Neoliberalism existed to crush Sixties democratic socialism and is now failing

Evidence

But the conditions which sustained capitalist realism have now evaporated, and the real enemy which prompted the neoliberal counter-revolution is re-emerging. This enemy was not the necrotic Stalinist monolith of the USSR; still less was it the cult of Parisian Maoism, which was only ever the most minor of distractions. No: neoliberalism was designed to eliminate the various strains of democratic socialism and libertarian communism that bubbled up in so many places during in the Sixties and Seventies. Wherever this possibility emerged, capital crushed it, most ruthlessly and most spectacularly in Chile. … It is now clear that molecular practices of consciousness-raising are not opposed to the indirect action needed to bring about lasting ideological shifts — they are two aspects of a process that is happening on many different time tracks at once. The growing clamour of groups seeking to take control of their own lives portends a long overdue return to a modernity that capital just can’t deliver. New forms of belonging are being discovered and invented, which will in the end show that both steampunk capital and cybergothic ISIS are archaisms, obstructions to a future that is already assembling itself. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2022

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes chapter 106’s claim that ‘neoliberalism is about class power, not market freedom’ and the Chile reference already made in ch119. — connects to: Neoliberalism was founded by the antidemocratic overthrow of Chilean democratic socialism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1955; TV rights NGOs were powerless companions of 1970s-era neoliberalism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 43; Neoliberalism won by absorbing sixties desires the left failed to address — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1716 (+3 more)