“First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship”： Richard Lachmann with Vivek Chibber

Feb 27, 2020 BROOKLYN Book launch for Richard Lachmann’s “First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers.” Recorded at Verso Books in Brooklyn on February 12, 2020. Cosponsored by Catalyst magazine. The extent and irreversibility of US decline is ever more obvious as America loses one war after another and its industries slip behind the competition. Richard Lachmann explains why the United States will find it impossible to retain global dominance. He contrasts America’s relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands’ similarly short primacy and Britain’s far longer era of leadership. Decline in those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. It was the product of the success elites had in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. In this process, not only are ordinary people harmed, but capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests as a class. They fail to adopt policies and make the investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world. Following this model, Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to its present-day condition of paralysis and plunder, explaining the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance’s cannibalization of the economy. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Richard Lachmann is a Professor at the University of Albany-SUNY and the author of “Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe,” “States and Power” and “What Is Historical Sociology?” Vivek Chibber is Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of “Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital” and “Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India,” which won the Barrington Moore, Jr. Prize. He has contributed to, among others, the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review and New Left Review. Original: