The Urban Fiscal Crisis as Neoliberal Shock Therapy: A Cartalist Fiscal-Sociological Approach

An article of mine has been posted by The Hampton Institute, A Working-Class Think Tank. From the intro:

My attempt is to suggest that, although laudatory, the neo-Marxist contributions to fiscal sociology put forward by James O'Connor's (2002 [1973]) The Fiscal Crisis of the State and Erik Olin Wright's (1977) Class, Crisis, and the State ultimately fail to accurately explicate the contradictions concerning the logic of capital during times of urban economic duress. I incorporate a dialectically materialist framework that manifests the interconnections between urban governance, capital accumulation and the structure of the state, with an emphasis on what I call a Cartalist sociological approach to money as an institution of social power to make my argument. The empirical backdrop is the United States, and the aim is to reassess the theoretical significance of the so-called 'fiscal crisis of the state' and its effect on the American urban built environment, in order to reconsider the broad historical contingencies that lead to the transformation from the so-called Keynesian managerial metropolis to the 'neoliberal city' (Harvey, 2009). I emphasize that the transformation was more the result of a deliberate policy by the federal government, so as to set in motion a set of institutional rigid social, political, and economic constraints (structural reforms is the euphemism) to enhance the process of rent-seeking, empirically manifested by the process of austerity & gentrification. 

Read rest here; a preliminary analysis was posted on NK here