The coronavirus crisis and the dramatic economic reaction that followed it require a rethinking of critical theory and the political position of left-wing movements and organizations. The policy of quantitative expansion (known as printing money) and additional social and economic processes (the massive bailing out of business owners, directly funneling money from states to citizens, wide protest movements) led many to the optimistic impression that the neoliberal age characterized by shrinking state intervention was over, and that a new economic order was now rising, which, if accompanied by effective political organization, would allow the advancement of demands for social justice. This approach is being promoted by some of the leading intellectuals of critical leftist thought today, including Yanis Varoufakis, Nancy Fraser and Albena Azmanova. These intellectuals are right in claiming that the neoliberal era is over, even if is has not completely ended and some of its ills still persist. Criticism of capitalism is needed to re-examine its assumption at a time when the state is returning to playing a central role, and the relationship between citizens and the government is reorganizing in a new way – an age that Varoufakis calls “techno-feudalism” and Fraser calls “cannibalistic capitalism.” This observation seems to also require a different kind of criticism, whose focus is not rights and lack of rights, but the forms of social economic rule of the new age. This article wishes to argue that such criticism is in order but is missing in these intellectuals, who remain loyal to the normative liberal grammar, and therefore the solutions they offer do not rise to the challenge they themselves pose. Their criticism is limited to demands for regulation and an attempt to solve the capitalism crisis with more capitalism, supposedly reformed and more democratic. But the normative grammar of recognition and distribution upon which they base their theories only replicates the conflicts they wish to resolve – those between classes and sectors, between communal and state values, and between the Eastern and Western blocs. The article proposes reading the genre of contemporary capitalism critique against itself: to challenge the liberal normative grammar that remains as a stubborn remnant in these thinkers using the techno-feudal or cannibalistic economic criticism they offer themselves.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.56.2022.4367