Michael A. McCarthy

Economic Democracy Activist, 2021-2023 Berggruen Fellow

Michael A. McCarthy is an economic democracy activist and Associate Professor of Sociology at Marquette University. He holds a PhD and MA from New York University and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Much of his work is on power and finance. He is the author of the award-winning book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal (Cornell University Press, 2017), which explains the marketization of old-age income in the US. He is co-editor of the volume Rethinking Class and Social Difference(Emerald, 2020) through the Political Power and Social Theory book series and has written for several peer-reviewed journals, including Annual Review of SociologyCritical Historical StudiesLabor Studies JournalMobilizationPolitics & Society and Socio-Economic Review. He is also a regular contributor to Jacobin Magazine and has advanced public debates about economic democracy in venues such as The Washington PostBoston ReviewRenewal, and Tribune Magazine. He is currently undertaking several projects about economic justice, including a co-authored book on the social theory of Erik Olin Wright. As a Berggruen Fellow at USC, he will complete a manuscript on democratizing finance, tentatively titled The Master’s Tools: Using Finance Against Capitalism, which is under contract with Verso Books.

By Michael A. McCarthy

Berggruen Fellows Aim to Reinvent Governance, Imagine Radically Different Futures for Global Systems and Institutions

A World Where Finance Is Democratic

The Problem of Class Abstraction: Identity, Collective Action and Socialism