“Today, it’s no longer about class struggle between capital and labor but about an economy that either serves life or death.” This remark by Gustavo Petro was at the center of a conference in Colombia on “The Economy for Life,” coorganized by the Progressive International, the Colombian government, and local think tanks. The phrase, cited by many participants, captures something real about the planetary crisis.

Climate change, external debt, extractivism, ecological destruction, hunger, and war all force us to ask what kind of economy is being organized and for whom. But it also reveals a danger in much of the contemporary progressive discourse: that is, the replacement of political economy with moral language.

An “economy for life” is a compelling slogan. Yet unless it is tied to the concrete interests of workers, distribution of income and power, and structures of global capitalism, it risks becoming too vague to guide policy. Neoliberalism has not been an abstract war against life in general. It has been, more specifically, a regime favorable to capital, as noted by David Harvey in his classic book on the subject. It has weakened labor, disciplined the periphery, restricted policy space, and reorganized the global economy around the requirements of capital accumulation. A serious alternative cannot simply be an economy for life in the abstract. It must be an economy organized around workers.