward redistribution from the process of production….

* The politically driven upward redistribution that began in 1980 is often misnamed ‘neoliberalism’—but in fact, it's anything but liberal…

* Both major parties in the U.S. are now deeply tied to this politically driven upward redistribution—neither offers a real alternative for working people…

* Globalization was always central to American capitalism…. The true shift was the emergence of politically driven upward redistribution

* We're seeing a hybrid economic form—capitalism hasn't disappeared, but its core dynamic has shifted toward predation and wealth extraction….. What we're witnessing is closer to pre-capitalist feudal forms of privilege and take, rather than a functioning capitalist economy…

* The elite's wealth gains have nothing to do with productive investment—they're sustained by financial speculation and political connections…

* The irony is that neoliberalism has created a huge political vacuum—and that's what right-wing populism has moved to fill…

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