This short piece on OpenDemocracy captures something I’ve been obsessing about since the UK election:
Neoliberalism is limping to its death, and it’s up to us to make sure that what comes next isn’t something worse. The energy, the ideas and the people are all on our side.
It seems increasingly clear that neoliberalism is dying, if it’s not already dead, bringing an end to the interregnum which began with the 2007/8 financial crisis. The question is what comes next? In the UK it had seemed this might be a pivot towards Scandinavian social democracy, with a powerful ‘movement of movements’ driving this forwards towards more radical horizons. But that window of opportunity has slammed shut with striking brutality, leaving many of us wondering if we had ever been as close as we had imagined we were.
The danger is that we revert to the repertoires of the 2000/2010s when the coordinates of politics have fundamentally changed. What does (millennial?) post-neoliberal socialist politics look like? What is it for? How does it operate? How should it operate?