Democratic control can make finance a tool to express and carry out the will of the people

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? Most political commentators point to heads of state, such as the Presidency, and other formal institutions of the state.

But in The Master’s Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer lays elsewhere, in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of democratic ruptures that argues that democracy is deeply intertwined with the economy itself.

He shows how democracy can be deepened and working-class power strengthened by creating new sortition-based institutions of deliberative finance. His radical proposal, the first of its kind, offers practical steps toward a comprehensive design to create the investment mandates that are needed to fund a just green transition, social housing, and other socially necessary, but privately underfunded, public goods.

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Marquette University and former Berggruen Research Fellow at the University of Southern California. His research is on capitalism and democracy. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions was published in 2017 with Cornell University Press. The book was awarded with the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. He has written extensively for public audiences as outlets such as Boston Review, Jacobin Magazine, Noema Magazine, and The Washington Post.

Preface: deckard on skid row

Part I – Structure: A Theory of Democratic Rupture
1. Mother of Antagonism
2. The Frankenstein Problem

Part II – Conjuncture: The Political Contradictions of Finance
3. A Primer
4. Political Plunder
5. Mythologies 11

Part III – Rupture: A Plan for Radical Democracy
6. Class Logics of Reform
7. Minipublics
8. Plebeian Recipes
9. Democracy on Fridays

Notes
Index