Sublime

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

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.

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.

If they hope to challenge these arrangements, the dominated classes must construct a new, more persuasive common sense, or counterhegemony, and a new, more powerful political alliance, or counterhegemonic bloc.

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