The left has a peculiar ritual: every few years, it holds a funeral for neoliberalism.
The 2008 financial meltdown was the first. The obituaries were beautifully written, the mourners lined up from Wall Street to the academy. Then came the eurozone crisis — another one. Then the pandemic — the most lavish ceremony yet. Everyone said, this time it's real, look, even neoliberalism can't save itself anymore. Trump's return was something of a memorial service tacked on.
The ritual is always the same: declare death, await rebirth, nothing is reborn, declare again.
Sperber does something rather unwelcome in NLR issue 158. He walks up to the coffin, lifts the lid, and lets everyone look inside.
It's empty.
Three Skins: You've Only Peeled Off the Wallpaper
Sperber's argument is not complex, but it is sharp enough. He says: stop asking "is neoliberalism dead or not" — that question is like asking "is winter over," and the answer depends on whether you're at the equator or the pole. Neoliberalism is not one thing; it's an entire structure, at least three layers deep. You have to look at each one.
The first layer: ideology. This one is indeed rotting.
Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society," recited today, sounds like a joke told at the wrong occasion — not that it isn't funny, but the setting is wrong. Friedman's sermons, once the background music of Western politics, now sound more like a late-night radio rerun: still playing, but nobody's listening. Gerbaudo gave its successor a name: "Neo-statism" — sovereignty, protection, control. Three words replacing freedom, market, efficiency. It sounds like a change of priests: the sermon text changed, but it's the same church.
More telling is generational turnover. Hayek's students retired, Friedman's disciples entered the grave, Buchanan's chair sits empty. The "collective intellectual" that once inserted neoliberal thought into the halls of power has died of natural causes. Today's politicians and CEOs grew up with the memory of neoliberalism's crises, not its triumphs. It's like an army where the veterans went home decades ago and the new recruits have only heard stories — do you expect them to maintain the same faith?
So the ideological layer is rotting. But Sperber says: hold your applause.
The second layer: policy. The rhetoric changed, the actions changed, but what those actions actually do is worth examining.
State interventionism is back — that's a fact. Sperber sorts it into five categories: emergency bailouts, monetary backstopping, industrial strategy, government shareholding, externally targeted sanctions. It sounds like a picture of "de-neoliberalization"?
Hold on.
Most of these interventions serve to protect the winners of the neoliberal era. When they bailed out the banks in 2008, no treasury minister opened Hayek for inspiration — but they were rescuing precisely the institutions that grew fat under Hayek's regime. The Fed's balance sheet ballooned to $9 trillion, the ECB's to $8.8 trillion. Sperber's phrasing is remarkably cool, cool to the point of sarcasm: this is "quasi-public ownership of financial capital," "indirect monetization of government deficits." In plain language: using everyone's inflation tax to keep the capital market bubble inflated.
The industrial strategy section is even more savor-worthy. The Biden administration's CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act are, Sperber points out, a "unilateral, unbalanced, and largely unacknowledged imitation" of China's development plans.
Without the precedent of the Chinese state doing the same thing, the Inflation Reduction Act's ambition to accelerate green technology development would not have taken this form.
He coined a term for this imitation: "Competitive Isomorphism." Roughly translated: denouncing the opponent from the podium while secretly copying their homework at the desk below — and doing so with an extremely solemn expression.
But the third layer is where the entire article truly lands.
The Layer That Hasn't Moved an Inch
The French Regulation School makes a distinction: the mode of regulation (institutional arrangements) changes, but the regime of accumulation — the material logic of capital valorization — doesn't move easily. Sperber uses this framework to cut straight to the bone.
Has the tax structure changed? Corporate tax rates are still that low, capital gains taxes still that generous, workers' income taxes still that solid, consumption taxes still dutifully collected. This pipeline system that pumps wealth upward hasn't changed a single pipe in twenty years.
The labor market? Employment protection frameworks are basically untouched, the transnational gradient of labor rights is unchanged, the army of precarious workers keeps growing. Corporate governance? Big-company executives still faithfully execute "shareholder value maximization" — the short-term speculation game invented in 1970s America and exported globally in the 1980s.
And financialization? More rampant than ever. Debt outpaces GDP growth, derivatives pile up, cross-border capital flows freely, the "Masters of the Universe" sit in their New York towers issuing orders with the same tone as twenty years ago.
All the "post-neoliberal" stories you've heard happen in the first two layers — rhetoric and policy. But the third layer, the material foundation of capital accumulation, hasn't loosened a single brick.
Then Sperber pulls out his data. No rhetoric, no emotion, just numbers:
| Period | Wealth Growth of US Top 1% (inflation-adjusted) |
|---|---|
| 2000s | +11.3% — that's with two crashes |
| 2010s | +71.3% |
| 2020s first half | +40.1% |
In 2024, US corporate profits hit $3.8 trillion, 13% of GDP — a continuously rising curve since the 1990s that survived all those "funerals" without once bowing its head. The S&P 500 rose 242% in real terms from 2000 to 2026.
Then Sperber writes a sentence so calm it doesn't sound like a verdict:
Seen from the top — from the vantage point of the capitalists themselves — the mode of production is in rude health.
In rude health. Four words heavier than ten thousand theoretical articles.
Two Theorists Who Walked Into a Left Hook
If the article had stopped at diagnosis, it would already be powerful enough. But Sperber also takes care of two heavyweight academics — and that's the most entertaining part, because he uses debate, not invective.
Wolfgang Streeck, the German sociologist, spiritual pillar of left-wing theory. He tells a four-stage decline story: postwar golden age, then inflation, then debt, then post-2008 central bank dictatorship. The ending is called "the interregnum" — legitimacy evaporated, society dissolving, but capital still lingering like a body nobody has unplugged.
Sperber's rebuttal is technical, and that's where its force lies. He says: Streeck's entire narrative rests on an unstated premise — he treats the postwar three decades (Keynesianism, welfare state, moderate equality) as the "normal state" of capitalism, and uses it as a yardstick to measure everything after. Measured against it, of course everything looks like decline.
But what if the postwar three decades were the exception? What if capitalism never needed "high growth plus sound money plus social fairness" to function? Capitalism survived for a century inside what Streeck calls "crises" — surviving without dignity, to be sure, but surviving. Treating a brief exception as the norm and then writing endless eulogies for its disappearance — is that analysis, or nostalgia?
Branko Milanovic, former World Bank star economist. He offers another narrative: globalization created a class of "Homoploutic Elites" — people with both high income and high capital; China's rise pushed American workers down. The conclusion: neoliberalism is being replaced by "national market liberalism" — liberal at home, mercantilist abroad.
Sperber's response: four points, each cutting to the quick. The domestic/international boundary is impossible to draw clearly (which industrial policy today isn't both?); the "elite" definition is so broad it could include half of society; calling Trump an "anti-plutocrat" requires considerable imagination, given that the White House-Wall Street relationship can only be described as "intimate"; most fundamentally, Milanovic attributes everything to class reshuffling and China's rise, while ignoring that capitalists have their own material interests in industrial policy, and that geopolitics weighs far more than electoral politics.
This isn't to say Milanovic is entirely wrong, but that his framework is too narrow to contain reality.
The Real Problem
The article arrives at its conclusion, and it's an uncomfortable one.
Neoliberal ideology is indeed falling apart, and policies are indeed changing their costume. But the engine of capital accumulation is still running, and class domination — the only true constant of the past half-century — hasn't moved a hair.
What's more notable is the nature of this "transition." The move toward neoliberalism in the 1970s was planned, with vanguards: Thatcher and Reagan took office with blueprints, clear goals, and stunning execution, because they had just won a class war. Today's so-called "departure from neoliberalism" is piecemeal, implicit, passive. Nobody is leading, because there's no need — that war ended long ago, the capitalist side won, won so thoroughly that today's ruling class sincerely believes it is merely "responding to one shock after another."
Class domination is the thread that ties together the entire trajectory of neoliberalism.
This is what Sperber truly wants to say. You can celebrate the obsolescence of neoliberal rhetoric, you can cheer the return of interventionism. But as long as you haven't touched the accumulation regime layer — haven't touched the tax structure, labor relations, the operating logic of financialization — what you're celebrating is just the same play with different scenery. The scenery changed, the actors are still on stage, the lines changed, the script didn't.
So the next time someone tells you neoliberalism is dead — it's worth asking a follow-up. Ask what? Three questions: Whose assets shrank? Whose profits declined? Whose power was diminished?
If all three answers are "nobody" — then the ones holding the funeral are not neoliberalism's relatives, but those spectators who keep thinking this time it's really different. The coffin is empty. The inheritance has been collected. The banquet continues — they just changed the menu.