Sublime

we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have lately supported it—casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism.

The progressive-neoliberal bloc combined an expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition.

A key realization for me, which came in a flash, was the idea that neoliberalism is not a total worldview. Many people believe it is, but in fact it is a political-economic project that can articulate with several different and even competing projects of recognition—including progressive ones.

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

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.

These ideals were interpreted in a specific, limited way that was fully compatible with the Goldman Sachsification of the US economy: Protecting the environment meant carbon trading. Promoting home ownership meant bundling subprime loans together and reselling them as mortgage-backed securities. Equality meant meritocracy.

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

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

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