The whole promise of neoliberalism is that finally everybody will be treated as an individual. It won’t be about groups, ethnicity, race, sex, or any other unchosen characteristic. Neoliberalism was supposed to free an individual from any unchosen group identity. We were going to give it a pass on every problem it creates in exchange for the wonderful boon of liberating the individual.
The pass was extended but in return all we got was group identities becoming more important than ever.
What is the point then? Why should we subscribe to this setup? What’s in it for us?
Clarissa's Blog 
Your premise is important but I think there is a more pressing question to ask, and if possible, to answer.
In the Neoliberal paradise promised, the individual is supposed to reign as a sovereign. Everyone, regardless of any characteristic assigned at birth in Neoliberal parlance – be it ethnic national religious sexual or of any other kind – will be given his or her due.
The reality that this promise has given birth to is nightmarishly different: everyone is assigned to a very closely determined category from which escape is impossible, and this on the basis of a politically determined and rigidly fixed hierarchy that acts as a kind of bonus giver or bonus taker. They – the Neoliberals I mean – call it intersectionality: it works as a pyramid and it revolves around the concept of oppression: the most oppressed on top, the oppressors on the bottom.
This is nothing new, really: to those who have studied Marxism and the Bolshevik revolution these concepts will appear eerily familiar. Which is why you call the new Masters Neoliberals, but Neo-Marxists would work just as well, and ultimately Neo-Hegelians would be even better.
So, how did the revolution that promised to liberate everyone end up imprisoning most people into the cages of their unchosen characteristics with a few winners on top who are the enforcers of the new ideology?
The fact is that individuals do not exist in a vacuum. In fact, no individual can exist in a vacuum. The totally free individual can only be a hermit or a madman. All individuals exist within groups, from a couple – the most basic group – to the family – the fundamental cell of any society – to the parish to the village to the city to the region to the state, in an unbroken chain that gives further and further meaning to the myriad aspects of which any individual is constituted.
Thanks to technology, today no groups is necessary: individuals are atomised self-sufficient cells that are supposed to exist autonomously as mere consumers and, to a lesser extent (again, technology), producers, who eat shit and die – pardon my French.
The freedom promised by the Neoliberal creed cannot be reached because it’s predicated on the destruction of society as we have known it for the past two hundred years at least in the West, slightly longer in a few lucky European states. In a society where people are divided into oppressor/oppressed categories there is no freedom possible for the majority of people, including most self-predicated oppressed people. There can only be great opportunities for grifters and scammers, as was the case with the so-called “trained Marxist” founders of the BLM movement who ended up buying million-dollar mansions for themselves and their families, just as the case was in olden days for the Nomenklatura of the Politburo of the Soviet Union.
The Neoliberal “free individual” is a fantasy, a mirage that people with power flash around to keep the “useful idiots of the revolution” running. And it’s tragic that among those useful idiots the majority are women and young people, offering their executioners the rope with which they themselves will be hanged. But then, it was the same story with the tricoteuses during the French Revolution, and that is precisely when it all started, this nightmare called history from which we seem unable to wake up.
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These are excellent observations, thank you. The neoliberal freedom is an illusion because we are bound not only to each other but to our physical reality. A guy who transed himself will forever sit there wondering why he’s in so much pain yet still doesn’t look remotely like a woman. A physics department that hasn’t hired in a decade because there are no black female physicists on the job market will be closed down for failure to teach the Physics major courses (true story). The guy who picked up and left many times in search of better opportunities will have a sad and lonely old age. People who play this game earnestly and sincerely end up losing. It’s not kind even to the most faithful and eager players.
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Avi
Well done — possibly the Groypers may wake us up.
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LOL, c’mon Kid, undermining western civilization was the entire point of centuries of Marxist/feminist revolutions. Simply destroy that nasty identity group that creats, builds, and maintain the West, and we will all finally reach Utopia ;-D
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