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memories lie in a world that disappeared in the other century. The memories of the revolutionary feats populate pages of a literature of minorities, or of a history alien to the mainstream current history. Mass politics with a view to profound social change is an undreamed of dreams today. Many who were left, became liberals and neoliberals; perhaps they think they have matured, perhaps they judge that they lived nightmares, perhaps they believe in nothing; survive, vegetate in comfort, no more thinking about humanity and what is human. Do not think, sans phrases. in the style of movement woke. A comfort disturbed by anxiety.
Left meant having the mind and the desire to achieve socialism. An open desire for the death of capitalism. The end of the exploitation of workers by capital. The burial of alienated work. The expiration of the lie involved in the mercantile exchange between capital and the labor force. Overcoming the society in which it appears natural
that some live on capital gains (industrial profit, commercial profit, financial profit and real estate income), and others on salary. It is that, you know, some were born for the former, and others, for salary. Natural: nature gives birth and breeds capitalists and wage-earners and others exploited by capital.
The dream of overcoming was great, and today he sleeps so soundly that he seems dead and buried. Although the structural nature of society is the same, and its social devastation worsened with neoliberal globalization. But the masks of their scams are falling apart. Before, the law was for everyone and we were all (so called) equal before the law. Today the law is naked: it is an instrument of power. Those below perceive it, and that is an operation of immense value in the consciousness of the dominated, even if they cannot use it to manipulate it in their favor, as the ruling class does. But there is no cheating.
The capitals have concentrated without stopping. The few become fabulously millionaires; even so, now they are in a greater hurry, and greater is their greed to accumulate. The inequality thus engendered is the most acute in history, and those few at the top are not willing to cede any of their ground. livestock
. Their own immense accumulation frightens them: this can’t last, says his behavior: but more, I want more. They are not appeased by the far-right discourse: the poor are poor because they are brutes; the poor deserve to be poor. Although this goofy speech is also impotence. The non-polarizing claim shows its truth.
The 20th century was shaped by industrial development and colonial capitalism, but also by the resistance of the people, and by a threat that could bring them down: the socialist left. That is why capital gave in: the rise of unionism, workers’ parties, labor rights, social security, the welfare state, the end of the old colonial system. The left won and inspired. However, neoliberal globalization, which sank the USSR, also sank the socialist left, which could not leave inspiration for a 21st century left.
Not everything is profit for neoliberalism. Not much less. Neoliberalism created an intemperate and ruthless capitalism, obsessed with capitalizing on education, health, water, ports, roads, and everything that was previously a public service. Neoliberalism put capitalism against the wall with its increasingly frequent crises; there is less and less to commodify; Capitalism is now on the razor’s edge with its already manifest inability to boost productivity again, the historical source of all its successes. The financial and digital capitalism of the 21st century cannot retrace the path followed by neoliberal stupidity. As if that were not enough, neoliberalism was the vehicle to turn China into a planetary power: it produced the adversary of the historical capitalist powers, which will be displaced, unless nuclear war prevents everything.
The 21st century left is a thousand-headed hydra that cannot learn from the experience of the 20th century left. A thousand heads that think and act in response to particular challenges, driven by the indignation caused by the great diversity of detestable living conditions of the majority of the planet. It is different from the left of the 20th century, which acted more or less unified in its theoretical and programmatic foundations, based on diverse national conditions.
The 21st century left has to deal with the climate catastrophe; of the transforming force of anti-patriarchal feminism; of the new world of imperialist geopolitics, with the emergence at the same time of a new bloc of emerging powers of a different nature from the imperialist center formed in the last century. With her thousand heads, that hydra has only one body. The path of anti-capitalism in the 21st century will be a new meeting of international society with itself.
