Organic Crisis, Integral State, Passive Revolution: Twilight of the Neoliberal Order?

Abstract

A reconnaissance of the 2020 pandemic begins by registering the moments of refusal and supersedure, demonstrating the extent to which it seemed to many to be an organic (transformational) crisis re-ordering neoliberal capitalism’s fundamental elements. Vaccine development and debates over lockdowns illustrate the emergence of a neoliberal integral state, one in which the lines between government, industry and finance are blurred to the point of invisibility. Yet the pandemic also suggests that such states are hobbled as effective organisers of hegemony by their incapacity to safeguard the lives and interests of the people they purportedly represent and to break with imperial patterns of global dominance. Passive revolutionary attempts to contain revolutionary critiques and activism are to be expected; yet they may not succeed, given that the covid-19 pandemic arose from the environmental consequences of the global processes of capitalist accumulation neoliberals defend. The ‘next left’ has an opening, provided it soberly addresses the crisis of the neoliberal order and develops a convincing strategy for overcoming it.