Neoliberalism as a political practice should not be read as a juxtaposition of (less) state against (more) market. As a set of policy practices, neoliberalism has been about a particular kind of state suited to the logic of capital in a specific historical phase of capitalist development. As such, it has been directed at reducing public services and assets in order to open-up the state sector to new profit-making opportunities; lowering wages, benefits and working conditions for a more flexible and market-dependent workforce; and deploying the coercive capacities of the state to enforce these «market measures». The politics of austerity that has emerged out of the Great Recession of 2008-10 takes further steps toward the «total privatization» of the public sector. It is enforced by a «disciplinary democracy» that ever more deploys anti-democratic measures that marginalizes, and even criminalizes, dissent in defense of austerity and market freedoms. It is ever more difficult to envision the «democratic capitalism» that has animated social democracy, even for its foremost theorists today, as a feasible alternative. This raises the question without providing any ready-made answers, of course, of the prospects for the radical democracy of socialism to re-emerge as the banner under which the political opposition against neoliberalism and capitalism is organized.