Americans, however, have neither viewed themselves with such grandeur nor understood themselves operating within any predictable pattern of history. On the contrary, a revolutionary historical narrative pervades American political culture, with ‘exceptionalism’ remaining a constant refrain. The special brand of US democracy and its faith in human progress, the capitalist marketplace, and the individual will, ultimately, are thought to overcome all challenges. Most political economists and social theorists, of course, have viewed this proposition with skepticism, focusing their criticism on the specificity of US capitalism, with its strong neoliberal characteristics and grossly unequal social outcomes. Nowhere in the capitalist world have the extensions of the free market been as great as they have in the United States, where Nancy Fraser (2019) has argued that the post-Reagan battle between reactionary neoliberals (Republican-led) and progressive neoliberals (Democrat-led) has resulted in the hyper-reactionary neoliberal brand of the Trump administration.

Why should any of this come as a surprise? After all, this has long been the age of neoliberalism, the history of which puts the Anglo-American world at the cutting edge. The pedigree is difficult to deny: from the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, through ‘third way’ Clintonians and Blairites, and on to the full-blown neoliberal fury of the Trump and Johnson administrations. Neoliberalism in Anglo-American countries is said to be more than just the uptake of classical liberal principles—rather, it is the unwavering disavowal of all things Keynesian and the systematic dismantling of the institutions of post-war society (Peet, 2003). At the same time, however, more than a whiff of hypocrisy is notable here, because this disavowal only seems to hold while capitalism is bullish in nature. Whenever prospects for economic growth slow—the Savings & Loan Crisis, Black Monday, the 2008 financial crisis, or the COVID 19 shutdown—even the starkest free market advocates in Congress and elsewhere willingly endorse multi-billion or trillion-dollar government interventions.

This book interrogates, beyond such bailouts, whether the ‘unbridled’ brand of US neoliberalism, in fact, always holds true. Certainly, the financial crises listed above demonstrate an especially free ranging financial market, with a good deal of industry-friendly regulatory oversight. In that arena, it could be said that the state has, intermittently, receded from view, allowing a much wider, unsupervised ambit of corporate activity. And one would be correct for sensing a more general ‘retreat of the state’ across a wide array of activities, as the specter of ‘privatization’ seems ubiquitous at all levels of government. It has been estimated, in fact, that of the $6 trillion in government spending across the U.S., at least a full $1 trillion now goes to private companies (Ball, 2014). A large part of that privatization dynamic, however, does not suggest the standard image of government ‘getting out of the way’. This work maintains that there has been a large-scale movement of capital into central public policy domains, where government retains and even builds on its dominant functions. More specifically, it argues that part of the development of US neoliberalism involves adaptive accumulation, a process in which capital allies or aligns itself with public objectives and institutions, as a means to transform or reroute public revenues into private profit streams. Along the way, corporate organizations ‘adapt’ their roles as pure market actors, taking up and inhabiting quasi-public aspirations as a central part of their commercial mission. The state, in all its complexities, proceeds with this relationship, as it both addresses budgetary dilemmas brought on by regular rounds of austerity and extends or carves out new areas of accumulative growth for corporate America.

The sectors involved range in scope and magnitude, from substantial to enormous, but the present work does not presume to capture every manifestation of this process. Instead, it gives an indicative account of concrete cases that challenges our sense of a hyper-neoliberal US political economy, where the ‘rules of reproduction’ are not as self-evident as we might assume. Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke (2020) have made the argument that when we examine historically specific cases of capitalist development, it is imperative that we not read the nature or outcome of their development from some inherent attributes of capitalism. In the authors’ words, there is a necessity to avoid, “a fetishized conception,” where “[what] is conceptually rendered as an auto-generative logic of action grates with the historical tracking of capitalism … as a contested and concrete process” (2020, p. 77). The authors seek “to open up space for rethinking capitalism as a historically open rather than theoretically-closed category” (2020, p. 77). The utilization of adaptive accumulation to view the specific nature of US political economy demands this same historically open perspective. It requires that we consider the existence of a symbiotic relationship between state and capital across a range of significant economic sectors, potentially, as a constitutive part of American neoliberal development.

In order to make this argument, the work examines four separate arenas of public policy—military, healthcare, education and incarceration—as cases in which adaptive accumulation has taken hold. Taken together, these sectors make up a very large portion of public and private spending and, as such, represent a large share of US economic activity. Cobbling together estimates from only K-12 education, health, and incarceration, total government spending in these areas amounted to almost $5 trillion in 2019 (Wagner and Rabuy, 2017; Martin et al., 2021; Hanson, no date). Potentially, this reveals two possibilities with respect to US political economy. The first, obviously, is that sectors of such size exhibit a broad appeal for those seeking profit streams, as room to transform public spending through adaptive accumulation remains extensive. Second, and more important, it might be fair to say that US economic strength is as reliant on these publicly-funded sectors as it is on the vitality of either its domestic consumption of goods or its financial sector. This is significant, because within political economy, much of the sectoral spending involved would be categorized as ‘unproductive’ components of economic activity. The implication is clear: in the heartland of neoliberal capitalism, publicly-funded sectors actually constitute one of the differentia specifica that drives American capitalist development. Rather than seeing them as either marginal attempts to ‘shore up’ capitalism or bloated government spending, it might be better to understand them as concrete specificities, integral to the US capitalist engine.

Before getting to these sectors, however, the second chapter provides the basic outlines for adaptive accumulation as an interpretive lens. With the strategic aim of readability, the chapter has been deliberately limited in size and conceptual scope. Those looking for a long, meandering, or overly abstract survey of literature on the state and political economy, or a ‘deep dive’ into value theory and accumulation, will have to look elsewhere. The point here is to specify the context of US neoliberalism, from which questions concerning the unique form of US capitalist practices emerge. From this, the chapter positions adaptive accumulation within a more critical set of perspectives on institutions, and it sets out the various functions that such accumulation serves its participant social actors. Ultimately, the objective is an enhanced understanding of neoliberalism, where we gain both a different version of ‘privatization’ and a more nuanced view of what the public realm means for corporate actors.

The third chapter proceeds to an examination of the public policy sector in which talk of state-supported capitalism all began: the military. Readers are, no doubt, more than familiar with the notion of a ‘military-industrial complex’, and it is the contemporary widespread application of that concept to other sectors that motivates a re-examination of neoliberalism in the American context. Logically, then, the work begins by examining the potential for adaptive accumulation in US military matters. Importantly, the chapter goes beyond weapons procurement issues usually involved in such discussions, as they have been both well explored elsewhere and are not especially indicative of adaptive accumulation. Instead, it highlights the more recent ways in which US military policy—as a form of public policy—has redirected societal revenues into private profit streams. This is a public policy process specific to the neoliberal era, and it demonstrates the manner in which corporate actors have been ‘drafted’ into public objectives, all with an eye to maintaining forward deployment capacities and an increasingly expensive high-tech arsenal in the context of an uncertain post-Cold War budgetary environment.

Following this, chapter four explores the domain that is often cited as the only serious rival to defense spending: health and healthcare. Health constitutes an immense area of activity, in which government involvement has grown, even while the U.S. remains the leading case of free market health delivery worldwide. Here, the argument is made that across several government-run or -regulated healthcare structures, from Medicare to so-called healthcare exchanges, corporations have been able to insert private forms of healthcare purchasing and provision, supported by government payments and subsidies. It is well known that US spending in health is typically twice as expensive as it is among its advanced industrial counterparts, even as the latter systems tend to be far more universalized and generous in their provisioning. The segmented nature of the US system, with very uneven but generous government involvement, makes this terrain particularly lucrative for capital. Cloaked in a shawl of concern for patients’ well-being, health related corporations pursue a government-expanded terrain of public spending that carefully avoids the price restricting chokehold of universality. In the face of adaptive accumulation, it is little wonder that when ‘Medicare For All’ rose as a meaningful possibility (along with Bernie Sanders’ campaign in late Fall 2019), the concerted and interest-laden denunciation of its ‘fairness’ and ‘feasibility’ was deafening.

Chapter five furthers this exploration into social policy, with an examination of education, where everything from programs like No Child Left Behind to the vast private systems of post-secondary institutions are open to scrutiny. Limiting its scope, however, the chapter considers the transformation of K-12 education, with its attendant connection to the charter school movement. The struggle around school transformation has been part of a process underway since the Reagan administration—designating ‘crisis’ in the public school system and identifying ‘lost’ schools and districts for conversion to ‘free’ charter organizations, a growing portion of which are for-profit or market-disciplined. Alongside the relentless, localized push towards charterization and marketization, federal and state legislation has cooperated with the standardization of curriculum, supplying a quantification of performance standards that has generated a lucrative parallel industry of tests, teaching materials and supplemental tutoring. As with other forms of inequality, this conversion process is directed predominantly at marginalized communities, where ‘failing schools’ come about as a result of grossly depleted resources. This creates a self-fulfilling reality, whereby under resourced, minority-populated public schools require ‘rescuing’ from the ostensible ineptitude of public management, clearing the ground for new forms of service delivery. Alarmingly, however, the evidence points to little or no progress with experimentation, unless union-busting of teachers, unequal access and redlining of performance results is considered progress.

The race-infused elements of this political economy are further highlighted within chapter six, an examination of the changing US incarceration system. The scene set here is not a happy one, with a post-1980 political agenda that has backed the execution of racist drug policies, ‘three strikes’ laws, and mandatory sentencing guidelines. The end result is the largest prison population in the world, with a grossly disproportionate black and Latino majority. In this context, the private incarceration industry has grown at both the federal and state level, providing fixed contracts based on per prisoner service payments. The grim public function fulfilled by these companies has proven lucrative, and the consequences for prison populations, by all reports, are not good. In short, if corrections and rehabilitation are the public function of federal and state prisons, the entry of private actors complicates this with perverse dual imperatives to increase prisoners and control costs, leading to less than humane conditions. None of this is made less complicated by the recurring detainment of immigrants, an additional and enticing field of profit for prison corporations, with less onerous regulations around standards than state or federal correction facilities. Operating a majority of detainment facilities in this area, private corporations have benefitted from successive administration policies that have subjected immigrants to ‘securitized’ and increasingly punitive conditions.

Overall, these cases render a picture that complicates our image of US political economy as the archetype of neoliberalism. This is not to suggest that US capitalism is now entirely state-led capitalism. On the contrary, it points towards an interpretation of capitalist development that begins from concrete historical circumstances. It cautions us from too quickly drawing the conclusion that problems associated with these sectors—high costs, poor quality control, dangerous outcomes, and stepped-up racism—are merely the neoliberal product of state retreat, combined with an increasingly unbound market. Consistently, the circumstances of adaptive accumulation are more complicated. Instead, the state plays a co-active role in carving out niche areas of service delivery, or it intervenes to shore up an existing area of provision. Corporate actors, new and old, struggle politically to participate in this largesse, but they also do so with full cognizance of their new public persona. Whether this is draped in the patriotism necessary for military service contracts, or the compassionate endeavor to preserve the health and well-being of US citizens, this new pseudo-public character offers a valuable shield from political criticism and, often, economic competition. And, as we will see in the ensuing chapters, this is a part of the problem—the delivery of public objectives by private actors often leads to suboptimal results, but policymakers see no choice once these systems are in place. The challenge for scholars and practitioners alike, one taken up by this work, is to determine the degree to which this embedded position of private actors is both a permanent and constitutive element in the American political economy.

On the face of it, such an update might seem unnecessary. The prevailing characterization of US political economy as uniquely Anglo-American could be understood as sufficient to capture the most important components of the state-capital relationship. By this characterization, the state is understood to be minimalist or subordinated with regard to capitalist civil society. Institutionalist a...