Critique of Progressive Neoliberalism
Identity, empowerment, narrativity, and other forms of faux populist neoliberal politics
In recent years, economic leftism emerged as a real threat to neoliberal hegemony. But almost as soon as it began, this leftist insurgency has failed. Why has this happened? Left populism was unable to fully distinguish itself from progressive neoliberalism, and so couldn’t achieve the escape velocity needed to establish a new common sense, imagine a new horizon, and open up a coherent collective vision. Hegemony is about the ruling class making its domination appear natural, and one way to do that is to obscure and even demonize class analysis. If class is not fully recognized and conceptualized as a determining category, then the exploitative material conditions that the mass of people experience every day feel natural and inevitable, and nothing ever changes, which is what capital wants.
As progressive neoliberalism entangled and embedded itself within the ascending economic populist wave, left popular politics and discourse failed to establish a coherent, collectivizing class critique, which alone would have the mass appeal to win and establish a new common sense. Common sense comes from the Latin sensus communis—there is a communistic aspect to common sense itself. Without capitalist hegemony’s seemingly endless ability to adapt, this common sense would assert itself, as it has been trying to in recent years. So progressive neoliberalism, as capitalist hegemony’s last gasp, imposes an identity framing to supplement, or even replace, the frame of class, the frame which is common to all. Hegemony is about producing an artificial common sense to keep an authentic common sense from realizing itself.
Like so many neoliberal tendencies, identity politics is utopian—it imagines that a politics that privileges the innermost essence of all individuals separately would somehow make for a powerful political collectivity. It hasn’t worked. Utopianism runs through all neoliberal tendencies, from the basic, absurd economic idea that cutting taxes for corporations and the rich will somehow benefit the mass of people, to the idea that simply having diverse corporate executives will create a more ethical kind of capitalism.
Utopia comes from the Greek word ou-topos, which literally means non-place, or nowhere. A utopian world is one that does not, and cannot, exist. This utopianism has led progressive neoliberalism to mistake connectivity with collectivity—identity politics, personal narratives, and the like, are easily shareable. We can connect and share our stories, but they are just our own individual stories, without any larger structural or material analysis. The connections never cohere or conglomerate into a collectivity. In place of conglomeration is agglomeration, connections that do not cohere, or form a collective, and so cannot build real power. A conglomeration can form a collective, is more than a random heap of parts, and can use its coherence and cohesiveness to build power. A conglomeration is a cohesive group, while an agglomeration is a heap, a jumble of discrete parts that have no common unifier, but just happen to occupy the same space. Agglomerated entities move separately through a space, while conglomerated entities together can constitute a place. This is how neoliberal power wants us.
So many stories are told, but they do not collect, and they do not cohere. Increased connection and exchange of stories does not necessarily produce a popular left, and it can even undermine it. Progressive neoliberalism has turned the left into a series of monologues, Telling Your Story (TYS), rather than a dialogue. This new left is a loose connection of monologuing storytellers rather than a popular collective in dialogue. The only role for the Other here is to Do The Work (DTW) of compliantly being imposed upon by the storyteller. TYS and DTW is an artificial dialogue that progressive neoliberalism uses to create the illusion of understanding, collectivity and progress, but it creates none of those things. Authentic dialogue is the only way to build a left that can be popular, find a new common sense, and win.
But the discourse of progressive neoliberalism is not about authentic dialogue, it is about creating the conditions for endless monologues, and so has no chance to win. It’s about creating safe spaces for monologuing stories about individual identity and narrative. These spaces are safe from any negative inputs, or triggers, but this also creates the effect of keeping the world safe from receiving any of the messages or content created within the safe space. This safety works both ways—nothing gets in, and nothing gets out, so the disconnect between political discourse and the actual public grows, which seems less than ideal for building a popular left.
The term “safe space” shows the key role that the concept of space, rather than place, plays in this discourse. Being utopian, or that which is without place, neoliberalism privileges space over place. Space is artificial, lacking humanity, sterile, interchangeable, and efficient. Place, on the other hand, is where people actually live, where language comes from, where politics can happen. Capital always prefers space over place, since space is smooth, while place has edges, and capital is all about maximizing its own flow. A safe space is somewhere that nothing can get into or out of—it is a non-place, the perfect location for neoliberal subjectivity (which is itself a kind of alienated non-subject) to reproduce itself—or, more precisely, for capital to reproduce itself through. Progressive neoliberalism conceives of a subject who does not exist, in a space that does not exist, and so it can never be what it needs to be to win—popular. Popular politics is about people and places, while progressive neoliberal politics is about neither people nor places, but bodies and spaces.
So what is it that people (i.e., not bodies) really want? What can form a left that can be popular and win? Authentic liberation, that is what is most universal, and so most popular. But who offers this today? It’s true that radical liberals and democratic socialists have more prominence and clout than ever. They are very good at building brands and devising slogans: Abolish ICE, Open Borders, etc. But they do not offer liberation, in Paolo Friere’ssense, as they prefer “…to substitute monologue, slogans, and communiques for dialogue,” which is an “attempt to liberate the oppressed with the instruments of domestication.” To sloganize is to domesticate, not liberate. Slogans create the illusion of change, without the change—which is how neoliberal hegemony is maintained. No one uses slogans or brands more than progressive neoliberals of all types—radical liberals, democratic socialists, lifestyle anarchists, and so on. AOC herself is one of the slickest new brands there is. These people are monologuing elites masquerading as liberators, but they will never liberate because they understand neither dialogue nor style, only monologue and identity.
A slogan lacks style—it substitutes repetition and brute force for style. Identity lends itself perfectly to sloganizing. Identity, as Franco Berardi says, is the opposite of style—“it is inherently limiting of the possibility of comprehension and interaction.” Identity is precisely what cannot be communicated or understood—an odd fit for popular politics, but a perfect fit for ruling class politics. Here is another aspect of the utopianism of progressive neoliberalism: that having something that is by definition incommunicable as the basis of your politics could build a coherent mass base.
“Style,” Berardi says, has no normative feature, and “implies no interdiction or punishment.” Style has nothing to do with domestication or discipline, its popular appeal lies in its ability to advance the realm of the possible and broaden horizons, and it makes no use of punishment or norms. Style is inherently popular, which is why progressive neoliberalism has none of it. Their media, their journalists, their politicians, and their art generally have none of the kind of integrity that goes along with authentic style. They tend to be halting, measured, and qualified, always lacking perspective. Style is dynamic, it carries its own momentum. It comes from somewhere and it is headed somewhere. Style comes from perspective, a point of view—but the progressive neoliberal mind is cannot ever quite come to a point.
The perspective of a style is what can lead to authentic liberation, rather than the constrictions of identity. What is identity? It is perspective without a style. We shouldn’t listen to an identity—we should listen to a perspective. A perspective has the freedom of style—it has been free to go somewhere, and so can point somewhere, while an identity can point only to itself. A lack of style induces claustrophobia—walls that are plain and white feel more like they’re closing in. A left without style, an identity-obsessed left, will have nowhere to go; it is claustrophobic, despite the soaring, lofty rhetoric of multiculturalism and so on. Neoliberal hegemony is about producing conditions that are optimal for capital’s ongoing self-realization process. Capital realizes itself only narrowly and short-term, focusing on enriching the narrow ownership class, and worrying only about quarterly dividend checks for major shareholders being bigger than the previous quarter, and so on. Despite the lofty promises of capitalist industry to change our world and create innovative new goods and services, it is very narrow, short-term, and claustrophobic—in much the same way as the progressive neoliberal identity dynamics just described.
Identity is an elite imposition, while style has the chance to open up a horizon. Authentic liberation is about horizons rather than imposition, it is dialogical rather than monological. Liberation is about “naming the world,” to use a Freirean phrase, together. Monologue is not about naming the world together, but about naming yourself for the world—even naming the world after you. Instead of liberation, progressive neoliberalism offers empowerment—this is one of their key buzzwords. But empowerment is not liberation—it is not about escaping the binary of oppressor and oppressed, but simply maximizing what is already there, amplifying essence, making the world more like you. The world only exists as a receptacle for your monologue, it is there for you, and it has been made safe from anything other than receptivity to you. The empowered storyteller imposes themselves on the world, and calls that progress. For the progressive neoliberal, other people only exist to Do The Work of submitting, as you Tell Your Story.
None of this has any chance at political success, but rather can succeed only in undermining any nascent class consciousness. “Dialogue,” says Freire, “does not impose, does not manipulate, does not ‘sloganize.’” Dialogue means to pose reality itself as a problem, and engage in the process of authentic liberation by naming the world together. “Let me reemphasize,” Freire says, “that posing reality as a problem does not mean sloganizing: it means critical analysis of a problematic reality.” Notice that for authentic dialogue, it is reality itself that is problematic, not a person. Any politics that emphasizes notions like “problematic people” will never be a successful popular politics, because a popular, winning politics is about changing reality, not changing people. People don’t want to be changed, they want their reality to change for them—that’s what politics actually is. Here we see another utopian aspect of progressive neoliberalism—the belief that if we just problematize every person who does not Do The Work (i.e., cheerfully be imposed upon by someone who is TYS), then reality itself will become less problematic.
This idea that politics should start by changing the internal properties of individuals goes back to Plato, who was a great enemy of populism. He described the key to building his ideal republic like this: “Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of citizens.” Plato’s ideal republic was, of course, just that—ideal and utopian, because you cannot ever have a political community in which justice is programmed into the hearts and souls of all citizens. But this is what Plato set out to do in his Republic. “The oppressors forget,” says Freire, “that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not to ‘win the people over’ to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor.” Winning people over, creating justice in the hearts and souls of the people, is oppression, not liberation.
A politics of authentic liberation, a truly popular politics, seeks to engage in meaningful dialogue with the oppressed, to build a popular coalition. Freire describes the oppressed as those “whose words have been stolen from them.” Liberation is about joining them as they find their words, it is not about imposing words on them, and it is not about stealing any more words from them.
Instead of the liberation of left populism, we have gotten the empowerment of neoliberalism. Instead of the classless world of socialism, we get the worldless you of neoliberalism, where the capitalist class continues to steal the world from you, but by flattering you and appealing to your narcissism, and making you not notice that you are being exploited—indeed, making you part of that exploitation, by painting it as something which empowers you. Neoliberal hegemony preaches empowerment because they want to empower you to become part of their system, rather than liberating you from the system. Empowerment is the bourgeoisification of liberation, it is what neoliberal hegemony offers us in place of liberation.
Empowerment is always only an individual phenomenon—only an individual can be empowered. Telling Your Story empowers, and Doing The Work creates space for that empowerment—the person who is DTW should be grateful for the opportunity to do so. Empowerment and gratitude form a part of the dialectic of progressive neoliberal hegemony. Identity politics, as a limiting, disciplining phenomenon, does not expand horizons for the masses, it hems them in, offering them nothing but DTW. The expansion offered is for the identity claimer only—the expanded horizon happens internally for that individual—and it expands into you, that’s what Doing The Work is; it’s flattening your own subjectivity out, so that the storytelling subject can Become Empowered. The Other, the one who is DTW, becomes simply a space for the empowered progressive neoliberal to expand their identity even more.
A populist politics should value liberation over empowerment. Liberation is the creation of something new, breaking from the binary of oppressed and oppressor, while empowerment stays within the established binary. This bourgeois socialism offered a kind of connective empowerment instead of a collective populism. Both tendencies are active and dynamic, but the extent to which the distinction was blurred badly undermined this moment of economic leftism.
Those with no perspective, speak of their identity, and those with nothing to say, speak in slogans—and that is what this new left consists almost entirely of. The ruling class wants us to change our language so that we don’t change our reality. The ruling class wants us to change our language so that we don’t change our reality. They want us to connect, share stories, and empower ourselves, to create the illusion of progress, while the world just keeps getting worse. Maybe now that can begin to change. Maybe now there can be a left that speaks from perspective, not identity, and that speaks the language of liberation and dialogue, rather than the language of slogans and monologues.