A capital critique: Progressive alternatives to neo-liberal economic order

Abstract

Advocates of progressive political economy agree that the neo-liberal economic order has worsened environmental degradation, worker precarity, and oligarchy, but what are the alternatives? This article relates left-progressive discourses about concrete approaches and policy ideas to implications for the global economic order. While progressives explicitly seek a more social democratic global order, the various policy initiatives in the progressive imaginary implicitly involve approaches to order-building that are in scarcely acknowledged competition with one another. While neo-Keynesianism, justice for the Global South, a Global Green New Deal, and degrowth are all anti–neo-liberal approaches that pursue the same broad aims—reducing inequality within the Global North, raising standards of living and buffering structural violence in the Global South, and responding to the climate crisis—these goals potentially exhibit the tensions of a trilemma.