[We publish here our translation into English of Barbaria’s article about the ascent to power of a new crop of right-wing politicians around the world and the leftist invocation of the fascist threat, which becomes a clarion call for workers to defend capitalist democracy.
Also available in the original Spanish and Portuguese.]
In the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a new political phenomenon within the coordinates of capital, which has been given names such as the new far right, populist right, alt-right, and neo-fascism. The difficulty of giving this phenomenon a precise name is perhaps the first symptom of the novelty it represents but let us not get ahead of ourselves.
Before addressing whether this phenomenon is genuinely new, it is important to examine the response from the capitalist left—institutional or otherwise. Recent years have also seen, alongside the rise of right-wing populism, a resurgence of antifascism on a scale unseen for many decades. The capitalist left has almost unanimously categorized this phenomenon as “fascism,” framing its resurgence as part of a “global reactionary wave,” supposedly forming an ultraright-wing international aimed at crushing the rights and freedoms granted to us by democracy and even leaping toward a model that is no longer capitalist, but techno-feudal. [1]
From this perspective, our task as activists, and even more so as citizens, would be to set aside our interests as proletarians and join the progressive bourgeoisie in trying to stop fascism once again. There is no room for disquisitions or programmatic purism when the greatest, almost absolute, evil rises before us.
The progressive bourgeoisie is aware of the effect that pressing the antifascist button has in mobilizing a considerable portion of the electorate in its favor. Victories such as those of Macron, Biden, Lula, and Boric are clear examples of this use of antifascism when the left’s real margin for implementing reforms within capitalist states has been exhausted. By contrast, when we look at the use of antifascism in the radical milieu, what it reveals is the influence that the counter-revolution and its camps still exert, despite their waning popularity. We can find no better way to explain this than by beginning once again with the time-honored method of historical materialism.
1. The Right Since 1945
According to the profound analyses of the left, one might well conclude that, in reality, the right has not changed at all over the last century and that, if it has appeared to change, this is merely because of the shame and humiliation caused by the defeats of fascism and Nazism in the Second World War. What matters is that, beneath these changes, the same fascist essence has remained—the infamous authoritarian personality described by Adorno, characteristic of people with conservative tendencies—which would resurface when the conditions were right, as is supposedly happening now.
In general, much of the antifascist movement adopts this kind of essentialist interpretation of the right wing, which, as we will see later, attempts to evade historical analysis altogether. From this perspective, there would be a category—fascism—that is projected directly onto reality in order to give it form, in the purest style of the idealism that so captivated the rising bourgeoisie. However, an important part of our task of clarification as revolutionaries is to ground these phenomena in reality so that we can understand their origins and how to respond to them. To this end, we will recall a phrase by Marx that is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it:
“The mode of production of material life determines the social, political, and intellectual process of life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
In this sense, the period immediately following the end of World War II saw economic development proceed at an unprecedented pace, as part of the continuation of the socialization of capital that had begun in the pre-war period. Unprecedented economic development and state intervention went hand in hand during these years, generating a consensus across the left and right—the Bretton Woods agreements—under which public policies implemented by a strong state, with union support, became the foundation of development. To a large extent, this continued the policies of capitalist socialization initiated by fascism in Europe, as well as by the Roosevelt administration in the United States and Stalinism in Russia. Thus, various social security systems emerged in the United States and Western Europe, pooling the costs of workers’ upkeep, alongside public housing programs and the extension of water and electricity to every corner of the state. This was the era of what has been called the “Welfare State,” during which Keynesian economics became the guiding principle of the democratic bourgeoisie, giving rise to a new social stratum, the middle class, which for a time seemed to leave the antagonism between classes definitively behind. It was midnight in the 20th century, and the counter-revolution was at its peak in both the Western and Soviet blocs.
It was at this time that more or less two-party systems were established in all the democratic powers, with a strongly interventionist social democracy alternating in power with a Christian democracy that drew heavily on the Social Doctrine of the Church, grounding its interventionism in charity and the fair distribution of wealth. The right wing in this form was far from liberal, whether in the classical sense—anathema since 1929—or in the sense in which we understand the term today. It was generally critical of the excesses of capitalism and believed they needed to be curbed through a strong state. This statism combined with staunch anti-communism within the context of growing imperialist tensions between the United States and the USSR, providing further proof, if any were needed, that state intervention in the economy is not a symptom of socialism. This tendency manifested itself regardless of whether states were democratic or not, giving rise to powerful political machines such as the Christian Democrats in Italy, Gaullism in France, and the CDU in West Germany, as well as trends in Spain such as the technocrats of Opus Dei within the Franco regime and, outside it, many members of what the regime’s press called the “Munich conspiracy.” Later, it would play a key role in the Spanish transition to democracy through Suárez’s UCD party. The closest example of this type of right wing in the United States was the Eisenhower administration (1953–61), which not only maintained the public policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations but expanded them through the construction of public housing and massive highways across the country, along with the emergence of the suburban model for the new middle classes. The American way of life had been born, and it was destined to spread throughout the world.
It was not shame over defeat that drove them to implement these policies—Eisenhower himself was, after all, one of the generals involved in the defeat of Nazi Germany in Western Europe—but rather the need for capital to socialize itself in order to develop its productive forces to a new level. This development of the productive forces, in contradiction with the capitalist relations of production that gave rise to it, produced an overaccumulation of capital that brought this period of economic prosperity to an end. The difficulty of obtaining profits sufficient to compensate for the falling rate of profit, driven by productivity growth and fierce global competition among capitals, brought three decades of economic dynamism to an end.
The slowdown in investment was accompanied by inflation stemming from the costs of the Vietnam War, as well as the 1973 oil crisis, which arose as retaliation by Arab countries against those that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This led to a recession that lasted until 1975 and was characterized by a combination of high inflation and high unemployment. The state had been essential in previous decades, absorbing some of the costs of production through public works programs, facilitating credit for businesses, and establishing mechanisms for social dialogue to ensure that wage costs remained below productivity growth. However, the solutions implemented to overcome the 1929 crisis, in which the state had played a part, had simply carried those contradictions to a new level. Once this point was reached, state intervention, once part of the solution, became part of the problem. Thus, the socialist policies of previous decades began to hinder economic recovery, which was delayed until the early 1980s. This required a new direction, one that, in the case of the right wing, had already begun to emerge in the mid-1960s.
2. The Neoconservative Right
During these years, the common-sense notion that public spending needed to be cut to boost capital accumulation began to gain traction across the political spectrum, on both the left and the right. Thus, the 1970s and 1980s saw massive cuts in social benefits—as well as stricter eligibility requirements—and in aid to certain economic sectors, especially industry.
Numerous companies—either on their own initiative or at the behest of the state—closed their factories in Europe and the United States, relocating them to countries on the periphery of capitalism where production costs were lower. Governments across the political spectrum—from Reagan and Thatcher to González, Clinton, and Blair—implemented these policies, amid significant social unrest throughout the period. The return to non-interventionist policies recalled the classical liberalism that had prevailed before the Great Depression, hence the left’s frequent use of the term “neoliberal,” which, however, we do not consider appropriate, since the 1980s had witnessed a process of capital socialization that could not have been foreseen at the beginning of the century and that gave these policies conditions different from those of classical liberalism. The left’s response to the needs of capitalism during this period was the so-called Third Way, which triumphed in the 1990s under Clinton, Blair, and Schröder, among others. They implemented or expanded these economic measures while combining them with progressive social policies such as environmental protection and the recognition of LGBT rights. It was no longer simply a matter of removing barriers to investment and economic development, as had been the case with early 20th-century liberalism; rather, the state intervened to remove them by reducing tax rates. These different conditions are why, as we have pointed out, we do not consider the term neoliberal appropriate.
The expansion of the state had already faced criticism from the right, even when it was operating at full capacity and showed no signs of crisis. The most notable of these critics was probably the Republican Barry Goldwater, who campaigned in 1964 on cutting public spending and privatizing services, as well as rejecting state intervention in social affairs [2], while strongly opposing trade unionism and communism and advocating the normalization of nuclear weapons use. His campaign was a complete failure, and President Johnson won by one of the largest margins in American democratic history. At the time, Goldwater was seen as a far-right fanatic capable of starting a nuclear war, thereby endangering democracy and the fragile balance with the USSR. Over time, however, he came to be seen as a visionary who had anticipated in his platform many of the policies that would be implemented two decades later.
One of those who supported that failed campaign was—not by chance—the future president Reagan, who delivered his A Time for Choosing speech, which would eventually become a foundational landmark of neoconservatism. His presidency (1981–89) saw the dismantling of many of the programs of the previous administration. Reagan adopted a new supply-side approach to economics: an attempt to stimulate the economy by incentivizing production and investment through tax breaks, tax cuts, and wage adjustments, in contrast to the demand-side approach that had dominated previous decades. However, in a context of economic stagnation, these policies, coupled with increasing military spending, would lay the groundwork for the structural deficit of the American economy. In the United Kingdom, the first manifestation of this was the Thatcher government (1979–90), characterized by similarly drastic cuts in public spending, an equally aggressive foreign policy, and the suppression of the class struggles that had begun during the 1970s, most notably the Welsh miners’ strike of 1984–85. The loss of power by trade unions was a significant feature of this period, given their inability to challenge the state and, above all, their demonstrated ability to convince the proletariat that struggle and strikes were futile. This era also witnessed the rise of open markets worldwide and relatively weak borders, with the right also commonly promoting migration and pathways for the regularization of new workers. Key examples can be found in Reagan’s farewell address, the regularization policies of George W. Bush, and the mass regularization of migrants carried out by conservative governments in Western Europe.
The suppression of class struggles would accelerate the atomization of the proletariat, giving rise to a new morality of an individualistic nature or, failing that, to a search for new forms of community in religion. This explains the rise of religious conservatism—especially in the form of evangelicalism—throughout the Americas during these years, given that, with the retreat of the state, many of the welfare functions it had previously performed were now being covered by religious communities [3]. This contrasted with the liberation theology of the 1960s and 1970s, which influenced the peasantry and was aligned with Stalinism in Latin America. North Africa and the Levant would witness a similar movement—Islamism—following the failure of Arab “socialism” and the triumph of the ayatollahs in Iran in 1979. In both cases, the shift from a statist to a non-interventionist political model brought about a change from forms of religiosity with a reformist bent, accepting separation from the state, to others of a communitarian nature, tending toward integration with the state. Evangelicalism and Islamism are often cited as the most emblematic examples of this new religiosity, but it can also be found in other faiths, such as the Charismatic Renewal—and, more generally, in forms of charismatic liturgy—the rise of traditionalism within Catholicism, the Sokka Gakkai movement in Buddhism, and Hindu religious nationalism, or Hindutva. To single out evangelicalism and Islamism as the sole causes of this shift, or to label them as “reactionary” faiths in contrast to the “progressive” religiosity of the 1960s and 1970s, would be shortsighted enough to kill the messenger of our time. In short, the separation between politics and religion, once a consensus, is now being challenged, and confessional references in politics—especially in the United States—are becoming increasingly common, not only as a public profession of faith but also as a key element in shaping political discourse. The Reagan administration’s efforts to reinstate prayer in public schools are particularly noteworthy. The George W. Bush administration would also demonstrate this by, for example, banning stem-cell research.
Deregulation policies, which favored a massive influx of foreign capital, coupled with the speculative spiral in the real-estate and credit sectors that characterized the 2000s [4], were called into question when the housing bubble burst in 2007. The consequences of this bubble triggered a global recession the following year, due to a loss of confidence in these financial products and, consequently, a lack of liquidity in the markets. Once again, it was capitalism’s very growth—and not simply the greed of real-estate speculators [5]—that generated its crisis through overaccumulation, erupting with even greater force than in the 1970s. Major central banks had to intervene and, in many cases, nationalize or bail out some of the largest banks, while many others went bankrupt. Unemployment soared to levels seen during the Great Depression, and millions were unable to continue paying their mortgages, resulting in widespread evictions and persistent job insecurity. In many countries, including Spain, purchasing power has still not recovered to 2008 levels, and unemployment rates remain above 10%. This crisis was bound to trigger a market downturn and, consequently, further political upheaval on both sides of the political spectrum.
3. The Age of Populism
The years following the outbreak of the 2008 crisis saw the implementation of draconian austerity measures worldwide, particularly severe in Southern European countries. In all of them, debt repayment and interest payments to the ECB for bank bailouts were prioritized over any other budgetary expenditure [6]. This entailed cuts to and privatization of numerous public services, as well as reductions in pensions, tax increases, a higher retirement age, and a freeze on public-sector wages. Similarly, labor reforms were enacted that reduced severance pay and increased temporary employment, creating a large segment of the working class that could no longer guarantee the maintenance and reproduction of its labor power through wages. Likewise, since 2008, the once-powerful middle class has largely disappeared, with most of its members becoming proletarianized.
In northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, however, the idea spread that the bailouts of southern European countries were an effort by their systems to rescue countries that, in a common expression at the time, “had been living beyond their means,” and that it might be more convenient to devote those resources to maintaining their own stability while allowing the southern European economies—especially Greece—to leave the euro. This was the same slogan imposed on the proletariat worldwide after the outbreak of the crisis: we had been living beyond our means. Who had been living beyond their means? The workers who were granted loans even though it was already known that there was a high risk they would be unable to repay them? Or the bourgeoisie, which could only continue inflating the bubble while knowing [7] that this growth did not correspond to an increase in the productivity of the economy?
The perfect breeding ground had formed for a new wave of class mobilizations, which would explode in 2011. That year, proletarians from all over the world, from China to the United States and across Latin America, Europe, and the Arab world, took to the streets to protest the worsening of their living conditions caused by the austerity measures being imposed by different governments. Their demands also revealed a crisis of political representation—the memory of “They do not represent us” remains—that has only deepened since then.
During this period, the bourgeoisie faced the contradiction between a capitalism that could only grow, increasing the global interdependence of its various centers, and the need to retreat into the national sphere. The massive influx of foreign capital—and the competition associated with it—was one of the causes of the bubble and the subsequent economic crisis.
The mobilization of the proletariat meant that, initially, it was the left that attempted to articulate these contradictions and demands within the framework of institutional politics. Thus, in the countries of southern Europe, forces to the left of traditional social democracy rose to prominence, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. These forces sought to address the crisis through pronounced economic nationalism, including the nationalization of companies and services and increased public investment, at the cost of repudiating the debt to the ECB, entering into direct conflict with this foreign power and its point of reference, Germany, and attempting to challenge its authority. The prospect of regaining their previous conditions through the intention to maintain the default on the debt incurred was enough to awaken the hopes of many proletarians, crushed by years of cuts and public humiliation.
At the same time, the wars that erupted following the failure of protests to overthrow some of the previous regimes in the Arab world—especially in Syria—as well as the rise of Islamist terrorism—with ISIS as the de facto state—triggered the mass exodus of millions of Syrians—a quarter of the country’s total population—and Afghans to Europe beginning in 2014. They entered with great difficulty through Greece—despite the agreement between the EU and Turkey for Turkey to retain them—bound for Germany, which ultimately took in 800,000 Syrian refugees. Far-right forces would exploit the rejection of this segment of the population by certain sectors of society to expand the space for new far-right forces such as the AfD in Germany and Vox in Spain, and for the massive growth of already established ones such as the Lega in Italy, the FPÖ in Austria, and the FN in France. Similarly, the perception that migration was becoming a social and labor problem for American workers began to take shape around 2015 with the MAGA movement—and its leader, the future president Trump—within the Republican Party, which began openly discussing the need to complete the wall separating the United States from Mexico. The unifying element of all these expressions is, once again, economic nationalism: migrant labor competes with native-born workers, driving wages down, and receives a disproportionate share of public assistance compared with native-born workers. Furthermore, the factories that relocated to other countries in the 1980s and 1990s are helping them compete against their former locations, so their return must be forced.
The failed [8] experiences of the alternative left in government, together with the persistence of problems stemming from the 2008 crisis and discontent with a new green austerity, have exhausted many of the foundations on which this new left was built [9], ultimately shifting the political axis to the right, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic—and the crisis that followed it—and the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a prelude to the imperialist escalation in which we currently find ourselves. Many of these aspects have already been discussed, but the question that arises is: how should this new phenomenon be classified? Is it a new form of fascism?
4. A Historical Note: What is this new Right Wing?
To answer this question, we must analyze the facts using our method: historical materialism. We therefore return to Marx’s words mentioned at the beginning of this piece: the formation of consciousness depends on social circumstances. In this sense, the current context is very different from that of a century ago. To begin with, and as we have already pointed out, capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century had not yet made the leap toward the socialization it would undergo after the Great Depression. The dominant ideology until then had been classical liberalism, whose aversion to state intervention permeated even radical circles [10]. Fascism emerged after the First World War as part of capital’s need to concentrate in order to resume its growth after the conflict, within the framework of an economic crisis that devastated the German economy until 1923, coupled with the bourgeoisie’s fear of the triumph of proletarian revolution in Italy during the Biennio Rosso (Red Biennium). To achieve this consolidation, it was necessary to forge cohesion among the various factions of the national bourgeoisie, since social democracy had already crushed any possibility of autonomous proletarian activity. This cohesion was achieved through public policies geared toward autarky—the level of economic interdependence we see today did not yet exist—and implemented by authoritarian governments, as well as by fostering a sense of unity based on the grievances suffered under the Treaty of Versailles. This sense of grievance would give political expression to the need to invest capital in other markets, thus initiating the voracious imperialist escalation that would soon lead to the Second World War.
Thus, we can see that the context then was radically different from today’s. First, capitalism today has far less room for reform and is incapable of generating such consensus, with very similar economic policies coexisting with heightened imperialist tensions between different states and a tendency toward the formation of economic and military imperialist blocs. The crisis of political representation causes these expressions to take on more extravagant forms [11], breaking with the institutional normality of previous periods. However, the break with this formal normality does not imply a break with democratic institutions themselves, which are rarely questioned. In the absence of a class struggle that compels it [12], the populist right does not need to stage coups or break with institutions because it wins—and loses—elections and transforms institutions from within, applying and expanding existing legality [13].
Similarly, the populist right does not generate any kind of consensus [14], not even among the bourgeoisie, with its figures generating more doubts than certainties. It may maneuver to discredit its opponents, a behavior also found on the left, but it does not prohibit their existence or their ability to express themselves publicly [15]. The function of the populist right is to try to cope with the national retreat of economies without losing its share of the global pie, in a context where imperialist tensions are accelerating the escalation toward war on all fronts and the role that the United States had played as the sole superpower since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 is increasingly being questioned. Ultimately, it is the imperialism inherent in all states that prevails over the bourgeoisie’s desire to retreat and take a break from global competition. To illustrate this, the initial balance in the second Trump administration between Vice President Vance—an isolationist—and Secretary of State Rubio—an interventionist hawk—is now shifting in favor of the latter. In any case, this right wing is as capitalist as any other, with no sign of transforming social relations from capitalism to a new feudalism. One lesson to be learned from this is that the level of self-awareness of the bourgeoisie is irrelevant, as are its particular aspirations: capital is an impersonal and automatic social relation, and the bourgeoisie is a vector in its reproduction. There is no effective Machiavellianism in the actions of the bourgeois class, but rather the fulfillment of a function that must be abolished by the revolutionary proletariat.
It is important to note that when we argue that there is an economic determinism in the formation of political ideas, we are not referring to a mechanical link, but rather to a process of organic development. There are always moments of coexistence and mutual influence between ideologies corresponding to different periods. Thus, fascism coexisted with liberalism throughout the 1920s and did not expand in its various forms until the following decade. Similarly, as we have already seen, a neoconservative like Goldwater was already advancing his platform in the 1960s, just as Christian democracy coexisted with neoconservatism during the 1970s and 1980s, despite being an obsolete approach—as shown, for example, by the impotence of the UCD governments in Spain or the institutional decay of 1980s Italy, dominated for decades by the Christian Democrats—and the first Trump administration was full of neoconservatives who had previously worked with Bush.
Understanding determinism as a mechanism would be the other side of the coin of the same idealism that underpins the left’s interpretation of the period under capital in its various forms. The left takes the category of fascism, as we noted at the beginning, and projects it onto reality in order to give it form. Reality needs our categories, just as the proletariat does, because on its own it is a formless, disorganized, and meaningless expanse. In this respect, the left under capital remains as attached to Kantianism as reformism was in the debates of the Second International, thereby avoiding the discomfort produced by historical change. The left’s recourse to fascism operates in the manner of myths, as understood by the scholar of religions Mircea Eliade—a militant fascist, indeed: the myth presents us with a problem originally solved outside of history; if we reproduce the myth step by step, we can solve the problem exactly as it was solved then. In this way, fascism ceases to be an ideology, segregated from the needs of capitalism during that period, and becomes a problem to be solved that can arise at any moment, even a personality trait that can emerge in any of us, forcing us to constantly monitor ourselves. Antifascism, as a myth, offers us a series of steps (the popular front, the mass party, hegemony over the class, the repression of the uncontrollable…) which, if properly replicated, will allow us to preserve the current democracy with all its apparatus of rights. History disappears from the analysis, and with it the perspective of human emancipation. From this point of view, we live in a kind of cyclical time in which a decadent capital and an impotent proletariat [16] duel eternally. Leftism’s fixation on historical memory is more akin to fetishism, to remembering the steps of the myth, than to explaining social change. Listing facts without considering their causes and the stage of capitalist development in which they occurred has, in this sense, the same historical value as the steps in an instruction manual: first this, then that… and why?
We do not intend to offer an intellectualist view of the value of history here; we do not subscribe to the common notion that “those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.” We simply do not believe that history repeats itself, but this does not diminish the value of understanding it. On the contrary, understanding the history of the workers’ movement, following the historical thread woven by our class comrades over time, is one of our tasks as a historical party. Unearthing our historical thread from the burial imposed by the counter-revolution allows us to take stock of what has happened and continue clarifying our class’s position, to develop “a theory of counter-revolution,” in Bordiga’s words. This assessment is not merely an instruction manual for solving specific and partial problems, but rather the method that allows us to understand the extent to which the past has created the conditions of the present, and how the present, in turn, is creating the future society: communism. Not surprisingly, all our activity is directed toward that end—communism—beyond the intrigues between the various bourgeois factions. We do not need to hatch plans or form coalitions with this or that faction, because we have already chosen. Capitalism has spawned different ideological forms throughout its history, yes, but the first of them, the one that questions it entirely, was born from its very soil the moment it appeared. Our comrades have witnessed the rise and fall of all kinds of ideological forms in government, from monarchical absolutism and traditionalism to the new populist right, but communism has outlasted them all insofar as it is not simply another ideology, but a complete overhaul of the existing system, from its inception to the present day. Throughout all this time, our objective has remained constant: the emancipation of humankind in a classless society. That is our sole task: yesterday, today, and until the day of the revolution.
Barbaria – July 2026
[1] Some luminaries of the progressive bourgeoisie, such as former Greek minister Varoufakis, point in this direction.
[2] This led him to reject the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it interfered with individual freedom to conduct business, even though he himself had racially integrated his businesses in the 1930s. Nevertheless, this rejection led the segregated South to vote Republican for the first time in these elections.
[3] Not surprisingly, and despite the obvious differences, this was one of the reasons for Christianity’s initial success: the crisis of the Roman Empire in the third century meant that many of the functions it had previously performed were taken over by Christian communities. When the state recovered, despite strong reservations, it had no choice but to accept the fait accompli and lift the ban on Christianity.
[4] In this regard, the data provided by the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, in early 2009 are illustrative, highlighting the sixfold increase in foreign capital in the American economy over the previous fifteen years: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20090414a.htm
[5] It is a common—and very convenient—position on the left wing of capitalism to point to the real-estate and financial sectors as solely responsible for the crisis—the reactionary capitalists—as opposed to the industrial sector—the good guys—which, had it been maintained, would have prevented it. Capitalism and its crises cannot be understood as isolated compartments: they all depend on one another.
[6] This was seen in Spain with the express reform of Article 135 of the Constitution in 2011, carried out with the agreement of the PSOE and PP.
[7] Not surprisingly, there were already signs of what was to come as early as 2004, which is why the US Federal Reserve drastically raised interest rates—from 1% that year to 5.25% in 2006—to curb the inflationary spiral that had begun in 2001. Likewise, numerous reports from 2006 and 2007 warned about what was coming, even in mainstream media such as the Wall Street Journal.
[8] They failed to fulfill their objectives, not in managing capital. The Syriza governments (2015–19) were diligent and scrupulous in fulfilling their obligations to the ECB.
[9] This is not to say that it has disappeared; it is simply proof that ideologies are devoured and discarded by capitalism if they cannot respond to its needs, a process that is occurring with increasing speed.
[10] Plekhanov already pointed this out in his text The Doctrine of Arturo Labriola (1908), when discussing the influence of Manchesterism on the theorists of trade unionism, among whom the aforementioned Labriola and the Proudhonians stood out.
[11] Examples of this include Trump’s homilies in the Oval Office, or the growing recourse to religion in European politics and culture, with the hackneyed allusions to the “Judeo-Christian roots” of Western culture.
[12] Even in the case of particularly radical class struggles, such as those of the 1970s, whose defeat through the role of social democracy makes such a coup d’état possible. Consider the role of Peronism and Popular Unity in Argentina and Chile.
[13] For example, it was not necessary for political power to break the law in order to repeal federal protections for abortion in the United States; these were overturned by a Supreme Court decision. Nor, in countries such as Poland or Switzerland, has the far right needed to break the law to implement its policies; on the contrary, in the latter, it approves them through referendums.
[14] Indeed, the breaking of the taboo surrounding socialism in a substantial part of American society has been widely discussed.
[15] It would take another whole article just to list the number of times Donald Trump has been parodied during his two terms, to the point that Alec Baldwin has made it his job.
[16] This idealist perspective is well reflected in Gramsci’s famous quote: “The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in that chiaroscuro, monsters emerge.”
