Neoliberalism succeeded by capturing sixties anti-authoritarian energies the left failed to harness

Evidence

It was that the right successfully harnessed those desires — the anti-authoritarian currents that came out from the Sixties. The left I think failed to come up with a convincing model of an anti-authoritarian left. Energies that were released by the kind of struggles against capitalism on the left then became diverted into this neoliberal project, which, in the Eighties, had two faces. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2101

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The privatization of the counterculture: the right won not with reactionary nostalgia but by claiming the language of freedom/choice against a bureaucratic state. Fisher’s reading of Thatcher selling off council houses as a genuinely persuasive freedom-granting move is subtle and reusable.
• XREF: Resonates with Fisher’s own book Capitalist Realism and with older critiques that the New Left’s cultural radicalism was absorbed by consumer capitalism — also David Graeber on bullshit jobs/boredom. — connects to: Postwar libertarian sentiment turned the sixties generation against older movement hierarchies — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 85; Neoliberalism targeted Sixties democratic socialism and communism, not the USSR — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2022; Neoliberalism won by absorbing sixties desires the left failed to address — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1716 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism won by absorbing sixties desires the left failed to address #corroborates (0.97) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1716
• Neoliberalism existed to crush Sixties democratic socialism and is now failing #contradicts (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2022
• Sixties egalitarian communes seeded postmodern authoritarian fundamentalisms #complicates (0.78) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 543
• Neoliberals historically co-opted leftist ideas but offered no new thinking in 2009 #expands (0.76) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 21
• The left’s abandonment of freedom caused its political decline. #complicates (0.75)
• The 1960s liberation movements planted the roots of later right-wing libertarianism #expands (0.74) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 57
• Neoliberalism generated desires that remain unsatisfied and could anchor left renewal #complicates (0.73) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 163
• The left’s embrace of pluralism wrongly led it to abandon hegemonic alternatives #complicates (0.72) — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 501
• The left’s anti-elite movement energy never translated into political power #expands (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 404
• Neoliberalism has ended as a hegemonic project despite institutional persistence #qualifies (0.71) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1840