“The Left", in the singular, is a simplified expression of the diversity of leftist movements1. By “the Left", I mean all organized collective resistance against social injustice, inequality, and discrimination caused by the main forms of domination in the modern era: capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Resistance is only “leftist” when it is simultaneously anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist. This does not preclude the possibility that, depending on contexts and circumstances, a given axis of resistance may be more urgent than the others, or that there may even be other axes of resistance that are equally urgent. In India, the left will, moreover, be anti-caste. In all regions of the world, it will also be anti-fundamentalist, anti-ageist (discrimination against the elderly), and anti-ableist (discrimination against people with disabilities).

The “left” is just one of the possible names for resistance. It is the most common name in the Eurocentric political and cultural world—primarily in Europe, in the “Europes out of place” (the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand), and in other regions of the world where Eurocentric political culture has taken deeper root. In other political contexts and cultures, resistance against inequality and discrimination may go by other names. This means that when I issue the call “leftists of the world, unite!” I am making a call that implies the need for intercultural translation between the various practices and cultures of resistance against modern inequality and discrimination, whatever their designation may be.

Since different social classes, peoples, or social groups suffer different injustices and experience them differently, resistance against injustice takes on different forms and intensities. Therefore, even within the same culture, practices of resistance are diverse, and, consequently, so are the various lefts.

The dilemma facing modern left-wing movements is that, being pluralistic, they can never be antagonistic toward one another because, if they were, they would commit suicide—and their suicide always means more social inequality and more social discrimination. When dictatorships or “dictamoles” (political regimes in which elements of democracy coexist with elements of dictatorship) repress left-wing policies and activists, these are almost always acts of mercy against left-wing movements that have been destroying themselves through fratricidal internal struggles. Before Hitler came to power, the Socialists regarded the Communists as their main enemies, and, conversely, the Communists regarded the Socialists as their main enemies. Once in power, Hitler saw no difference between them; he banned both and ordered the assassination of many activists from both parties.

The Left and the monsters

In a recent article, I argued that there is a global trend toward the traditional right being absorbed by the far right, and I wondered what this means for the left2. I suggested that, just as on the right, we must also distinguish between the traditional left (so-called moderate, liberal, social-democratic) and the far left (so-called revolutionary, communist, anarchist). I would like to reiterate that by “far left” I mean all resistance against the triad of capitalism/colonialism/patriarchy that does not accept liberal democracy as an instrument of resistance, on the grounds that this type of democracy is what legitimizes and sustains the continuity of the triad.

In light of the dominant modern linear way of thinking, the obvious reasoning is this: if the traditional right is disappearing, the same is happening to the traditional left. Therefore, the fundamental political choice in the near future is between the far left and the far right. And if that is the case, the situation is tragic for today’s left because, while the far right is increasingly present and aggressive, the far left either does not exist or operates on the most remote fringes of political processes and mobilizes very few followers.

It’s not quite that simple.

In the Gramscian interregnum in which we find ourselves, the old liberal democracy is dying, but it has not yet died completely, and what will follow it has not yet fully emerged. We are, therefore, at a moment when morbid phenomena—if not outright monsters—abound. Gabriel García Márquez once wrote about Colombia that “this crossroads of destinies has built a dense and indecipherable homeland where the implausible is the only measure of reality.” I believe this characterization of Colombia applies to the entire world today.

Let’s look at some contemporary monsters.

  1. The “world’s greatest democracy” (the U.S.) systematically promotes both soft and hard coups against countries with democratically elected governments and actively supports far-right politicians and their anti-democratic tactics (lies, fake news, digital manipulation of public opinion on social media, physical violence, and media lynching against left-wing politicians and critical intellectuals).

  2. Two races are running in parallel to destroy the democratic values they claim to defend. The arms race to prepare for a new global war in the name of defending global peace—which citizens do not see as threatened by any hostile country, be it Russia or China. The race to manipulate public opinion and silence dissenting voices in the name of freedom of expression.

  3. Those who advocate for war never imagine dying in it. War is always the death of others. “Our soldiers” are something we have, not something we are.

  4. Far-right politicians cling to the national flag and convince millions of citizens that they are the true defenders of the homeland, while at the same time openly calling for foreign countries to intervene in the internal affairs of their sovereign nation.

  5. The political use of religion—especially neo-Pentecostal evangelicalism—legitimizes the concentration of wealth and, with it, the increase in poverty, while comforting the poor with the idea that their wealth lies in salvation after death. Poverty is defended, but not the poor, and their resignation is secured by the wealth reserved for them after death.

  6. The far right exploits the space afforded to it by a dying liberal democracy to normalize fascism. On the one hand, it downplays the fascist crimes of the past; on the other, it instills the idea that a “fascism with a human face” is possible.

  7. Over the course of decades, a strong global environmental movement has been building. The looming ecological collapse has made this movement irreversible and has increased its strength. Suddenly, the “imminent threat to world peace” and “the urgent need for countries to prepare for war” have emerged. The war in the Middle East, the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, and the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader brought to the surface the mother of all capitalist struggles: the struggle for free access (at low prices, expropriated, or stolen) to natural resources. Oil and its derivatives were momentarily trapped in the Strait of Hormuz, and within a few weeks, the world economy threatened to collapse. The fossil fuel economy proved, after all, to be the foundation of capitalism. The environmental movement faded away and was consigned to the museum of antiquities of resistance.

  8. The genocidal state of Israel reduces countries to rubble and peoples to mass graves, commits all manner of war crimes and crimes against humanity, declares the UN Secretary-General a persona non grata—and nothing happens.

  9. The peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the modern world system have two political constitutions: one national and one global. For this reason, they are constitutionally a monstrosity: they have three organs of sovereignty (legislative, executive, and judicial branches) and three organs of non-sovereignty (global financial capital, global corporate media, and direct interference by foreign powers).

The list of monsters is far from complete. But I’ll stop here. At the beginning of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg put forward the choice: “Socialism or barbarism!” At the beginning of the 21st century, we can conclude that, if this dichotomy holds true, barbarism has won.

The Left in a time of monsters

In this interregnum, liberal democracy is dying, and its agony does not stem from the mediocrity of politicians, systemic corruption, the oligarchization of parties, or the new McCarthyisms that foster censorship and self-censorship. Undoubtedly, these factors contribute to the agony of liberal democracy and are its main symptoms. But the primary cause of liberal democracy’s agony is the end of the minimal redistribution of wealth that it allowed in many countries—and, consequently, the end of the middle classes that sustained it.

It was in the name of the possibility of some redistribution of the wealth produced—and of a portion, large or small, of the working classes rising to the middle class—that the revolutionary left abandoned its original project and decided to compete within the arena of liberal democracy with the aim of expanding the redistribution of wealth and, thereby, enlarging the middle classes. By “middle class,” I mean the group of workers who have achieved a minimum level of stability that allows them to plan their lives and those of their families (buying a home with a mortgage, sparing their children from having to contribute early to the family’s livelihood, providing them with the opportunity for an education—ideally higher education—planning vacations; in short, living in peace with dignity).

The middle classes were built through the achievement of workers’ rights, social policies, public education, public health care, the public pension system, progressive taxation, the nationalization of strategic sectors, and so on. The contradiction inherent in these concessions—which capitalism was forced to make as a result of social struggles—ultimately undermined the possibility of any form of democratic socialism.

If we bear in mind that the original socialist project is the overcoming of capitalism, the middle classes are inherently anti-socialist. They hope that liberal democracy will guarantee their moderate expectations and fear they have everything to lose if capitalist liberal democracy is replaced by any other political alternative. The middle classes’ greatest fear is a sudden plunge into poverty. For workers who have not risen to the middle class, that fear has always been their way of life.

It so happens that neoliberal capitalism is utterly hostile to the middle classes. To put it simply—but not simplistically—neoliberalism is a gigantic mechanism for transferring wealth from workers, the working classes, and the middle classes to the upper classes—that is, to the most intensely extractivist sectors of the bourgeoisie (financial capital and digital capital). As neoliberalism has taken hold, liberal democracy has been transformed into its opposite—neoliberal democracy—without changing its name.

In the long run, this democracy will reduce the middle classes to a minimum and, consequently, their political power. In turn, workers who have never risen to the middle class will permanently lose hope that such a rise will ever occur through liberal democracy. The main source of the far-right’s growth lies in exploiting the potential social revolt that this prospect will cause. The goal is not so much to combat the revolt as to prevent it from occurring without its demands being met. Digital capital (artificial intelligence, social media, surveillance capitalism) is entirely geared toward this objective.

Aware that it would be difficult today to seize power through a coup d’état, the far right finds itself forced to use democracy to come to power. Once in power, it has no intention whatsoever of exercising it democratically.

The far right is the political form of neoliberal capitalism. Its central objective is to prevent any possible return to social democracy. That is why far-right parties are funded by the most exploitative forms of capital that feed off the wealth of others. It is no surprise that the election campaigns of far-right parties are, in general, the best-funded.

How, then, can we explain the far right’s growth fueled by the votes of the most precarious middle classes and workers without hope?

One reason lies in the far right’s success in diverting the revolt against those at the top (those who finance it) into a revolt against those at the bottom (those who vote for it). The strategy consisted of successfully replacing the politics of well-being with the politics of ill-being. The politics of well-being consisted of the promise of better social policies—those that formed the basis of what, with some exaggeration, was called the welfare state. It was these policies that created rising expectations for a large portion of the population (a larger or smaller portion depending on the country’s position in the global system): “things are good, but they could be better.” In short, more hope and less fear.

In contrast, the politics of ill-being consists of promising physical security against threats coming from below—from immigrants, Roma, terrorists, and all hifenated humans with racial or ethnic labels. Hence the “need” to strengthen police forces and surveillance systems, to amend nationality laws, and even to address the chronic crisis in obstetric services—a situation that is, at first glance, inexplicable, at least in Europe, where an aging population complains about the lack of young people: for example, in 2025, in Portugal, 28% of women giving birth were foreign nationals, the overwhelming majority of whom were immigrants. Herein lies the real cause of the “crisis of obsteric services”.

Through this mechanism, the victims’ revolt is diverted from the true aggressors toward other victims: victim against victim—a strategy made all the more viable by the fact that, in terms of social perception, there is always someone below us, no matter how low we may be. Thus, those at the top are absolved of any responsibility, and downward expectations are managed: “things are bad, but they could be worse.” That is, much fear and little hope.

After periods in which the material well-being of the majority has improved—however slight those improvements may have been—the management of downward expectations becomes more convincing if the previous institutional framework is discredited and a radical alternative is offered: the anti-system. In terms of propaganda, this amounts to an all-out war against corruption, waste, and insecurity. In reality, it is about consolidating the very system that produces corruption, waste, and insecurity.

This gives rise to two democratic monstrosities: majorities vote in favor of the policies that will harm them the most; the major financiers of anti-system politics are the ones most closely tied to that system and those who benefit the most from the elimination of the truly anti-system forces that could truly threaten them.

All of this is possible for the three reasons I have mentioned and for one mega-reason. The three reasons are: the unlimited and opaque financing of political parties, which has resulted in the merging of the realm of ethical-political values with that of economic values; the digitization of propaganda on social media, which has become a weapon of mass destruction against reliably informed public opinion; and the suppression of dissent that goes beyond authorized freedoms.

The mega-reason is the growing predominance of digital capitalism and the ideology that it heralds the true end of history. Capitalism has not disappeared to make way for techno-feudalism, as Yanis Varoufakis proposes, but has changed profoundly with the advent of artificial intelligence. We can, with some caution, mark the beginning of neoliberalism-in-action at two moments and in two contexts: under a dictatorship, in Chile in 1973 following the coup d’état against President Salvador Allende; and in a democracy, with the brutal repression of the labor movement in the early 1980s in the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher. We are currently witnessing the climax of its evolution: the greatest repression is when repression is no longer necessary.

If revolt has always been fueled by the working classes, there will be no more revolt if artificial intelligence allows capitalism to dispense with a significant percentage of human workers.

Karl Polanyi taught us that capitalism, as a vast machinery for the production of commodities, was based on three “false commodities”—that is, resources that were not originally produced as commodities to be sold on the market: labor, land, and money. Is capitalism on the verge of dispensing with one of these false commodities? It is estimated that in the U.S., by 2030, 10.4 million jobs (6.1% of the total) will be permanently eliminated by AI and automation.

I do not address this complex issue in this text. I merely wonder what the consequences of this transformation will be for democracy, since robots do not vote (at least not yet). To draw on my conception of the epistemologies of the Global South, will the abyssal line of the modern era—which splits humanity into two subgroups, the fully human and the subhuman—shift, thereby expanding the subhuman group to levels unprecedented since World War II and the end of historical colonialism? Or, on the contrary, will this shift lead to a reduction or even the elimination of the subhuman group? In the first case, the triad of capitalism/colonialism/patriarchy will remain in force.

In the second case, we will be facing a paradigmatic transition incompatible with the existence of that triad. For a long time, I have based my few predictions on Pascal’s wager3. It is on this basis that I wager on the second hypothesis: a post-capitalist, post-colonial, and post-patriarchal future. With this wager in mind, I envision the tasks of the left in the short and medium term. In this text, I address the short term, and in the next one, the medium term. In the long run, as John Keynes said, we’re all dead.

The short term: liberal democracy as a ruin-seed

In the short term, the traditional left is the guarantor of liberal democracy’s survival. To achieve this, it must break with its own tradition. It must do so now or immediately after the next elections, whether it wins or loses. Of course, the steps and pace will differ in each case, but the transformations will move in the same direction.

Liberal democracy is dying, but it is not yet dead, and its short-term survival is essential so that, in the medium term, something better—and not worse—than it may emerge. It is in this sense that I conceive of liberal democracy as a “ruin-seed.”

The steps toward moving away from tradition

  1. Power and the opposition: the first step is to start from the assumption that, even if it wins the elections, the left is always in opposition. Government power today is just one component of political power—and perhaps not even the most important one. When the right wins elections, it holds governmental power, media power, financial power, and cultural power. When the left wins, it holds only the first of these. In relation to all the others, it is in opposition and must act as such. This is a major asymmetry of liberal democracy that ensures the continuity of the triad of modern domination.

  2. Parties, social movements, and collective presences in the public sphere: the party form, as it exists today, favors only the right. Parties today are structures that tend to be dominated by centralist, authoritarian, oligarchic—in short, anti-democratic—elites. They foster distance rather than closeness between their members/supporters and their leaders. This model serves the right well because it fuels the fusion between the realm of ethical-political values and the realm of economic values: party leaders move seamlessly from business to government and from government to business. In the era of social democracy, things were somewhat different, precisely to the extent that the two realms remained somewhat separate.

    For the left, this party model is a disaster because the lack of internal democracy undermines or discredits any struggle for greater democracy in society. Therefore, the first step toward breaking with tradition is to accept that the party form, as it exists today, has outlived its historical usefulness and is an obstacle both to the survival of democracy and to the survival of the left. This applies to all left-wing parties, whether they belong to the governing coalition or the opposition.

    Profound internal reform is based on the idea that the left must practice internally the only form of democracy capable of surviving for any length of time: the integration of representative democracy and participatory democracy. The left will continue to have leaders and platforms, but both will stem from exercises in participatory democracy led by the party’s members and supporters.

    The left-wing party of the future is, by definition, a party-movement because the internal democracy that drives it combines representative logics and procedures with participatory logics and procedures. This makes the party more open to collaboration with non-partisan social movements and organizations—a collaboration based on mutual autonomy and respect. It allows the party to understand and respect new forms of social protest that are neither partisan nor organized by social movements or organizations. These are collective gatherings in the public sphere, many of them genuinely spontaneous and mobilized by an event that provokes particular revulsion or outrage. I have written extensively about the party-movement and refer readers to one of those texts.4

  3. Social democracy as an anti-system: in the short term, the left must fight as if social democracy were still possible. The struggle is defensive because it aims to restore social rights and instruments of wealth redistribution that were previously won but have now been lost.

    Aware that neoliberal capitalism will mobilize all internal and external forces to prevent the success of this struggle, the left—whether in government or in opposition—must unequivocally stand with the social classes that have suffered most from the erosion of rights and the rise in social inequality, and take the risks that this entails. Namely, the deliberate provocation of social upheaval which, according to the far right, can only be controlled through repression and the deportation of undesirable immigrants.

    Under current historical conditions, “capitalism with a human face”—as social democracy led broad majorities in the core countries of the world system, especially in Europe, and the more or less small middle classes in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries to believe during its golden age—is not possible. Social democracy, once regarded as the highest possible form of consciousness within the modern democratic system, is today viewed by the right and far right as unviable, dangerous, subversive—in short, anti-systemic.

    In the short term, the anti-systemic alternative that the post-traditional left has to counter the proto-fascist anti-system of the far right is social democracy.

  4. The institutional and the extra-institutional: neoliberal management of preferences means putting institutions at the service of a conformism born of resignation, legitimized by the absence of alternatives. Nonconformity and resistance will be heavily repressed, but, as I mentioned earlier, repression is viewed as merely a temporary measure. With artificial intelligence at its service, the ultimate goal is to neutralize resistance before it even arises.

    Neoliberal freedom is freedom without the conditions necessary to be free. Ultimately, it is the freedom to be miserable. But the freedom to be miserable is the misery of freedom. Social groups that are extremely impoverished and lack any right to social protection worthy of the name have only two freedoms: the authorized freedom to beg and rely on social philanthropy, and the unauthorized freedom to steal.

    The need for the entire left to navigate between the system and the anti-system implies not limiting political activism to the management of preferences as shaped by neoliberalism. It is necessary to maintain a tension between the management of authorized preferences and the confrontation between authorized and unauthorized preferences.

    The left as a whole must act with one foot in the institutions and the other outside them—in the streets and squares—peacefully, but occasionally illegally. It must experiment with creating new institutions, even if only at the local level. Institutional innovation at the local level is today more likely, bolder, and more effective.

    The likelihood that active nonconformity—social protest—will be outlawed and heavily repressed will grow ever greater. The natural intelligence of left-wing activists must prevail over the artificial intelligence of Palantir and Co., which will seek to neutralize, silence, and, in extreme cases, eliminate them.

  5. Salaried-labor citizenship and human-activity labor: historically, labor organized into unions was the path to building citizenship with rights for the broad segments of the population who owned nothing but their labor power.

    The dream of Silicon Valley and the nightmare of the working classes (workers and the middle classes) around the world is that artificial intelligence will eliminate human labor as much as possible and, consequently, the labor with rights that the social struggles of the past 150 years have made possible. Robots and algorithms do not demand rights nor do they need vacations (unless AI programs them to do so).

    It is unclear how far the frenzy surrounding AI will take us—whether to the end of work with rights, to the end of humanity as we know it, to eternal peace, or to the apocalypse. Only one thing is certain: AI aims to eventually eliminate the very concept of citizenship that underlies the idea of democracy as popular sovereignty.

    Detraditionalizing the left means accepting that citizenship with rights must prevail over the possibility that, in the future, any wage labor that remains necessary will be akin to slave labor—that is, this type of labor will be the rule rather than the exception, as is the case today. In the short term, the left must curb the overwhelming surge of artificial intelligence by regulating it—both nationally and globally—and by promoting zones free from digital extractivism, as well as forms of in-person coexistence and unpaid labor, work as a fundamental human activity, as exercises in citizenship.

  6. The degree zero of political reform: from everything I analyze in this text, it follows that a profound political reform of democratic regimes is urgently needed. The horizon of this reform is a post-capitalist, post-colonial, and post-patriarchal society.

    The democracy that will bring us closest to this horizon will certainly be very different from the low-intensity democracy that prevails today—a democracy that is, even so, in danger because it fails to defend itself against fascists by allowing them to be democratically elected.

    This is a task to be carried out in the medium term. But there is one aspect of this reform that, given its urgency, must be addressed in the short term: party financing. If party financing continues to be permitted without limits and without transparency, the left will not even have the medium term to envision the society of the future and fight for it.

Conclusion

In the short term, detraditionalizing the left (the entire spectrum of the left) means making it capable—whether in government or in opposition—of ensuring that democracy prevails and does not merely survive. Ultimately, it is a matter of democratizing democracy itself to allow for a democratic medium term. In the medium term, democratic society will be post-capitalist, post-colonial, and post-patriarchal. This medium term must be conceived and prepared for in the short term. That is the subject of my next text.

References

1 Over the past thirty years, I have written many articles on the left, addressing topics as diverse as the left and capitalism, the future of the left, the renewal of the left, the unity of the left, the relationship between left-wing parties and social movements, the transformation of left-wing parties into movement-based parties, and so on. Articles with titles such as “Letters to the Left” and “Leftists of the World, Unite!” have been widely circulated.
Among others, Trece cartas a las izquierdas. Bogotá: Ediciones Desde Abajo2017;¡Izquierdas del mundo, uníos! Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores/Siglo Veintiuno Editores2019.
2 The Right Is Disappearing: The Choice Is Between the Left and the Far Right., The right is disappearing.
3 “A Non-Occidentalist West?: Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge”, Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7-8), 2009, 103-125.
4 «Quince tesis sobre el partido-movimiento», Tlatelolco, 21 de junio de 2021.