There Was No Such Thing as

Progressive Neoliberalism
Johanna Brenner January 14, 2017 At an anti-Trump march in New York, November 12, 2016
(Kelly Kline / Flickr)
Nancy Frasers analysis of Donald Trumps election and thoroughgoing critique of the Clinton
Democrats in The End of Progressive Neoliberalism offers much to agree with. But I disagree
with her subtle, yet distinct, attack on social movements as handmaidens to the rise of
neoliberalism.
On the one hand, Fraser mostly tells us what we already know about the rise of neoliberalismthe
role of Clintons DLC, the cozy relationship between the Democratic Party and financial capital, the
increasing cultural dominance of tech elites, and the incorporation of liberal feminism and liberal
multiculturalism into neoliberal politics and ideology. Also entirely familiar is her prescription for
moving forwardbuilding a left outside the Democratic Party that brings into coalition the
struggles against social oppression and a challenge to the powers of corporate capital. Many of us
have been arguing this for years.
On the other hand, Frasers argument carries an undercurrent of blame toward feminism and other
social movements for having participated in what she dubs progressive neoliberalism. It was, she
argues, a revolt against progressive neoliberalism that led to Trumps victory over Clinton. By
shifting the analysis away from the capitalist class offensive that ushered in the neoliberal order, and
which is primarily responsible for the U.S. political drift to the right, Fraser ends up attacking
identity politics in favor of class politics. While her conclusion is that of course the left must
embrace anti-sexism and anti-racism, her analysis implies the oppositeshes clearly suspicious of
multiculturalism and diversity.
Fraser argues that neoliberalism found its perfect mate in a meritocratic corporate feminism
focused on leaning in and cracking the glass ceiling. This is true. But Fraser
mistakes this feminism for feminism as a whole. She ignores the continuing struggle
by other feministsin trade unions; in immigrant rights, environmental justice, and Native
womens organizations; in grassroots civil rights projects and in groups organizing working-class
transgender people; on college campuses, and elsewhere, where the politics she calls for has already
been developing. The Platform for the Movement for Black Lives, which I think can be considered
one of the most advanced and inclusive political visions we have ever seen in the United States,
emerged from the thinking, activism, and lessons learned within these social movements over the
last three decades.
Fraser herself acknowledges that the term progressive neoliberalism sounds like an
oxymoron. Yet she goes on to make a case that not neoliberalism tout court,
but progressive neoliberalism became the dominant politics of the Democratic Party, which
abandoned the middle-class (white, male) voters who eventually rose up in revolt. She argues
that, disastrously, corporate neoliberalism drew on the charisma of social movements in order to
justify itselfoffering a vision of the good society based on equality of opportunity for anyone to
access the rewards of a highly competitive and hierarchical economic and political system. In this
recounting of the trajectory of social movements, Fraser completely erases three decades of struggle
as well as the theoretical and political evolution of the movements she critiques. She treats
corporatist liberalism as representative of all movements, even though it is but one strain.
In the 1970s the emancipatory movements against oppression evinced a wide range of
politics. However, the dominant politics of feminism through the 1970s and 80s was defined
neither by radical or socialist feminism nor by classic liberal feminism. Rather, the feminist politics
of this period was characterized by what I would call social-welfare feminism.
Social-welfare feminists share liberal feminisms commitment to individual rights and equal
opportunity, but go much further. They look to an expansive and activist state to address the
problems of working women, to ease the burden of the double day, to improve womens and
especially mothers position in the labor market, to provide public services that socialize the labor
of care, and to expand social responsibility for care (for example, through paid parenting leave and
stipends for women caring for family members).
Winning these demands required a confrontation with capitalist class power. Yet, at the very
moment when social-welfare feminism was at its strongest, in the 1970s, the tsunami of capitalist
restructuring arrived, opening up a new era of assault on a working class that had little means of
defending itself. As people scrambled to survive in this new world order, as collective capacities
and solidarities moved out of reach, as competition and insecurity ratcheted up, as individual
survival became the order of the day, the door opened for liberal feminism to move center stage,
incorporated into an increasingly hegemonic neoliberal order.
In other words, second-wave social-welfare feminism was not so much coopted as it was politically
marginalized.
I would not deny that many middle-class advocates for women and minorities shifted their rhetoric
in response to the obdurate political opposition they faced. For example, after Bill Clinton
dismantled welfare reform in 1996, advocates embraced the rhetoric of economic self-sufficiency
for single mothers, hoping to justify funding for education, childcare, and access to living wage
jobs. Instead, of course, single mothers have been forced into insecure, low-wage jobs, mostly
without access to publicly funded childcare. But these discourses were always contested even
though those opposing them remained marginalized.
There were some important successesfor example, organizing by women of color pushed
mainstream pro-choice organizations, especially NARAL and Planned Parenthood, to move away
from using the bourgeois liberal privacy argument to defend abortion and toward reproductive
rights discourses that are less easily aligned with neoliberal ideology. Women of color challenged
the law-and-order feminism that came to dominate advocacy around gender violence. They
developed alternative strategies (such as open shelters and restorative justice) and analyzed how
interpersonal violence is linked to the violence inflicted by the state on their communities (see, for
example, the website of INCITE!).
Internationally, it is true that some organizations like the Feminist Majority foundation supported
U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. However, there are well-organized feminist antiwar groups (such
as Code Pink and MADRE) and other feminist organizations that reject and challenge neoliberal
development policies (like the Womens Environment and Development Organization). The Critical
Resistance movement organized many young people to protest the carceral state from a feminist,
anti-racist, and anti-capitalist perspective. Many of the activists leading the most radical social
movements of recent years, such as Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers, learned their politics
through these various oppositional movements and on campuses where womens studies programs
were developing what came to be called intersectional analysis. The rise of the internet opened up
a much larger space for such challenges to liberal feminism and the promotion of more radical, anti-
corporate, feminist perspectives. The same is true for many other social movements.
Fraser argues that we should reject the polarized choice between financialization-cum-
emancipation and social protection. Im not sure who this we is. Again, if Fraser is speaking
about corporate feminists, the black political class, or Democratic Party hacks, then surely, yes. But
in fact, many groups and organizations have all along resisted this supposed choice. Mainstream
feminist and civil rights organizations have challenged the austerity agenda, for example, by
defending social security against attempts of Republicans to privatize it. Mainstream feminist
advocates continue to agitate for expansion of publicly funded quality childcare programs. Yes, they
are mostly unsuccessful. And yes, they are unfortunately dependent upon a corporatized Democratic
Party. And yes, they would be more successful if they were allied with a revitalized labor
movement. But they are not progressive neoliberals caught up in the romance of competitive
individualism, and they continue to identify politically with a social-welfare feminist program.
Fraser argues that the American left is so weak today because potential links between labor and
new social movements were left to languish. Of course the failure to build a coalition of labor and
social movement activists led to the rise of the right. But does Fraser really think that this was due
to deliberate decisions made by activists from social movements? They simply preferred to ally
with the corporatist politics of the Democratic Party rather than with labor? Or, is the failure to
build these coalitions the consequence of the bureaucratization of unions in the post Second World
War period, which left labor completely unprepared or unwilling to confront the employers
offensive against wages and working conditions that began in the 1970s and has only intensified
with capitalist globalization. Only a militant, politicized, and inclusive labor movement ready to
challenge corporate power would be interested in and capable of overcoming the many divisions
within the working class in order to build an alliance with social movements.
In the context of the increasing power of globalizing capital and the increasing disempowerment of
the working class, U.S. politics drifted to the right. Yet, the bureaucratic leadership of unions has
been contested both from within (for example, by the social justice unionism of the radicals who
took over SEIU Local 1021 in San Francisco and the Chicago Teachers Union) and from without
(such as by worker centers like the Chinese Progressive Association, and community-based
organizing projects, like Make the Road in Brooklyn). And then of course there is the Fight for $15
movement and the successful campaigns to raise the minimum wage in many states and cities over
the past five years.
Although it is true that Bernie Sanders mobilized many people new to activism, the resonance of his
message drew strength from previous instances of resistance, including Occupy and Black Lives
Matter. These challengesdismissed by Fraser as outburstsweakened the edifice of neoliberal
hegemony and prepared the ground for the explosion of the Sanders campaign.
Finally, although I certainly agree that white working-class Trump voters were expressing anger at
the elitist liberalism of the Democratic Party (and also at establishment Republicans whom they
rejected in the primaries), I also think Fraser understates the degree to which whiteness and
masculine privilege shaped how they understood and articulated their distress. As other writers have
pointed out, the black and Latino working class have many reasons to fault the Clintons and their
Democratic Party collaborators (welfare reform, the prison-industrial complex, deportations, and so
on). Yet it was defections by white working-class Democrats in swing states that put Trump in
office. Clearly, a majority of black and Latino workers could not afford to look past Trumps
hideous misogyny and racism. It was all too easy for working-class white men (and women) to do
so. Lets therefore reject the counterposition of identity politics to class politics. Let us instead
critique liberal multiculturalism and liberal feminism, while advancing a socialist-feminist, anti-
racist, anti-capitalist vision. And let us try to leave behind the sectarian divisions that have
hampered us and seize the opportunity to build a new left.

Johanna Brenner is the author of Women and the Politics of Class (Monthly Review Press,
2000). Her recent articles have appeared in Socialist Studies, Jacobin, Against the Current,
and Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture.
Read Nancy Frasers original article and her reply to Johanna Brenner.

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