The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond

If the left hopes to revive the idea of the working class as the leading force within a new counterhegemonic bloc, we will have to envision that class in a new way—intersectionally, if you will—as not restricted to the white, straight, male, majority-ethnicity, manufacturing and mining workers, but as encompassing all of these other occupations—pai

Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working-class and globalized.

A project of unionizing service workers, fast-food workers, domestic workers, agricultural workers, public-sector workers, and more—defending the unions that do exist and organizing the unorganized—that’s a potential game-changer.

Of course, many of the progressives weren’t themselves interested in or focused on the economic stuff. But there was an elective affinity between their meritocratic, crack-the-glass-ceiling view of “emancipation” and the free-market ethos.

The underlying object of our general crisis, the thing that harbors its multiple instabilities, is the present form of capitalism— globalizing, neoliberal, financialized. Like every form of capitalism, this one is no mere economic system but something larger: an institutionalized social order.

While claiming to foster small business and manufacturing, reactionary neoliberalism’s true economic project centered on bolstering finance, military production, and extractive energy, all to the principal benefit of the global 1 percent. What was supposed to render that palatable for the base it sought to assemble was an exclusionary vision of a j

The phenomena just invoked show the depth at which racism is anchored in contemporary capitalist society—and the incapacity of progressive-neoliberal moralizing to address it.

But it is counterproductive to address them through moralizing condescension, in the mode of progressive neoliberalism. That approach assumes a shallow and inadequate view of these injustices, grossly exaggerating the extent to which the trouble is inside people’s heads and missing the depth of the structural-institutional forces that undergird the

Determined to unshackle market forces from the heavy hand of the state and the millstone of “tax and spend,” the classes that led this bloc aimed to liberalize and globalize the capitalist economy. What that meant, in reality, was financialization: dismantling barriers to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; deregulating banking and