Abstract
Michael McCarthy’s The Master’s Tools is an ambitious and provocative contribution to the growing literature on finance capitalism and democratic decline. Rooted in a Marxist tradition and oriented toward democratic innovation, the book advances a distinctive account of how finance became hegemonic and how it might be rebuilt to better serve our collective purposes.
The book is organized into three parts: Structure, Conjuncture, and Rupture. Part I introduces the theoretical scaffolding. McCarthy argues for the value of his focus on the conjuncture—the present historical situation—to complement analyses at the more abstract levels of social formations and modes of production. It is in this “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” that we see the historically contingent features of the social system—and in particular, the specific fractions of capital, their sources of power, and the associated tensions—and can begin to reason strategically about how to change that system.
Part II provides that conjunctural analysis, with a focus on the United States and the United Kingdom as the most powerful centers of finance. McCarthy traces the rise of finance not as an accidental by-product of neoliberalism but as a politically constructed growth regime—a macroeconomic configuration in which finance is structurally central to accumulation, governance, and social reproduction. As befits conjunctural analysis, he sees the roots of this shift in the conjunction of several factors: stagnation of profits in productive sectors in the 1970s; deregulation and financial innovation in the 1980s and 1990s; the rise of institutional investors such as pension funds, endowments, and mutual funds, which pooled and managed vast amounts of capital; the privatization of public services; and increasing household dependence on debt and markets for education, health care, and retirement. McCarthy shows how policy decisions embedded finance deeper into the state and the household, creating widespread dependency on financial markets, not only among elites but across the middle and working classes. The section also clarifies that finance is not simply a parasitic elite, but an institutional structure deeply embedded in the reproduction of capitalist society.
McCarthy argues that finance’s political leverage stems from the mobility, liquidity, and scale of the assets it manages, especially under asset manager capitalism (notably, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street). Here, finance dominates politics through three levers: these firms’ engagement by direct participation in policymaking; their prominence, or centrality, in the economy; and their entanglement and deep integration with state and corporate infrastructures (building on Michael Mann’s concept of infrastructural embeddedness). Rather than focusing on lobbying or corruption, McCarthy shows how finance structurally reproduces oligarchy through the governance of capital itself.
This oligarchic trend has progressively undermined the legitimacy of financial institutions, and as a result, calls to democratize it have proliferated. McCarthy effectively skewers the idea that finance is democratized simply by giving more people the opportunity to invest: This would merely subordinate more of us to the gyrations of the financial casino. And his discussion of crypto finance reveals it to be a “morbid symptom” (p. 116) of the crisis rather than any way out, notwithstanding the enthusiasm of some progressives for Distributed Autonomous Organizations.
In Part III, McCarthy turns to strategy and builds on the idea of "non-reformist reforms" articulated by André Gorz (Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, 1964). Like Gorz, McCarthy looks for measures that alter power relations and expand democratic capacities without presuming the immediate abolition of capitalism. He reviews a range of reform projects rooted in distinct class logics: normative projects seek to change the norms and “moral calculus” of finance, as in the ESG movement; regulatory projects that aim to rein in finance by legal mandates; “supplemental” projects, in which public options provide an alternative and some competition for private finance; and “control” projects, which aim to democratize capital allocation itself. Only the last, he argues, can truly subvert finance's structural power.
The centerpiece of his proposal is the development of "minipublics" as a mechanism of “plebeian republican” democratic control. These minipublics are randomly selected deliberative bodies that would be empowered to govern public institutions. McCarthy rehearses the arguments for random selection by lot (aka sortition) over direct democracy (not scalable) and over-representation (risks the formation of a new elite), and envisions such bodies overseeing public banks, investment authorities, central banking, and the country’s overall development strategy. Participants are selected by lot to reflect the diversity of the population and serve limited, non-renewable terms, minimizing the risk of capture or careerism. A range of such bodies under a People’s Assembly (also selected by lot) could deliberate under structured, facilitated conditions, and would be required to make their reasoning and recommendations public, enabling horizontal accountability through civil society and institutional checks. Though some may worry about the lack of traditional forms of recall or electoral sanction, McCarthy argues that legitimacy in these institutions would come from their “horizontal” accountability to other bodies.
The author tries to overcome the agonist objection posed by authors such as Chantal Mouffe (Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, 2013) to the deliberative function of these minipublics. McCarthy does not assume that consensus is always possible; rather, he sees deliberation as a mechanism for pluralistic governance under conditions of irreducible disagreement. And he frames minipublics as tools of rupture, not consensus, able to challenge financial hegemony. Exactly how that challenge will escalate into qualitative societal change is not addressed, and McCarthy embraces that uncertainty: The future is open.
McCarthy's contribution is notable for its synthesis of critique and institutional imagination. Whereas Greta Krippner (Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance, 2012) offers structural accounts of financialization as a state response to crisis, and Wolfgang Streeck (Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, 2014) emphasizes capitalism's fiscal exhaustion and institutional decline, McCarthy provides a strategic road map for contestation. While Daniela Gabor (2021) critiques the "Wall Street Consensus" and green de-risking, McCarthy goes further in envisioning democratic control over investment itself. Unlike Cedric Durand (Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future, 2017), who highlights the speculative and fictitious character of finance, McCarthy insists on the potential to repurpose financial tools for democratic ends.
This strategic optimism rests on several key arguments. First, finance's structural power is grounded in its role as coordinator of capital flows—a function that can, in theory, be socialized. Second, institutional experimentation—particularly via sortition and deliberation—can provide viable mechanisms for popular control over economic life. And third, the contradictions of finance capitalism, particularly its legitimacy crisis and ecological destructiveness, open real possibilities for transformation.
In sum, McCarthy offers a bold and original intervention that deserves wide attention. His synthesis of conjunctural analysis, class politics, and institutional design marks a major step forward in thinking about how finance might be democratized rather than merely restrained. The writing is clear and straightforward: Technical issues are nicely clarified for non-specialists. For scholars in industrial and labor relations and other social scientists, as well as for activists seeking a path beyond neoliberalism, The Master’s Tools provides both a compelling diagnosis and an invitation to rethink the possible.