Thus sayeth the socialists at Monthly Review, Vol. 77 (2025–2026), No. 06 (November 2025):
The refashioned liberals and social democrats are back. They have positioned themselves as the saviors of the world; they act as Reason to the unreasonableness of neo-fascism. This is possible because their forebearers have collapsed in the puddle of neoliberalism and technocracy, and because their adversaries now present themselves as the howling wolves of the extreme right. The refashioned liberals and social democrats are like zombies, the reanimated corpse of a dead liberalism.1
These refashioned liberals and social democrats have a point. Their immediate predecessors had taken their liberal tradition and exhausted it in the fires of austerity and debt. From the British Labour Party to the Indian Congress Party, the old liberals and social democrats in the West and the anticolonial freedom fronts in the Global South bowed down when the Soviet Union collapsed and began to conform to four realities of their own making:
- That capitalism is eternal.
- That the neoliberal policy framework (capitalism let loose) is inevitable, even if it creates extreme inequality and does not advance social goals.
- That the most that can be done by us is to improve society by ameliorating certain specific social hierarchies (such as those around race, gender, and sexuality).
- Finally, following the poorly conceived warnings of Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944), that pursuing anything more than mere amelioration is folly because it is either bound to fail or inevitably reproduce the “autocracy” and “bureaucracy”‘ of the Soviet Union.2
As the old liberals tied themselves openly to the austerity-debt agenda of neoliberal policy, they refashioned themselves as technocrats and began to style themselves as the sole arbiters of what in popular opinion was acceptable to their technocratic vision. This acceptance by liberals of the gripping pain of austerity and the rejection of its critique allowed the extreme right to cloak itself as the people’s representatives and strike a populist tone through the ugly rhetoric of anti-immigration and “anti-woke,” but marrying it with their incoherent criticisms of the economic system. The extreme right emerged largely on the coattails of liberal surrender to neoliberalism. But the extreme right has not broken with the general outlines of neoliberal policy. It replicates it alongside a harsh social agenda. Despite all the talk of economic nationalism, the extreme right does not have an original economic agenda.
The refashioned liberals and social democrats ignore the surrender of the old liberals to austerity and debt and refuse to do an accounting of the ways in which liberal technocracy laid the foundation stone for the extreme right. To position the return of liberalism as if it could save civilization from the extreme right is misleading, since this refashioned liberalism and social democracy has no different formulation about the way forward than their predecessors. Nothing from the refashioned liberals or the social democrats provides confidence that they are prepared to break the austerity-debt-finance conservatism agenda of neoliberalism. What we have is a left-sounding rhetoric and agitational sensibilities against the system, but incoherence when it comes to how to move beyond the atrocities of capitalism. Specifically, there is nothing in the form of an economic policy that addresses the gross inequality that characterized the neoliberal period. Dig deep into the political agendas and programs of the new social democrats and, amid a festival of identity politics jargon (not even taking seriously the demands for dignity in contexts of social oppression), you will be hard-pressed to find an economic agenda that restores rights or builds power for the masses. At best you will find conservative redistributive policies that attempt to rebuild a middle class that social democracy considers its real base—eschewing any ambition to represent and organize beyond it and into the working class and the peasantry who comprise the vast majority of the world’s people....
....MUCH MORE
