Can We Remake Finance?

ABSTRACT: While there is a broad consensus that we have been living in a neoliberal era since the late 1970s, there is little agreement on what to do about it. Authors on the left often come to diametrically opposed conclusions on questions of strategy. A case in point are new books by Brian Judge and Michael A. McCarthy. Judge ends his book, Democracy in Default, by arguing that proposals to democratize the financial system, including a set of reforms that I put forward with Robert Hockett in Democratizing Finance (2022), are incapable of effectively challenging neoliberal hegemony. In The Master's Tools, on the other hand, McCarthy elaborates a strategy to use the financial system—the master's tools—to dismantle the power of markets and oligarchs.