In addition to the plasticity of organizational form, we need also to pay attention to the plasticity of desire. Freud said that the libidinal drives are “extraordinarily plastic”. If desire is not a fixed biological essence, then there is no natural desire for capitalism. Desire is always composed. Advertisers, branders and PR consultants have always known this, and the struggle against neoliberalism will require that we construct an alternative model of desire that can compete with the one pushed by capital’s libidinal technicians.

What’s certain is that we are now in an ideological wasteland in which neoliberalism is dominant only by default. The terrain is up for grabs, and Friedman’s remark should be our inspiration: it is now our task to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.