By Musa T. Bey

In this epoch of managed decline, where empire repackages its contradictions and oppression is marketed as opportunity, neoliberalism has gutted the revolutionary spirit and replaced it with simulations of resistance. The radical imagination has not only been imprisoned—it has been franchised. We are witnessing the slow, sophisticated suffocation of insurgent energy by a system that consumes rebellion and spits out brands, diversity slogans, and foundation grants.

Neoliberalism has become the ruling doctrine of racial capitalism. It sells us identity without power, visibility without autonomy, and equity without emancipation. Under its reign, revolution is no longer feared—it is curated. The revolutionary becomes a professional, the organizer becomes a consultant, and struggle becomes a commodity.

This is not a metaphor. This is a crisis. Neoliberalism is the death of the revolutionary.

I. The Corporate Hijacking of Liberation

Neoliberalism’s most cunning feature is its ability to absorb critique and repackage it as reform. Its method is not overt repression but subtle incorporation. Movements are not crushed by tanks—they are disarmed by funding, policy panels, and brand partnerships. In this moment of hyper-visibility and digital performance, the language of liberation is paraded across stages that were once battlegrounds.

Under the rule of neoliberal capital, “radical” now means marketable. The image of a fist raised in rebellion becomes the logo of a sneaker campaign. Pride banners fly from the same banks that finance border militarization. Corporate statements flood social media after every police murder, yet their portfolios continue to profit from prisons, policing, and gentrification.

Our enemies have learned how to speak the language of the movement. And in doing so, they have made it harder to distinguish revolution from performance, solidarity from simulation.

This is not accidental—it is strategic. It is a form of pacification. The very forces that once assassinated revolutionaries now pay for murals in their honor. What neoliberalism wants is not the end of resistance—it wants to choreograph it.

II. The Political Economy of Co-optation

Born out of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s, neoliberalism emerged not merely as an economic strategy but as a counter-revolutionary framework. It was a response to the radical uprisings, labor struggles, and decolonial movements that threatened to disrupt the global order of racial capitalism. Its architects sought not just to privatize public wealth but to dismantle collective power—especially among the Black working class, the colonized, and the politically organized poor.

Where Keynesian capitalism co-opted labor through the welfare state, neoliberalism disciplines labor through debt, surveillance, and abandonment. And it disciplines movements through assimilation. Its cultural arm doesn’t fight revolutionaries head-on—it funds their colleagues, gives platforms to the less confrontational, and creates a buffer class of brokers between empire and the oppressed.

Nonprofits become the new plantations. Foundations become the new political parties. And revolutionaries are offered positions in the machinery of reform—so long as they don’t speak too loudly, so long as they manage their people, so long as they don’t agitate for rupture.

This is the political economy of co-optation: offer proximity to power as a substitute for liberation, and weaponize representation to conceal continued domination.

III. From Revolutionaries to “Thought Leaders”

Neoliberalism does not fear radical ideas—it fears radical organization. And so, it champions a new kind of figure: the thought leader. These are not insurgents—they are influencers with analysis. They are not building dual power—they are building brands.

The thought leader is the evolutionary product of the neoliberal marketplace of dissent. They provide critique without disruption. They perform rage without risk. Their politics are polished, their language rehearsed, their platforms sponsored. And the system rewards them for keeping it that way.

The rise of the thought leader coincides with the decline of the cadre—the rooted, disciplined revolutionary forged through political education, collective struggle, and class confrontation. The former relies on exposure and individual charisma. The latter depends on accountability and collective responsibility.

This shift is more than symbolic—it is structural. As movements become spectacles, struggle becomes individualistic. As politics becomes a media product, mass organization collapses into personal brands. The revolutionary tradition is not only being erased—it is being replaced.

IV. When Revolutionaries Enter the Academy

Nowhere is this shift more devastating than in the university.

The academy—once a target of revolutionary critique—now functions as a soft landing zone for former revolutionaries. In this new order, the university extends an invitation to those with a past in struggle, offering prestige, pay, and platforms—so long as they domesticate their fire.

In this environment, radical theory is separated from radical practice. Movements are historicized into irrelevance. Revolutionary memory is turned into curriculum. Students are trained not to organize, but to theorize organizing. And those with the loudest critiques of empire are often the most removed from its frontline battles.

There is nothing inherently wrong with scholarship. But when revolutionaries become academics without a tether to struggle, they become absorbed into the very institutions we once sought to dismantle. They are celebrated as “voices” while their movements wither. Their work is cited, but their politics are neutralized.

Worse still, the academy often functions as a gatekeeper—deciding which knowledge is legitimate, which struggle is respectable, and which histories are worth preserving. It confers authority to those who speak its language, and invisibilizes those who organize beyond it.

The price of entry is often silence.

V. The Black Radical Tradition vs. Neoliberal Captivity

The Black radical tradition stands in direct opposition to this neoliberal captivity. It does not seek reform—it seeks rupture. It does not seek access—it seeks autonomy. It is not interested in being recognized by empire—it seeks to bury it.

This tradition is not a theoretical artifact. It is a living insurgency, born from maroon societies, slave rebellions, anti-colonial struggles, and revolutionary experiments in self-governance. It is the spirit of Harriet Tubman outwitting plantation systems. It is the organizing brilliance of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. It is the internationalist fire of Claudia Jones and the prison writings of George Jackson.

The Black radical tradition refuses to be absorbed. It understands that any attempt to exist comfortably within the institutions of our oppression is a betrayal of those who died fighting them.

To carry forward this tradition is not to quote it—it is to embody it.

VI. Resurrecting the Revolutionary

To resurrect the revolutionary, we must reject the incentives of assimilation. We must unlearn the performance politics of the neoliberal age and return to the hard, slow, and necessary work of building power from below.

This means study—not just academic reading, but political education rooted in struggle. It means structure—not just social media clout, but disciplined organization. It means strategy—not just slogans, but long-term plans for dual power and collective survival.

We must rebuild the infrastructures that neoliberalism destroyed: autonomous political organizations, people’s assemblies, radical study groups, popular defense networks, and international solidarity campaigns. We must move from critique to construction—from hashtags to bases of power.

And we must remember: no amount of representation, no grant, no academic post, no endorsement, and no media platform can substitute for revolutionary struggle.

Let us not mourn the revolutionary. Let us resurrect them in our work, in our politics, and in our uncompromising commitment to liberation.

Neoliberalism has killed the revolutionary in form—but not in spirit. Beneath the ruins of co-optation, the seeds of rebellion remain.

Water them. Organize them. Fan the flames.