“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” — Margaret Thatcher, Woman’s Own interview, 1987
3.1. From Crisis to Restructuring: The Rise of Neoliberalism
Every mode of production, as Marx teaches us, produces and reproduces the material conditions of its own existence through a unity of productive forces, relations of production, and their ideological mediation. But this reproduction is never guaranteed. It is traversed by contradictions—economic, political, and ideological—which periodically enter into crisis. The Keynesian compromise, elaborated in the postwar period, was one such historical formation—a conjunctural stabilization of class antagonism, momentarily suturing the fractures opened by capitalist war, depression, and insurgency. But by the 1970s, the internal limits of this compromise had been reached.
What erupted in the crisis of the 1970s was not merely a breakdown of economic growth or a fluctuation of market indicators—it was a crisis of the capitalist state’s capacity to reproduce class rule under the ideological mask of social democracy. Stagflation, falling profit rates, and militant labor movements did not simply “challenge” Keynesianism; they exposed its structural dependency on the continued subordination of labor to capital, a subordination it could no longer guarantee through welfare and consensus alone. This was a crisis not just of accumulation, but of bourgeois hegemony—a breakdown in the ideological mechanisms that had interpellated the “citizen-worker” as a loyal subject of managed capitalism.
From this rupture, neoliberalism emerged—not as a spontaneous or technocratic solution, but as a strategic counter-revolution, waged by a reorganized bourgeoisie through both repressive and ideological state apparatuses. It was not a return to classical liberalism, as the economists claim, but a recomposition of capitalist class domination, adapted to new conditions of globalized production, financialization, and post-Fordist labor regimes. It aimed not to “liberate” markets, but to dismantle the social constraints placed on capital by decades of working-class struggle and reformist containment.
This ideological formation—first crystallized under Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States, then imposed across the Global South through IMF structural adjustment programs—was not a neutral “policy turn.” It was a material transformation in the ideological reproduction of capitalist relations. The state did not wither; it was reforged into a disciplinary apparatus. The social wage was not “reformed”; it was disarticulated, its universality replaced by austerity and moralizing discourses of individual responsibility. The working class was not merely “de-unionized”; it was reconstituted ideologically, no longer as a collective subject of rights, but as an entrepreneurial individual, responsible for their own survival in an increasingly precarious world.
The transformation was total: economic liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the financialization of daily life were accompanied by a massive ideological offensive in every apparatus of interpellation—schools, media, culture, law. Under neoliberalism, ideology no longer promises emancipation—it enforces competition. It no longer masks exploitation with a “social contract”—it rebrands it as opportunity. The old ideological subject of liberal modernity—the “citizen”—was displaced by a new one: the entrepreneurial self, perpetually exposed to risk, debt, and failure, yet compelled to perform autonomy.
Thus, neoliberalism is best understood not as an economic doctrine, but as a reorganization of the ideological state apparatuses in the service of capital’s renewed offensive. Its goal is to neutralize the political capacity of the working class by fragmenting it, individualizing it, and blaming it for its own immiseration. It disciplines not only through coercion, but through desire: the desire to be self-sufficient, to rise above others, to escape the fate of the “loser”—a fate produced, precisely, by the system itself.
What neoliberalism achieves, then, is not stability or justice, but a new mode of ideological reproduction compatible with deepened inequality, democratic erosion, and permanent crisis. It abandons the universalist pretensions of liberalism while preserving its formal grammar—rights without substance, elections without choice, freedom without security. The state no longer represents a social contract—it is an enforcer of market logic. The economy no longer serves the people—it is the people who must serve the economy.
In this way, neoliberalism marks a qualitative shift in the ideological terrain of capitalism. It is the moment in which the bourgeoisie ceases to pretend that capitalism can serve the many. It is ideology without utopia, hegemony without consent. And yet, even this cannot last forever. The contradictions of neoliberal capitalism continue to deepen, and with them, the possibility of a new revolutionary conjuncture. But only if we break from the ideological traps laid by neoliberal interpellation and reforge the class consciousness necessary for collective rupture.
3.2. The Neoliberal Doctrine: Theory and Practice
Neoliberalism presents itself—through its economists, think tanks, and technocrats—as a doctrine of “freedom.” It chants the familiar incantations: free markets, limited government, individual responsibility. But ideology never speaks its own name. It appears as “truth,” precisely because it dissimulates its function: to reproduce the conditions of capitalist domination in a new historical conjuncture. What neoliberalism achieves is not freedom, but the restructuring of the state and its ideological apparatuses in accordance with the renewed requirements of capital.
Let us be clear: neoliberalism is not the “retreat” of the bourgeois state, but its strategic redeployment. It is not less state, but a different state—a state that no longer “mediates” between capital and labor, but instead functions as the political instrument of the capitalist class, stripped of its redistributive mask. It is a project of class recomposition, executed from above, through the coordinated transformation of economic policy, law, ideology, and repression.
At the level of its material practices, the neoliberal project consists of several interlinked strategies:
- Privatization: the systematic transfer of public wealth into private hands. More than a fiscal measure, this is an ideological act: it teaches the population to see health, housing, education, and infrastructure not as collective rights, but as commodities to be bought or lost in the market lottery. The commons are liquidated, and with them, the idea of society itself.
- Deregulation: the tearing down of constraints on capital—whether in labor protections, environmental safeguards, or financial oversight. Under the ideological sign of “efficiency,” this is the total restoration of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the sphere of production, free from the limits imposed by democratic struggle.
- Austerity: the moral language of fiscal discipline cloaks a material assault on the working class. Public budgets are cut not because the state is weak, but because it has been realigned: the resources once allocated to social reproduction are redirected toward capital accumulation, debt service, and policing.
- Marketization: the logic of exchange value penetrates every domain of life. Education is no longer a humanist project, but a private investment in “skills.” Healthcare becomes a business, housing a financial asset, social life an algorithmic performance. Use-value is displaced by price, and even the subject is reshaped in its image.
- Individualization: structural conditions—poverty, unemployment, precarity—are ideologically reframed as personal responsibility. You are not oppressed, only “underperforming.” You are not exploited, only “unskilled.” The unemployed worker, the indebted student, the evicted tenant: all are interpellated as failures within a meritocratic system that claims to reward effort while hiding its structure of exclusion.
These are not abstract principles—they are concrete operations of ideological and repressive state apparatuses, coordinated across institutions: the media normalizes competition; the school disciplines failure; the law criminalizes dissent; the family internalizes insecurity. Each site reinforces the production of the neoliberal subject: atomized, anxious, endlessly responsible for their own suffering.
Neoliberal globalization intensifies this process by unmooring capital from national constraints. Trade liberalization, capital account convertibility, and offshoring do not simply “increase efficiency”; they increase capital’s power to blackmail labor, to pit workers in Detroit against those in Shenzhen, to devalue life by making it mobile and disposable. Global financial markets become a transnational repressive apparatus, disciplining states themselves, punishing any deviation from the orthodoxy of “investor confidence.”
And when ideology proves insufficient, the mask falls. Neoliberalism has always relied on coercion: from Chile under Pinochet, where neoliberalism was born in blood, to the riot police deployed against striking workers in France, to the water cannons turned on students in South Africa. Structural adjustment is not merely a budgetary policy; it is a material weapon, wielded by the IMF and World Bank to enforce the primacy of capital on a planetary scale.
The outcomes of neoliberalism—rising inequality, democratic erosion, social atomization—are not “failures” of policy. They are the desired effects of a class project that aims to permanently disable the political agency of the working class, to render collective resistance unthinkable, and to install the market as the ultimate arbiter of value, morality, and life itself.
In sum, neoliberalism is a ruling-class offensive organized through the apparatuses of the capitalist state, legitimized by a new ideological formation, and enforced by both soft power and hard repression. It is not merely a theory, nor even an economic model, but a total mode of ideological reproduction, whose aim is to secure capitalist hegemony in the wake of the Keynesian decline—and to prevent anything close to its reemergence, at all costs.
3.3. Social Disintegration and the Fraying of the Commons
What neoliberalism shatters is not merely the postwar social contract or the welfare state. It shatters the very conditions for the reproduction of collective life, disorganizing the ideological and material apparatuses that once sustained working-class existence within capitalism’s historical compromise. The result is a generalized condition of social decomposition—a strategic disintegration of the commons as both a material infrastructure and a symbolic space.
This process is not accidental. It is the logical effect of the neoliberal transformation of the capitalist state, which no longer pretends to mediate between labor and capital but acts exclusively in the interest of capital’s accumulation, reproduction, and expansion. As public services are dismantled, labor protections revoked, and social rights redefined as consumer privileges, the burden of survival is increasingly transferred onto the individual. The worker is no longer a citizen, nor even a “citizen-worker” of the Keynesian moment, but a bare economic unit—precarious, isolated, and disposable.
The transformation is brutal in its banality:
- Wages stagnate despite surging productivity, a fact not of economic mismanagement but of class discipline.
- Jobprecarity spreads from the periphery to the core: the gig worker, the adjunct, the temp, the subcontractor—all become the new norm of labor-power, fragmented and depoliticized.
- The “flexibilization” of labor, hailed by neoliberal ideologues as emancipation from rigidity, is in truth a reorganization of insecurity, calibrated to prevent the formation of solidarity and resistance.
As Marx taught us, labor is not simply a productive force but a reproducible subject, whose social existence must be continually ensured. The neoliberal order disrupts this reproduction at every level:
- The family is eroded under the weight of work schedules, housing costs, and gendered austerity.
- Schools are turned into testing factories, producing debt-laden human capital rather than critically aware citizens.
- Healthcare becomes a luxury, access determined by insurance status or income bracket, a death sentence for many.
- Communities—once held together by shared institutions—are decimated by displacement, privatization, and gentrification.
These ruptures are not failures of policy, but acts of class warfare, carried out through the coordinated operations of the state, capital, and ideology. What disappears is the commons: not only public spaces and services, but the collective capacity to produce a world in common—to imagine, fight for, and organize alternative futures.
In parallel, the ideological apparatuses of neoliberalism do not retreat, but mutate. The dismantling of solidarity is accompanied by the production of new interpellated subjects, who internalize the logic of the market:
- The unemployed are no longer victims of systemic failure, but “unmotivated.”
- The indebted are not structurally trapped, but “financially irresponsible.”
- The precariat is not exploited, but “entrepreneurial.”
This is the individualization of structural contradiction—an ideological mechanism by which the effects of capitalist accumulation are mystified, privatized, and moralized. It is a profoundly anti-political ideology, which evacuates the possibility of collective identity, struggle, and transformation.
As the ideological bonds of solidarity erode, the reproduction of subjectivity under neoliberalism produces disaffection, cynicism, and impotence. The future is no longer a terrain of utopian projection, but an empty abstraction—colonized by debt, ecological collapse, and terminal capitalism. Here, the cultural logic described by Mark Fisher as reflexive impotence—“we know things are bad, but we can’t imagine them being different”—must be understood as an ideological formation, produced through the continuous disarticulation of collective agency.
The “death of the future” is not a metaphysical condition. It is a class outcome.
Let us be clear: neoliberalism does not only impoverish; it atomizes. It does not only extract; it disorients. It does not only displace working people materially, but annihilates their political and symbolic presence. The result is a generalized condition of social dereliction, in which the working class is no longer simply exploited, but systematically disorganized, rendered incapable of recognizing itself as a class-in-itself, let alone becoming a class-for-itself.
What remains is a strategic imperative for revolutionary theory and politics: to reconstruct the conditions of collective identification, to reopen the horizon of struggle, and to reclaim the commons—not merely as material resources, but as the site of proletarian subjectivity, solidarity, and renewal.
3.4. Neoliberal Democracy: Authoritarianism with a Liberal Face
Neoliberalism presents itself not merely as an economic doctrine, but as an ideological apparatus of state transformation. It does not abolish democracy in the classical liberal sense—on the contrary, it preserves the ritual forms of democracy precisely to conceal their hollowing out. This is the cunning of neoliberal power: to maintain the appearance of democratic governance while functionally displacing the locus of political decision-making beyond the reach of the popular will.
The bourgeois state, always an instrument of class rule, here undergoes a profound mutation. No longer required to mediate between antagonistic social forces (as it did during the Keynesian compromise), the state becomes a pure apparatus for the reproduction of capital, stripped of any pretense to neutrality or universality. Yet it retains its ideological mask: elections are held, parliaments convened, debates broadcast. The Ideological State Apparatuses(schools, media, juridical discourse) continue to “hail” subjects as free and equal citizens, even as they are structurally excluded from the field of real power.
This contradiction produces what some bourgeois theorists have called “post-democracy”: a regime in which the form of democracy persists while its content evaporates. Political parties—regardless of nominal ideology—are interpellated into a monopoly consensus around fiscal austerity, privatization, and market discipline. Parliamentary politics becomes a theater of repetition, its antagonisms carefully choreographed to dissimulate consensus. Elections function not as a terrain of choice, but as a ritual of consent. The people vote, but they do not decide.
Behind this formalism, sovereignty is transferred—not to “the people,” but to capitalist institutions without faces: central banks, bond markets, ratings agencies, supranational trade bodies, and international financial institutions. This displacement of authority is not incidental but structural. It is a class strategy: to shield capital from democracy, to remove accumulation from the field of struggle.
And yet: power must still be defended. When the smooth circuits of consent begin to break—when popular classes no longer believe, when they no longer obey—the Repressive State Apparatus steps forward. What we call “authoritarian neoliberalism” is not a deviation from liberal norms, but their latent truth, made manifest in moments of crisis.
- Police militarization—justified in the name of “security”—becomes the everyday form of social control in surplus populations.
- Surveillance technologies, once exceptional, are normalized and deployed in the regulation of dissent, labor, migration, and everyday life.
- Legal repression—through anti-protest laws, anti-terror statutes, and administrative detentions—fashions the legal armature of a post-political state.
- Media ideology discredits protest as irrational, uncivil, or dangerous, while elevating market logics to the level of moral law.
This form is best understood not as the negation of liberal democracy but as its sublation—its preservation and destruction. In Gramsci’s terms, when hegemony fails, domination emerges. And domination under neoliberalism is both global and differentiated.
In the imperial peripheries, neoliberalism was never consensual. There, its implementation required naked violence. The Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF and World Bank were not “policy advice”—they were instruments of imperial command, enforced through debt servitude, coercive conditionality, and, when necessary, military intervention.
The so-called “developing world” experienced neoliberalism not as freedom, but as forced expropriation. Entire populations were dispossessed of social rights, stripped of state protections, and rendered vulnerable to the world market. In the shantytowns of Lagos, the favelas of Rio, the urban slums of Manila, neoliberalism is not a concept—it is the lived reality of mass unemployment, structural violence, and state abandonment, punctuated by moments of police terror and IMF diktat.
And yet, the ideological apparatus continues to function. It proclaims these very processes as “modernization,” as “development,” as “liberation from the dead hand of the state.” The oppressed are told they are free, even as they are shackled by debt. The unemployed are told to innovate. The hungry are told to compete. This is the ideology of neoliberal democracy: a cynical invocation of rights under conditions where rights have no material basis.
The task of revolutionary theory, then, is to disarticulate this mystification. To name the form: liberalism without democracy, markets without equality, sovereignty without the people. To expose the form’s violence: repression masked as reform, extraction masked as development, coercion masked as consent.
In place of the mask, we must return to the material structure. In place of illusion, contradiction. In place of liberalism’s pluralism, the antagonism of class.
The future will not be decided in elections that offer no alternative. It will be decided in struggle—in the rupture of this false democracy and the reconstitution of a politics of the many.
3.5. Crisis of Legitimacy and the Emergence of Populism
The 2008 global financial crisis must be understood not merely as an economic collapse, but as an ideological rupture—a crisis in the very apparatuses that reproduce capitalist domination. It was a moment in which the internal contradictions of neoliberalism, long repressed beneath the surface of hegemonic ideology, erupted into visibility. The event tore through the ideological veil that had, for three decades, presented capitalism not only as natural, but as inevitable.
What the masses witnessed was not an unfortunate accident, but a revelation of structure: trillions of dollars mobilized to rescue financial institutions—those very agents of mass dispossession—while the popular classes were abandoned to foreclosure, unemployment, and austerity. This was not simply the moral failure of a system—it was the functional truth of its operation: the state as guarantor of capital, the people as the residual variable in the equation of accumulation.
This asymmetry produced a moment of profound ideological dislocation. The promises that had underpinned the neoliberal consensus—prosperity, meritocracy, upward mobility, personal freedom—were unmasked as mystifications. The ideological interpellation of the subject as “entrepreneur of the self” broke down, and with it, the ideological glue that bound capital to consent. The Ideological State Apparatuses—schools, media, popular culture—entered crisis, no longer able to mask the reproduction of exploitation with the fantasy of opportunity.
What emerged from this crisis was not a unified revolutionary response, but a disarticulated and contradictory field of struggle. The ideological vacuum gave rise to a double movement—left and right populisms, each expressing, in distorted form, the political effects of a crisis of capitalist reproduction.
I. The Left Populist Moment: Reclaiming the Political
On one pole, the left populist insurrection—Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, Podemos, the early Sanders movement—attempted to repoliticize the economy, to render visible the hidden structures of class power. These movements sought to transform the ideological terrain by reintroducing terms long repressed by neoliberal discourse: class, exploitation, debt, solidarity, democracy.
Yet these movements were often short-lived, contained or neutralized by the very institutions they sought to transform. Syriza capitulated to the Troika; Occupy was suppressed and fragmented; Podemos was integrated into a parliamentary structure hostile to rupture. Their failure was not one of moral weakness, but of structural limitation: without a revolutionary apparatus capable of confronting the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses simultaneously, the left was outmaneuvered, not defeated.
II. The Right Populist Reaction: Rearticulating Bourgeois Ideology
The other pole—and ultimately the more successful—was the rise of right-wing populism, which did not reject neoliberalism, but repackaged it within a new ideological formation. Figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and others offered not a rupture with capital, but a restructuring of its ideological front. They displaced class antagonism onto cultural and racial terrain—transforming economic anxiety into xenophobic resentment, structural decline into nationalist grievance.
These leaders maintained, and in many cases intensified, neoliberal economic policies: tax cuts for capital, deregulation of industry, privatization of public services. But they abandoned liberalism’s rhetorical commitment to civil liberties, pluralism, and procedural governance. In its place, they offered authoritarian paternalism, mythic unity, and ethnonational identity. What emerged was not simply a more reactionary politics—it was a new ideological state formation: illiberal capitalism.
This form retains the economic logic of neoliberalism—the sanctity of private property, the primacy of markets, the commodification of life—but fuses it with authoritarian governance and cultural warfare. It is the ideological response of the bourgeoisie to a world in which its prior form of legitimacy—liberal democracy—can no longer command the consent of the governed.
III. Populism as Class Strategy in Crisis
Both forms of populism must be understood as effects of the same structural contradiction: the inability of capitalism to reproduce itself ideologically under conditions of deepening material inequality. Populism is not an aberration; it is the symptom of capitalist crisis refracted through the political field.
- Left populism attempts to articulate a new collective subject based on solidarity and redistribution—but without a rupture with the state apparatus, it is rapidly assimilated or crushed.
- Right populism rearticulates the class position of the bourgeoisie through an ethnonational ideological displacement, redirecting proletarian anger away from capital and toward scapegoats—immigrants, minorities, feminists, communists.
What we are witnessing is not the “death of democracy,” but its restructuring around the imperatives of capital’s crisis management. Liberalism cannot resolve the contradictions it has unleashed; it can only oscillate between technocratic paralysis and authoritarian reaction.
The task for revolutionary theory is to move beyond both poles—not to synthesize them, but to supersede the entire ideological structure within which they are positioned. We must reintroduce the primacy of class struggle, the critique of political economy, and the construction of a new historical bloc capable of breaking the apparatuses of bourgeois power.
Only then can we exit the conjuncture of managed crisis and open the path to true emancipation: the abolition of capital, the deconstruction of its ideological forms, and the construction of a new mode of production grounded in equality, solidarity, and collective sovereignty.
3.6. The Hollowing Out of Liberal Ideology
Liberalism, once the ruling ideology par excellence of the bourgeoisie, has today entered a phase of decomposition—not because it has been overthrown, but because it no longer persuades. It survives only as the residual echo of a hegemonic order in decline, a ghost that continues to speak even as its voice no longer resonates. It has become what Althusser once described as a “phantom ideology”: still present in the rituals and slogans of the state, but evacuated of the capacity to interpellate subjects with conviction.
The so-called liberal values—freedom, equality, democracy—have been transformed into ideological alibis, invoked not to organize collective action but to justify the status quo, to forestall rupture, to name what cannot be realized under capitalist conditions. In this spectral form, liberalism does not govern by belief, but by lack of alternatives. Its continued dominance is not proof of vitality but of the absence of an organized counter-hegemony.
Let us be precise: bourgeois ideology does not disappear when it ceases to function as a living belief system. Rather, it mutates—from an interpellating apparatus that enlists subjects into its project, into a defensive reflex, a discursive shield used to protect the domination of capital from any challenge, whether reformist or revolutionary. The signifiers remain intact—“individual liberty,” “rule of law,” “civil society”—but the signifieds have rotted. The result is a profound ideological disjunction between what is said and what is lived.
I. Liberalism as a Post-Ideology: Discourse Without Belief
In the neoliberal era, liberalism no longer proposes a future; it merely insists on the impossibility of any other. It no longer interpellates subjects toward historical progress, but instead disciplines them through market fatalism. “There is no alternative”—the infamous Thatcherite dictum—is not merely policy rhetoric; it is the expression of an exhausted ideology that can no longer universalize its class interests as the interests of all.
The liberal social contract, once the ideological formula that reconciled citizenship with capital, has collapsed. Its new form—silent, unwritten, coercive—reads:
“You are free to compete, but you are alone. You must survive by obedience to the market. Expect no reciprocity, only discipline.”
This is not the social contract of Rousseau or Rawls, but the anti-contract of neoliberal interpellation. It produces not political subjects, but market actors—consumers, debtors, investors, influencers—whose identities are indexed not to their collective agency but to their capacity for self-exploitation.
Where once liberal ideology held the promise of mediated contradictions—between labor and capital, liberty and order, equality and property—it now functions only to displace and repress antagonism. It cannot resolve crisis, only manage its symptoms through technocratic administration, police repression, or nostalgic appeals to a mythical past (the “postwar consensus,” the “founding fathers,” “Western values,” etc.).
II. The Decomposition of the Ideological State Apparatuses
This ideological hollowing out has material roots. The institutions that once reproduced liberal ideology—schools, media, parties, universities, civil associations—are themselves in crisis. Education has been financialized; journalism commodified; public discourse fragmented into algorithmic echo chambers; and political parties reduced to brands competing for market share.
The Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) of liberal democracy—especially those that once produced the image of a unified civic body—have lost their capacity to stabilize interpellation. The subject of liberalism—the rational, property-owning, rights-bearing individual—can no longer be sustained at the level of mass experience. Instead, subjects are fractured, suspended between precarity and resentment, technological mediation and social atomization. This is the “reflexive impotence” Mark Fisher named: the consciousness that things are broken, coupled with the inability to imagine alternatives.
In this vacuum, liberal ideology no longer commands faith but enforces submission through surveillance, managerialism, and credit. Where it once relied on consent, it now depends increasingly on coercive normalization: psychological, cultural, algorithmic. Neoliberal liberalism is thus no longer an ideology of the Enlightenment but an ideology of desublimated administration—of spreadsheets, metrics, compliance, and control.
III. The Ideological Hegemony of Absence
The central contradiction of our conjuncture is this: liberalism survives because its own disintegration has not yet yielded a revolutionary subjectivity capable of replacing it. It remains hegemonic precisely as the ideology of no ideology, sustained by inertia and the disorganization of resistance. It cannot inspire, only prevent. It does not promise freedom, but insists that freedom is indistinguishable from market obedience.
What emerges, then, is a situation of ideological non-alignment: millions disillusioned with liberalism, yet still positioned within its apparatuses; subjects aware of the contradiction, but without the means to transcend it. Here we see Althusser’s central claim affirmed: “ideology has no history,” not because it is eternal, but because it reproduces itself beneath the threshold of consciousness unless ruptured by revolutionary praxis.
The present crisis is not merely economic or political, but epistemological—a crisis of meaning, of belief, of the categories through which we understand ourselves and our world. The hollowing out of liberalism is not just the collapse of a discourse, but the collapse of a world. And yet, this collapse is riven with possibility.
In this ideological exhaustion, the task of revolutionary critique is not to mourn the death of liberalism, but to seize the void it leaves behind—to construct a new political subject, a new ideological apparatus, a new form of collective imagination rooted not in the myth of the individual, but in the solidarity of the proletariat, the rationality of planning, and the collective construction of history.
Liberalism is finished. But the ruling class will not bury it unless we make them.
Conclusion: Neoliberalism as Decay, Not Renewal
Let us be absolutely clear: neoliberalism did not restore liberalism—it decomposed it. What we witness today is not a new order, but the detritus of an exhausted ideological formation. Neoliberalism was not the rebirth of capitalist rationality, but the desperate reconfiguration of its hegemony in the face of a deep and irreversible structural crisis. It emerged not as the bearer of a coherent vision for society, but as the repressive reflex of a class in retreat, a bourgeoisie that could no longer universalize its interests as those of society as a whole.
Where liberalism once functioned as the dominant ideology of capitalist modernity, able to interpellate subjects with promises of citizenship, progress, and national development, neoliberalism dispensed with those ideological mediations. In their place, it offered technocratic management, market discipline, and moral individualism—a cold, instrumental rationality incapable of masking its class content. The result was a regime that retained the institutional husks of liberalism—parliaments, elections, courts, rights—but gutted their substance.
Thus, what remains is an ideological simulacrum:
- Elections without representation, where policy is dictated not by the will of the people but by the demands of capital, central banks, and rating agencies;
- Rights without material guarantees, where the juridical subject is declared free while denied healthcare, housing, education, and a living wage;
- Freedom without substance, where liberty is reduced to the freedom to consume, to compete, to fail.
This is not ideological hegemony in the Gramscian sense—it is hegemonic vacancy, a void where belief once resided, filled only by fear, inertia, and resentment. Neoliberalism, in this sense, marks not the continuation but the ideological decomposition of the bourgeois order. It is the form ideology takes when the ruling class can no longer lead, only dominate.
But decomposition does not mean disappearance. The dominant ideology, even in decay, continues to function—not through conviction, but through coercion, distraction, and the disorganization of its antagonists. The Ideological State Apparatuses of neoliberalism—corporate media, debt-financed education, consumer culture, and digital surveillance—continue to reproduce submission under the sign of freedom, though increasingly at the cost of legitimacy. What has eroded is not the presence of ideology, but its effectiveness. The mask slips; the mystification falters.
It is in this moment—when ideological reproduction falters, and political contradictions sharpen—that we must pose the revolutionary question with all its consequences:
If liberalism no longer convinces, and if neoliberalism no longer functions, what comes next?
This question is not academic. It is inscribed in the very crisis that defines our historical conjuncture. The collapse of liberal hegemony has opened the space for new political formations—not as abstract ideas, but as material responses to the void left behind.
- On one side, we see the resurgence of authoritarian populisms, ethno-nationalist movements, and fascist revanchisms. These are not “alternatives” to neoliberalism, but its reactive supplements, animated by the failures of the liberal order but preserving its class structure. They rearticulate the crisis not around emancipation, but around racialized scapegoating, gender panic, and cultural ressentiment. They offer the spectacle of sovereignty, even as they entrench oligarchy.
- On the other side, we witness the reawakening of revolutionary desire: demands for decommodified life, economic democracy, climate justice, and collective autonomy. These movements often remain fragmented, localized, and strategically immature—but they are animated by the recognition that liberalism cannot be saved, and that capitalism must be overcome.
This is the political terrain into which we now step: not the end of ideology, but a struggle over the meaning of its end. The dominant ideology is dying, but the new has not yet taken hold. It is in such moments of ideological interregnum, as Gramsci taught us, that monsters appear—but also that history becomes possible again.
We must therefore refuse the melancholic impulse to “restore” liberalism—to defend its empty forms in the name of “decency,” “civility,” or “normalcy.” Liberalism is not the solution to the crisis—it is its historical form. The task is not to rescue its institutions, but to supersede them, to forge a new revolutionary horizon grounded in proletarian solidarity, collective rationality, and the democratic transformation of the material world.
Neoliberalism is not the end of history. It is the form the bourgeoisie has taken in its epoch of decadence. What follows will not be a return to equilibrium but a protracted battle for ideological hegemony, for state power, and for the very definition of freedom and humanity.
The real question, then, is not how to save liberalism, but:
Will the next epoch be defined by barbarism or liberation?
The answer will not be found in theory alone. It must be fought for in the streets, in the factories, in the schools, in the realm of culture and reproduction—and above all, within the ideological terrain itself.
The next chapter will turn to that terrain.
Note: The introduction and previous chapters are available here: Introduction | Chapter 1 & 2
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