[...] it is by no means true that these sectors of the population are furious because the 'cultural left' is calling for a third toilet for transgender persons. They are furious because they have the feeling that such demands are getting lots of attention, while their own economic and social situation is not being given any attention at all.

[...] Anyone who comes forward with the implicit promise 'Vote for us because we shall make sure that things will only get worse slowly!' may just as well hand over the keys of office to the leader of the nearest right-wing populist party. What we need, finally, is what Barack Obama has called 'the audacity of hope'.

[...] the left was not established so as to have things easy but in order to bring about the impossible. It was created to improve the world and the condition of human beings in the teeth of adversity and apparent hopelessness, to fight for human rights and democracy and to flood the societies of the world with democracy.

[...] The market remains the reference point for all aspects of life. Pierre Bourdieu has called such mechanisms symbolic violence. We have now internalized the market and regard it as self-evident; we assent to its logic, partly willingly, partly against our will. In neoliberalism the burden of self-restraint, of permanent sublimation, is great. We have always to be happy to compete, to compare to measure ourselves against others and to optimize. Unreasonable demands, setbacks, humiliations and failures have to be chalked up to oneself--and then we just have to wait cheerfully for new opportunities. [...]

[...] Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nations. The promised service economy and knowledge-based society turned out to be smaller than the industrial society that was fast disappearing; hence a constant expansion of the numbers of people who were no longer needed, the surplus population of a revived capitalism on the move, watching helplessly and uncomprehendingly the transformation of the tax state into the debt state and finally into the consolidation state [...]

[...] the surviving Blair supporters in the Labour Party believed they could persuade their traditional voters to remain in the EU with a lengthy catalogue of the economic benefits of membership, without taking the uneven distribution of those benefits into account.It did not occur to a liberal public cut off from the everyday experience of the groups and regions in decline that the electorate might have wanted the government they had installed o show greater interest in their concerns than in international agreements. [...]

[...] The Berlin Wall [...] signified that capitalism was not the only option, that an alternative to it, although a failed one, existed. By contrast, the walls that we see rising today [...] don't stand for the division between capitalism and communism but for a division that is strictly immanent to the global capitalist order. [...]

[...] Why then should the left leave this field of nationalist passions to the radical right [...] Could the radical left not mobilize these same nationalist passions as a mighty weapons against the dominant force in today's global society, the increasingly unfettered reign of rootless financial capital? [...]