By some accounts, Western leaders have beaten the Left at its own game. A Conservative British prime minister has come around to enacting half of Labour’s demonized 2019 manifesto. Trump is intervening directly in the production decisions of large US corporations. And the center-right government of the largest German state is providing free food and drink for staff in all hospitals, care homes, and similar institutions.

Once again, establishment media have reason to proclaim that “we are all socialists now,” as Newsweek magazine did after Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package passed Congress at the height of the financial crisis in early 2009. A few months before that famous Newsweek cover, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had already mocked “comrade Bush” for being “to the left of me now” after announcing plans to invest heavily in large US banks in an attempt to stabilize them.

Then, as now, the intention behind throwing neoliberal dogma overboard is clear: capitalism has to be saved, by any means necessary. “To avert socialism, we must briefly become socialists,” a senior editor of conservative British newspaper The Times asserted in late March. But what kind of socialism is used to save capitalism from itself — and what does its “co-optation” mean for us?