Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Warren_speaks,_May_19,_2014.jpg)
2004 was the first year I was old enough to vote in presidential elections, and I quickly found it’s a depressing experience. But it’s easy to do. I’ll start thinking about voting for someone once I’m convinced they’ll work hard to leave the world a better place than they found it. Democratic presidential candidates never met that standard, so I never seriously considered voting for one. Depressing, but easy. Bernie Sanders complicated that in 2016. He met the standard, but he lost to Hillary Clinton. But what if there were a candidate clearly to Hillary Clinton’s left, and still to the right of Bernie Sanders? Did someone say ‘Elizabeth Warren’?
What’s going on with the Warren campaign? That’s my topic here.
The Flow of Capital
When he’s analyzing the circulation of capital in Volume 2 of Capital, Marx references the work of Quesnay, a French doctor. Quesnay himself was heavily influenced by William Harvey‘s modern account of blood circulation. Harvey’s major advance over Galen was to theorize that the heart acts as a pump to keep blood in constant circulation. Thus, it’s not merely a center for the production of blood, but also a center of circulation.
David Harvey does a great job developing and explaining the metaphor in his Companion to Marx’s Capital, as well as in his book The Enigma of Capital.
But the point of the metaphor is that capitalism isn’t merely a center of production or distribution. Nor is it a center of production sitting next to a center of distribution. Capitalism is a continuous flow, and blockages appear at various points in the flow. When blockages appear, it’s essential to the system that those blockages be cleared. And it’s essential that they be cleared from the core point of origin and cleared throughout the system.
If not, you can use your imagination to figure out what happens.
The Warren Policy Parade
“That’s great, Matt! But what does any of this have to do with Elizabeth Warren?”
I’m glad you asked! If we think of capitalism as a great circulatory system, Elizabeth Warren’s role is to keep the system flowing.
Elizabeth Warren is Capitalism’s Heart Surgeon.
Regulation and Taxes
Warren’s campaign is centered on reforming the capitalist regulatory structure. Her central policy proposal, which she unveiled a few months before announcing her campaign, is called the Accountable Capitalism Act.
The philosophical basis for Warren’s bill is that she wants to lean-in to the idea that corporations are persons. She wants to regulate them like persons, restricting their political activities, preventing them from hoarding cash, putting cash into the market, and requiring them to honor intuitive obligations to their various stakeholders. The bill would even require corporations with revenues over $1 billion to register as corporate citizens with a new government office. And to provide workers a meaningful role in the company’s board of directors.
On top of this, Warren wants a 2% tax on assets over $50 million. It’s known as her wealth tax. The goal here is pretty much the same. Warren wants to prevent speculation and cash hoarding. Taxing wealth pushes people to put that wealth into play, dislodging blocks to capital flow.
Monopolies and Child Care
A couple of months ago, Warren announced a plan to break up the big tech monopolies, to great progressive fanfare. In some sense, this is a return to Clinton Administration policy in the late 1990s, particularly as it applied the policy to Microsoft. Clinton and Warren’s goals are largely the same, though I think Warren is far and away the more competent of the two.
Warren wants to focus on major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Her idea is to roll back recent mergers and acquisitions, such as those of Instagram and Whole Foods. She also wants to wind down and spin off the side services of companies with more than $25 billion in revenue.
This gels well with the regulatory legislation, because, again, the goal is the same. Most of these companies have huge piles of cash on hand. The largest half dozen or so tech companies alone have about half a trillion dollars in cash hoard. With the exception of Amazon, which has invested in infrastructure, most of this money is unproductive. And the companies have few ideas for how to use it. This is a big problem for capital flow, and Warren wants to solve it.
Warren wants to solve related problems in the workforce with a universal child care proposal. The tech industry, in particular, is rife with sexism and obstacles to young women, particularly young women with children.
Debt
More recently, Warren introduced a plan to include student debt cancellation in a free college proposal. Her plan cancels up to $50,000 in debt for everyone with household incomes under $100,000, which is most people. This plan hits both parts of capital flow I discussed above, namely cash blockage and employment problems. Mass debt cancellation would help people start businesses, move out of bad jobs or bad relationships, and free up people’s life options, more generally.
Warren’s Governing Philosophy
I hope by now it’s clear why I call her Capitalism’s Heart Surgeon and why I used the circulatory metaphor. But what’s Warren’s deeper governing philosophy? What’s her animating vision?
I think we can read her animating vision pretty clearly from her policy proposals. She’s a progressive economist who wants to free up the flow of capital. The ‘progressive’ part of this comes from two things. One, her proposals focus on the needs of lower and middle income families. Two, she puts more emphasis on policy expertise than on popular, democratic struggle. She’s nodded at popular, democratic struggle more recently, particularly in her remarks to striking Stop & Shop workers. But she’s much more policymaker than popular leader.
Those two features, solving problems with attention to working families and preference for policy expertise, are the core of progressive politics. Warren’s solving capitalism’s huge problem with cash and resource hoarding. She wants to make capital flow again.
Warren, Sanders, and Social Democracy
I’m a philosopher, and we like drawing distinctions. I think Warren helps us draw a good one. There’s a lot of confusion out there over the differences between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In fact, some people simply conflate the two politicians. There’s also a lot of confusion out there over the differences between progressive politics, social democracy, and democratic socialism.
I think we can make progress on both these issues.
Bernie Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist, but he’s really a social democrat. I take it that all socialists, ‘democratic’ or otherwise, want to work toward some form of public ownership of economic resources and methods of distribution. That’s not what Sanders advocates.
What he does advocate is a robust conception of social democracy. He wants to reach outside the current political system and current voters to build large, transformative programs like universal health care, free college for all, and a higher minimum wage. I call it the Sandersista Trinity. And he wants to do these things through popular, democratic organizing.
Warren’s not a social democrat. These large, transformative, universal programs aren’t central to what she’s doing, and she doesn’t operate through mass politics. She’s a skilled economist who wants to put those skills to work solving problems in the capitalist system. This is pretty close to what most Democratic candidates say, particularly Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But Warren develops better and more detailed ideas than Obama and Clinton, and she’s more dedicated to the implementation of those ideas in the best possible way for working families.
Sanders and Warren Scorecard
Let’s summarize this. If you’re keeping score, here are the large, philosophical differences between Sanders and Warren:
Sanders is a social democrat, maybe or maybe not a progressive, and not a democratic socialist.
Warren is a progressive, but neither a social democrat nor a democratic socialist.
Got it?
The Warren Presidency’s Policy Emphasis
Presidents build big platforms. But they don’t get around to working on all the issues. There are differences between what a President Warren and a President Sanders would probably spend time on. I’d expect Sanders to focus on large, transformative, social democratic programs. Warren I’d expect to focus on more targeted interventions and structural reforms to government regulation of the economy.
The two of them often endorse one another’s proposals, but that doesn’t mean they’d spend equal time on one another’s ideas. Voting for Warren makes it relatively more likely we’d see a breakup of tech monopolies. And voting for Sanders makes it relatively more likely we’d see single-payer health insurance. I don’t expect Warren to prioritize single-payer, nor do I expect Sanders to prioritize big tech monopolies.
Warren’s Base
As I said, I think Warren’s core politics are less about popular, democratic organizing and more about policy expertise. This shows up, in particular, when it comes to who supports Warren. Warren’s base is much different from the Sanders base.
Warren’s support is heavily concentrated among white voters, particularly white women. She does much better with higher income voters than with lower income voters, and much better with liberal Democrats than moderate or conservative ones. And she has little support among independents or young people.
In other words, so far her base is more or less wealthier white progressives. And that’s exactly the base you’d expect for a candidate running the type of campaign she’s running.
Warren’s Prospects and Challenges
A big part of the problem with the wealthy white progressive base is that they’re not known for pressuring their elected officials to act on their campaign promises. They endlessly made excuses for Obama, and they’d likely do the same for Warren. Without a base that reaches into independents, non-voters, and working-class people of color, not only will it be difficult for Warren to win the nomination, it’ll be difficult for her to build a governing coalition. She needs a base that can build transformative change, and so far she doesn’t have it.
I think she knows about this issue, and I think she’s working on it. Right now, she’s reaching for small donors, and she’s working on cutting into the Sanders base. That’s a start. But she’ll need to go well beyond this.
Postscript (March 2020)
I’ll note that after Warren dropped out of the race, I wrote a post on how her campaign lost. You can read that post here.
