Neoliberalism’s Persistence and the Struggle for What Comes After

Introduction

For a while, in the Global North, there has been a general feeling that the normal rules do not apply anymore in the political realm. There seems to have been a breach in continuity, an upset in the regular scheme of things, an interruption. With the rise of populism, the influence of social media and the displacement of truth, a growing political polarisation and combative atmosphere have all added to the rising sense of threat and insecurity. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated and intensified this sense, bringing into sharp relief many of the neoliberal conditions which caused the interruption. Now, it seems increasingly apparent to many, although not to those who dominate the economic and political fields, that ‘neoliberalism has failed to deliver widespread prosperity and economic growth’ (Scott, 2024: 14). Indeed, there appears to be a blind denial among those who champion it to the suffering it has caused. As those in the US and in many countries around the world digest their recent electoral battles, it seems right, therefore, to continue to interrogate the nature of the breach, try to understand it, and ask what needs to happen in order for something new and hopeful to come next.

An interregnum is generally understood as a suspension of the usual ruling power or a period in between powers, rulers or governments. For Antonio Gramsci, the term interregnum denotes the interval between hegemonic blocs, coalitions of disparate social forces that ruling classes assemble and assert their leadership through. A hegemonic bloc is the organisational counterpart to the process of hegemony. This process is described by Fraser (2019) as ‘the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural by installing the presuppositions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole’ (p. 9). In her most recent book, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (Fraser, 2019), she takes the title from a quote by Gramsci (1971) in which he describes the interstice between hegemonic blocs: ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (p. 276). Fraser (2019) lists these symptoms, ones we have become quite familiar with, as including declining living standards, deficits of care, and increasing ‘intolerable stresses on community life’ (p. 29).

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, published in the same year, also examines what might have emerged from the recent conjuncture exemplified by the rise of Trump and the populist political right. She analyses the destructive politics of the first Trump administration by closely examining neoliberalism as a school of thought and tracing elements of it back to its conceptual beginnings. Ruins can be seen almost as the physical representation of an interregnum. They are what remains after one thing has fallen apart or has been destroyed, and before something else is built: in this case, the fragmented ideological rubble and ‘affective remains’ that neoliberalism has left in its wake (Brown, 2019: 188). This is the broken body politic, wounded by deindustrialisation, neoliberal reason and globalisation, with the remains of the nation, family, property, and traditions that reproduce racial and gender privilege. These remains have been reactivated by the right, like a Frankenstein’s monster, with a sense of nihilism borne out of the loss of potency caused by that very wounding.

The question of whether neoliberalism is in fact dying or being reanimated or reconfigured is one that has been debated for a number of years, especially since the financial crash of 2008 and more recently with the rise of populist parties and leaders. Indeed, neoliberalism’s death has been prematurely announced on multiple occasions (Dardot and Laval, 2013). In trying to ascertain the state of neoliberalism post-2008, scholars have forwarded many different possibilities, in varying states of reanimation, including post-neoliberalism, undead or ‘zombie neoliberalism’, or ‘mutant neoliberalism’ (Callison and Manfredi, 2020; Davies and Gane, 2021; Peck and Theodore, 2019; Springer, 2014). Many have also asked if what we are experiencing now is still neoliberalism at all (Peck, 2010).

Although not predominant in their recent works, both Fraser and Brown employ something of a feminist perspective, adding a necessarily important but sometimes overlooked dimension to these debates. Nancy Fraser’s work has been primarily concerned with questions of justice, particularly focusing on the interrelations between what she terms distributive justice and the justice of recognition. She argues that while social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including second-wave feminism, quite rightly campaigned for recognition as the basis for justice and equality, Fraser suggests that, as a consequence, there has been a neglect of questions around the distribution of resources. This has resulted in a growing focus on identity politics, which has in turn allowed certain strands of thought rooted in these social movements to be aligned with neoliberal capital.

Wendy Brown, on the other hand, has, over a number of years, developed a theoretical framework which combines Marx’s critique of capitalism with Foucault’s work on governmentality and neoliberalism. She has published widely on contemporary political issues, including on discourse, tolerance, and sovereignty. Her work is also inflected with a feminist perspective, coming to the fore in her writing on how a sense of woundedness has been used to construct identity formations, which she initially wrote of in relation to certain representations of second-wave feminism (Brown, 1995). For In the Ruins (2019), Brown draws on this earlier work as well as Undoing the Demos (2015), in which she engages with Foucault’s (2004) ideas from his lecture series on the birth of biopolitics, to examine how neoliberalism has emptied out the democratic state.

The Old Is Dying

Characterising the recent interruption, Fraser states: ‘It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense that has underpinned political domination for the last several decades’ (Fraser, 2019: 8). While her description of the morbid symptomology arising from the stalemate evoked by Gramsci is convincing, her characterisation of the prevailing power bloc and how it came together is somewhat problematic. Fraser argues that the prevailing hegemonic bloc has, over the last few decades, actually been comprised of an uneasy partnership between neoliberal global finance and progressive ideas of recognition from particular elements of the feminist, LGBTQ+ and Black communities. The two have formed what she terms ‘progressive neoliberalism’. The basis of this uneasy partnership is, Fraser (2019) argues, an elective affinity between the ‘glass ceiling view of “emancipation”’ and a free market ethos’ (p. 35). While Fraser’s book is framed in relation to the rise of Trump, it is as much a critique of the centre left, in particular of presidents Clinton and Obama (and New Labour). Moreover, she is particularly critical of Hilary Clinton, who exemplified a feminist agenda stripped of its radicality and too easily aligned with free market culture.

Fraser’s view of feminism’s complicity with neoliberalism is well documented. Her characterisation of its ‘elective affinity’ with neoliberalism is a phrase borrowed from Weber in relation to the relationship between Protestantism and 19th-century capitalism. It denotes the process by which two cultural forms enter into a relationship of reciprocal attraction, influence and mutual reinforcement (Löwy, 2004). In her previous work, Fraser (2013) has traced this back to second-wave feminism’s ‘critique of the family wage’ which, she suggests, ‘now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and moral point’ (p. 220). The emphasis on attraction is interesting here. Fraser has used romantic and even sexualised metaphors to describe this collusion, with feminism found to be ‘in bed with or in some other “dangerous liaison” with neoliberal capitalism’ (Fraser, 2009: 114; Funk, 2013: 184).

While in The Old Is Dying, Fraser does not go that far, she does argue that sections of progressive social movements and left-wing political parties have contributed charisma through the politics of recognition, diversity and empowerment, to a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ which has charged neoliberal economic activity with excitement and an aura of emancipation. This contributed to a repackaging of the neoliberal project for a broader appeal. Fraser echoes Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2007) work here on how the new spirit of capitalism has incorporated aspects of critique. They argue that capitalism remakes itself by recuperating strands of critique directed against it. They rely, as Fraser does, on a split between a social, economic or redistributive critique, and a cultural critique, connected for Fraser with recognition and identity politics. For both parties, the cultural critique has been more readily incorporated than the social and economic one and therefore is somewhat to blame. However, this falls into a trap of delineating between good and bad critique, with blame laid at the door of critique itself. As Funk (2013) argues, legitimation and co-optation are two different things. There is a difference between feminism legitimising or providing part of the ‘spirit’ of neoliberalism and neoliberal exploitation of the partial realisation of feminist demands. Neoliberalism has exploited, distorted and co-opted feminist arguments, as capitalism has long done with any progressive movements it is unable to defeat. In addition, Fraser arguably makes too strong a contrast between second-wave feminism and the contemporary feminist movement, with the former as radically challenging capitalism and the latter as only being superficially egalitarian and emancipatory, being content with equality within the neoliberal framework. Not only that, but the 1990s, the decade in which neoliberalism was consolidated, did not, as Fraser’s argument implies, foster and cultivate feminism, but included a significant backlash against it (Faludi, 1993; Funk, 2013).

According to Fraser, both the Democrats and New Labour broke their allegiances with the remnants of the New Deal coalition in the US and the corresponding post-war Keynesian social settlement in the UK respectively. However, the reasons given for the left-leaning parties pursuing this action are not clear. There is no mention of the ‘post-political’ consensus after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the imperative not to appear as the anachronistic left of the past, resulting in ‘the Third Way’ (Davies, 2016: 128). The political ‘golden age’ for neoliberalism, in which market-based metrics and standards of competition were extended into the social realm could only take place once socialism, and all other political hopes and choices, had been thoroughly discredited (Davies, 2016: 127). Once this had occurred and neoliberalism’s hegemony established post-1989, new areas outside of the market could be colonised, particularly the arenas of human value and subjectivity. The fact that this phase, in the 1990s, was overseen by centre-left parties potentially signifies that it was more of a political project to reform the social realm and remake subjectivity in an entrepreneurial direction than to produce constraints on capital. Fraser does not share this view on the encroachment on subjectivity, as it relies too heavily on a Foucauldian perspective. Rather, she focuses on how critiques based around recognition and diversity have been subsumed into a narrative of meritocracy, which does not see unequal access to resources as significant.

For Fraser, the insurrectionary surge we have seen recently, is a directly anti-neoliberal one, angry at the damage wrought by neoliberal economic policies. Anti-neoliberal agendas, for example around increasing inequality, have been excluded from the public sphere, particularly from a leftist perspective, leaving sectors of the electorate without a natural political home. For some time, Fraser argues, there has been a hegemonic gap that needs filling – an empty unoccupied zone in which ‘anti-neoliberal pro-working family politics’ might have taken root before Obama got into power (Fraser, 2019: 19). In contrast, it is worth highlighting Trump’s insurrectionary anti-neoliberal stance. As Slobodian (2021), points out, many of Trump’s advisors channelled disgruntled elites from, for example, the steel industry, to fuel a backlash against neoliberalism ‘from above as well as from below’ (Slobodian, 2021: 51). In addition, Cooper (2017), who has examined the role of the family in the alliance between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism in US politics, argues that Fraser’s work actually betrays a social democratic nostalgia for the family wage.

The family wage, or male breadwinner wage, was a central component of the Fordist compact which, Cooper argues, was structured around the family and the gendered division of labour it entailed (Cooper and Mabie, 2018). She argues that the history of working-class politics reveals a longstanding commitment to the family wage, and that the desire to return to class as a category often goes along with a tendency to assume that women and minorities are somehow responsible for the destruction of the stability it afforded. Having identified the destruction of the Fordist family wage, Cooper argues that Fraser’s analysis therefore leads to the conclusion that resistance demands its restoration in some shape or form. While Fraser’s work does valorise the security afforded by Fordism, it has also attempted to go beyond the family wage. If there is nostalgia for anything, it is more for the way that Fordist labour was organised, through mass trade unions and membership organisations that made specific kinds of resistance to capitalism possible. This is what Fraser concentrates on in The Old Is Dying.

Fraser calls for a new progressive populist bloc combining egalitarian redistribution with an inclusive politics of recognition. Since the financial crash, the hegemonic status of this particular bloc has been shaken and, she says, ‘the populist cat is out of the bag and won’t quietly slink away’ (Fraser, 2019: 28). There is now, Fraser argues, an opportunity to forge a new hegemonic bloc, a progressive populist configuration that could link redistributive political economy with progressive ideas of recognition. She calls both for new alliances and new ‘separations’ to be forged: in particular separating less privileged women, immigrants and people of colour from ‘lean-in’ feminists, meritocratic anti-racists, mainstream LGBTQ+ activists, corporate diversity and green capitalism. In the process, a united more class-based movement could be created, which would link the harms suffered by immigrants, women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ to those experienced by the working class strata now drawn to right-wing populism.

While these fault lines within progressive social movements and identity politics are visible, the process by which they would recompose around a more class-based unity is more difficult to see. Fraser concedes that the present is currently so divided by polarising rhetoric that it will be very challenging. For Fraser, neither reactionary neoliberalism nor a return to progressive neoliberalism is desirable, and she believes that if we stay in the same contested place, the morbid symptomology will only continue and perhaps become something worse. To reinstate progressive neoliberalism would be to exacerbate the very conditions that created Trump and perhaps even prepare the ground for something far more monstrous. However, what this also points to is a need to fully investigate the relationship between neoliberalism and identity politics. An examination of how different subject positions are co-opted, which desires, latent interests or demands might be partially realised and exploited, thereby limiting people’s horizons for change, could be an important avenue for understanding how new alliances and coalitions might be formed.

In the Ruins

The ground from which the monstrous can be reanimated is, in some senses, where Brown’s book takes over, although using a different theoretical framework, different metaphors and coming to somewhat different conclusions. Brown argues that the left’s narratives, in trying to make sense of the rise of the right since the political earthquake of November 2016, have been incomplete. She includes her own work in this charge, and, arguably, Fraser’s too. Brown suggests that she has missed an important aspect of neoliberal theory; that is, that alongside privatisation, monetisation and the predominance of the free market, there is a moralistic aspect to neoliberalism that is now becoming more visible, especially in the United States, where it has been there in some form from the beginning. Previously she has argued, following Foucault, that neoliberalism is something of an amoral project, and that it has been down to neoconservative elements to step in and assert a right-wing moralism in order to stabilise the inherently unstable and anarchic nature of neoliberalism – although she attempts to distinguish the origins of these strands of thought in a way that Harvey does not (Brown, 2006; Harvey, 2005: 81–5).

However, as Whyte (2019) has recently argued, ‘these accounts of the amoral economism of neoliberalism miss a particularly distinctive form of morality that was central to its rise’ (p. 11). While following Brown’s work, Whyte is deeply critical of her characterisation of neoliberalism as amoral. In Morals of the Market (Whyte, 2019), Whyte shows how neoliberal thinkers have mobilised the discourse of human rights to their own ends, particularly in defence of wealth and power. Property rights provide, in this model, a foundation for other human rights. Covering similar territory to Brown’s work in In the Ruins, Whyte highlights Friedrich Hayek’s evolutionary account of morality as the ‘survival of the successful’, with the commercial market as a space of mutually beneficial voluntary relations, in contrast to the violence, coercion, and despotism of government (2019: 22). Whyte also argues, however, in contrast with Brown’s earlier work, that, rather than being an external supplement, social conservatism, including explicit appeals to family values and Christianity, was foundational to neoliberalism in the mid-20th century. Cooper (2017) too sets out how family values, through a revival of earlier traditions of the private family, have become a shared site of morality for both neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. She argues that both strands of thought, in their different ways, combine a future-oriented perspective with a traditionalist one, to realign the family as a primary source of security and a substitute for the welfare state.

In the Ruins argues that a moral aspect of neoliberalism is indeed prevalent in its founding texts but is now resurfacing in a more monstrous form. In particular, she argues that prevailing leftist narratives have not only been unable to explain, but also have been seriously disarmed by the way traditional moral values (such as patriotism, free speech and fairness) have been mobilised. This weaponising of traditional moral values, pitted against social justice, has been especially disquieting when coupled with an increasing undermining of faith in truth and facticity.

Brown carefully examines writings by Hayek, Milton Friedman and the German ‘Ordo-liberals’ to find a deeply anti-democratic project based on the coupling of the free market with traditional morals. This is not in itself wholly new, as Brown and others have previously detailed the ways that neoliberalism has worked to undermine democracy (Brown, 2006, 2017; Dardot and Laval, 2013; Harvey, 2005). However, the results are startling, as she shows how these thinkers have demonised the social and the very idea of social justice. The result has been the discrediting of the public good by neoliberal reason with a thrust towards dismantling society itself. She argues that this attack on the social is key to generating an antidemocratic culture from below while building and legitimating antidemocratic forms of state power from above. Ideas of popular sovereignty and public policy have been discredited, while the neoliberal project of expanding the reach of traditional morality beyond the sphere of family and private worship into public and commercial life has operated through the judiciary, and the US Supreme Court in particular.

Brown argues, in agreement with Whyte, that for Hayek, both markets and traditional morals spontaneously generate the conduct needed to create and sustain order. Markets and morality have similar ontological logics, emerging through a kind of social evolution and precisely not being the product of design or policy which is then imposed on a population. Rather, they establish rules of conduct without relying on state coercion or punishment. Moral traditions stemming from the Judeo-Christian tradition generate an inherited system of value which is followed without anything having to be imposed from above. In this model, inequality is essential to development. Egalitarian policies are viewed as conformist, coercive and censorious, the radical opposites of markets and moral traditions.

Following this logic, public policy per se is therefore viewed as potentially leading to a totalitarianism which controls people’s lives. Hayek says that, ‘so long as the belief in “social justice” governs political action, this process must progressively approach nearer and nearer to a totalitarian system’ (Brown, 2019: 32). In response, Brown comments that:

If there is no such thing as society, but only individuals and families oriented by markets and morals, then there is no such thing as social power generating hierarchies, exclusion, and violence, let alone subjectivity of the sites of class, gender, or race. (Brown, 2019: 40)

However, Brown also argues that the most recent political configuration of neoliberalism is quite different from what the founding fathers of neoliberalism envisaged. Whilst their thought included complex and internally diverse formulations of the political from the start, she argues that they would have nevertheless deplored the manipulation of public policy by major industries and hated the politicisation and polarising political mobilisations which have happened with the rise of populism. In fact, Brown argues that ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ departs as radically from neoliberal ideals as repressive state communist regimes departed from those of Marx (Brown, 2019: 14–16).

Many scholars have previously argued that neoliberalism has always been a ‘diffuse and contested political ideology’ rather than any kind of ‘succinct, clearly defined political philosophy’ (Mirowski, 2009: 420; Plehwe, 2009: 1). It may be that neoliberalism has always emerged in a changing tension with laissez-faire liberalism or libertarianism and conservatism. Davies and Gane (2021), for example, suggest that Hayek in particular argued for a triangle between liberalism, socialism and conservatism in relation to which neoliberalism shifts, always against socialism but at different times sharing some aspects with libertarianism and conservatism according to the specific circumstances. Brown’s point here, though, is that the current monstrous reconfiguration has partly been created by the effects of neoliberalism itself and amplifies certain internal tensions and contradictions. As well as the rise of neoliberal authoritarian political formations being animated by the anger of the economically abandoned (insecure, marginal, precarious), Brown argues that we also need to appreciate the three decades of neoliberal assaults on democracy, equality and society that have fed into white working-class anger and given voice to it.

The last chapter of In the Ruins revolves around the construction and animation of this Frankenstein’s monster. Brown sees the nihilism which is infecting public life as a side effect of the neoliberal monetisation of everything – thus submitting every aspect of human existence to the judgement of future value. The result is that values themselves have become devalued. Selling one’s soul has become the norm. And while traditional morals are brandished, intense marketisation has also shown them to be superficial, constructed and without inherent meaning. The resulting nihilism shows itself in non-liberatory releases of instinctual energy, which may look like freedom but actually shore up the status quo. This explains sectors of the particularly masculine contemporary alt right which, while claiming to be bold and dissident, are in fact deeply regressive.

Theoretical Tensions

Brown’s combination of post-Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives is where she really diverges from Fraser’s account. Fraser’s analysis of neoliberalism stays within a neo-Marxist approach, conceiving of it as primarily an economic policy, while looking to empower labour power through a revived intersectional working-class identity. In particular, Fraser finds Foucault’s account of the capillary character of modern power problematic. Fraser, like others critical of his work, has argued that Foucault’s claim that forms of subjectivity are constituted by relations of power as effects leaves no room for resistance and that Foucault fails to provide resources needed to critique structures of domination (Fraser, 1989; Kreps, 2016; Schulzke, 2016).

For Brown, however, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian approaches should not be treated as opposites but rather as highlighting different dimensions of the neoliberal transformations taking place. In particular, neo-Marxist approaches focus on institutions, policies and economic relations, while neglecting the effects of neoliberalism as a form of governing political reason and subject production. On the other hand, a Foucauldian approach focuses on the principles orienting state, society, and subjects and neoliberalism’s shifting use of value and values, but pays too little attention to new powers of global capital that neoliberalism has been producing. Brown uses Marx as an additional critique which precisely foregrounds structures of domination (Burgum et al., 2017). Indeed, In Undoing the Demos, Brown (2015) argues for the need to ‘weld’ aspects of Marx’s theory of capital to Foucault’s work on neoliberal reason and governmentality, although she does not explain how this welding is to be achieved (p. 77). In the Ruins, does not further elaborate on this but rather sets the framework for the book by drawing on both thinkers in parallel to redress their ‘mutual neglect of the moral side of the neoliberal project’ (Brown, 2019: 20).

Fraser is not the first theorist to discuss neoliberalism in relation to the construction of Gramscian common sense. Harvey (2005) has also used Gramsci to describe the conceptual apparatus through which ways of thought become dominant by appealing to intuitions, instincts, values and desires. Harvey has been heavily criticised for his choice of theoretical framework, which as a Marxist one, potentially places neoliberalism squarely in the category of the economic, and the same criticism can be levelled at Fraser. However, there is currently a resurgence of interest in Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and common sense, particularly in relation to the role of Big Tech, and in reassessing social movements such as Occupy (Crehan, 2016; Kioupolous, 2019; Williams and Gilbert, 2022). Fraser’s proposal for a progressive populism based on a post-Gramscian hegemonic framework is also not new, echoing that of political theorists Mouffe and Laclau (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018). Indeed, Mouffe and Laclau’s work has provided the basis for a number of political movements, particularly in Latin America and southern Europe, which have encountered differing degrees of success.

As a Marxist theorist, Gramsci is certainly concerned with the nature of social and political domination. However, his concept of hegemony is more complex and contingent than being based simply on dominance or purely operating on an economic level (Crehan, 2016). It also operates on the levels of culture, discourse, subjectivity and public opinion. Hegemony doesn’t just comprise a monolithic and seamless ideology, but is, rather, the power to establish the ‘common sense’ or ‘doxa’ of a society: the reservoir of self-evident descriptions of social reality that normally go without saying (Fraser, 1990: 85). And Brown, it seems, to some extent, agrees. Although she doesn’t cite Gramsci directly, in Undoing the Demos, she states that ‘neoliberalism governs as sophisticated common sense’, and then emphasises Foucault’s focus on ‘theorising discourse as norms and normalisation’ (Brown, 2019: 35, 117). Both Gramsci and Foucault can be said to have theorised the ‘relationships between disciplinary power, hierarchy, processes of rule and the constitution of subjects’ (Gill, 2016: xiv). Gramsci perhaps even ‘tentatively prefigured some things that Foucault would later flesh out’ (Kreps, 2016: 3). In his essay on Americanism and Fordism, for example, Gramsci charts the mechanisms by which both desire and disciplinary techniques work on the body and the soul of the Fordist worker (Gramsci, 1971: 277–320). Gramsci, therefore, potentially offers a more nuanced perspective than a classical Marxist one, although still incomplete.

Contemporary Conjunctures

Both Fraser and Brown offer analyses of contemporary conditions: how we got there and – to some extent – suggestions for the future, although neither are as concrete as they might be. For Fraser, this is reliant on the making and reconfiguring of new alliances on the level of social movements, whereas hope for Brown lies in mapping and narrating the places where neoliberalism accidentally intersects with, or instigates, other forces that inadvertently work against it. These are the ‘conjunctures’ or ‘genealogical emergences’ which are occluded by particular narratives of progress, dialectics or determinism (Brown, 2019: 183). For Brown, using Foucault helps to explore precisely how we can resist the particular governing order, by understanding the subject that modes of governance produce, and consequently developing alternative principles, practices, and, ultimately, different kinds of subjects. This, she admits, is a complex but necessary task.

Both Fraser and Brown’s work points to the importance of exploring further how subjects, with all their different, complex and conflicting sets of interests, values and identities, have been enrolled in the neoliberal project and how they might be reconfigured otherwise, both individually and collectively. Feminist-inflected perspectives, like those of Fraser and Brown, and others such as Cooper and Gibson-Graham, provide a vital resource for this kind of work (Cooper, 2017; Gibson-Graham, 2006). Perspectives from outside the transatlantic impasse might also help to explore what other, less monstrous creatures might be born from the interregnum that the current political landscape presents (Reiter, 2018). What cannot be underestimated is the complexity of this landscape, especially with the increasing influence of the digital sphere on behaviour, power and wealth accumulation, including the amplification of conspiracy and misinformation in whipping up indignation, resentment and hatred (Klein, 2024; Varoufakis, 2024).

Nevertheless, while rapidly receding into the historical past, the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that paradigm shifts can take place, with a more dramatic overturning of neoliberal orthodoxies on a policy level than any other financial or political crisis in the last 20 years. It also highlighted our profound interdependence, which Brown suggests is almost unbearable and difficult to comprehend, especially for some particular identity formations, such as the kind of wounded white masculinity that has felt particularly under threat (Brown, 2020). In the return to business as usual though, things, generally speaking, haven’t been functioning very well. While as a doxa, neoliberalism still appears strong. It remains seemingly impervious to self-reflection, with many carrying on in the face of evidence against its effectiveness at producing a satisfactory society through trickle-down or the invisible hand (Scott, 2024). What is clear is that we suffer multiple crises in the face of a lack of coherent counter-narratives and alternative economic thinking, around which new alliances might coalesce and new subjectivities built. In the meantime, the moral authority of neoliberalism both wanes and continues to persist. While this remains the case, so too will the morbid symptomology.