Methodological remarks concerning the present state of the organised consistent left's position in social critique and social struggles

„Methodological remarks concerning the present state of the organised consistent left's position in social critique and social struggles”, 2026

Sursa: https://www.devrimcimarksizm.net/sites/dm/files/ana_bazac_methodological_remarks_concerning_the_present_state_of_the_organised_consistent_lefts_position_in_social_critique_and_social_struggles.pdf

This article, while highlighting philosophical concepts, addresses theoretical, intrinsically ideological aspects, outlining methodological frameworks related to the consistent left’s behaviour at least over the last decades. Ultimately, these frameworks are guilty for the retreat and weak efficiency of the organised consistent left and, somehow, of the popular left-wing spirit, although, of course, they are historically determined. Concretely, on the one hand, the frameworks can be seen as general epistemic but, on the other hand, as the political thinking – here, somehow even of the consistent left – that takes over the political patterns of the adversary, here, the right wing.

The point is that they can be reversed, and here the simple “philosophical” expression of the logic all the way and of the reasons-to-be of the consistent left is a key condition.

Actually, the article has an asymmetrical form: the pointing of methodological frameworks follows after a longer discussion of aspects substantiating the choice of this topic.

(1) Instead of an introduction

The left is, obviously, differentiated in the consistent Marxist part and the treacherous social-democratic type that supports the capitalist organisation of society, and even in its malignant evolution. Marxism and the consistent Marxist left are rejected and harshly contested by the social-democratic false left. It is clear that the consistent left has stronger and more numerous enemies of the working masses than the explicit right wing. But even the false left is pressed by the right-wing forces in order to not maintain even the rest of the social policies and slogans. Consequently, neither the false left is significant, while many young people and a large part of the capitalist countries’ population choose either a right-wing or extreme-right-wing mimicked “revolution” or different kinds of informal activism which are rather circumscribed to particular problems like the ecological, but do not explicitly oppose the root causes of these problems.

Yes, when all is said and done many people know that “somehow, capitalism is not quite good”, but at the same time, either by inserting themselves within voluntary NGOs of concrete aid (which, aside from the necessary alleviation of suffering of those in need, help even the system) or by retreating into an inert state of externalisation towards any domestic and international social problem, they do not vote against it: more clearly, they do not vote for the most progressive political force (and not necessarily a declared communist one) in different certain moments of the last decades of history. A pithy caricature synthesises both the ordinary people’s representation that “capitalism is not quite good” and their and the consistent left’s difficulty to give in a coherent, clear and resolute manner the root causes of capitalist historical structural unsolvable contradictions, waste and destruction, as well as their logical solutions: “-Socialism is a nice idea, but only capitalism actually works; -define ‘works’”².

But why is, ultimately, so inefficient the organised consistent left, namely, why does it not convince a majority of the population so that it can apply the most peaceful, fruitful, economical, therefore better, methods for people’s daily lives? Once again, from all the political, economic, cultural/ideological causes, this paper tries to select only some methodological frameworks the consistent left has assumed, consciously or not. If so, the overthrowing of these frameworks is the at-hand manner to change the results in the present relations of forces. And this overthrowing becomes obvious here, in capitalism, not in the distant future: just with the proof of the vast majority’s choice, as resolute clever deeds to constitute and defend a consistent organised left and as a vote for the consistent left. Electoralism is not the way to change capitalism: but it is a concrete measure, a “thermometer” of the social conscience of the population and, ultimately, of the state of the ideological hegemony of capitalism. And without strong coherent consistent beliefs of the vast majorities, no change in the world relations of forces can occur. This aspect is very well known by capitalism, and till nowadays it won, to the misfortune of the world majority destructed in imperialist wars and unimaginable suffering and waste. Consequently, the transformation of methodological frameworks of the behaviour of the left is an existential exigency.

* * *

So, we are already familiar with the methodological approach proposed in the article: the starting point of the analysis is not the vote, to which, as to the given that explains and directs the following political tactics, the consistent left must adapt, but just the methodological frameworks of its political attitudes which generated that vote. The interest is not how to improve the score for the consistent left, but how to ratiocinate in order to fuel the consistent logical and humanist perspective of the populations of the world.

From the standpoint of the criteria of the cognitive process, in other words epistemologically, the methodological frameworks of a long series of facts can be grasped at the (relative) end of the series, because only after the accumulation of meanings of every fact in the history of their unfolding, we are able to discern, select and coagulate a coherent synthesis of the inherent complexity. However, because the facts of the series are not isolated from other facts and series, and because human cognition involves not only empirical concepts reflecting the concrete deployment of facts (events, situations) but also abstract concepts extracted from them and synthesising universal meanings related to their deep causality and significance for humans³, people can usefully judge every fact and not only the aggregation of facts.

But both the object and the subject of judgements about social facts are ideological/have multi-mediated class positions in the domination-submission structural relations, that is, the judgements themselves concern at the same time direct and indirect, implicated meanings. The first result from/are related to the visible. In this sense, it’s clear why social critique as such is easy to do. Much more complicated is to judge the deep causality of facts and their significance for humans.

In class-based societies, the dominant way of social thought – the most diffuse and the general assumption of criteria and values – is the social thinking of dominant classes, as Marx demonstrated long before. This “contamination” of social thought has attacked also the left: and in different proportions, also the consistent left. The methodological frameworks pointed out in the paper regard just this “contamination”.

However, it can be reversed if we are aware of it. And, besides the practical strategies resulted – and are absolutely required by the present state of things – two interrelated not so philosophical points of view as they seem have to be considered as proofs of the necessary “maturation” of the left and, thus, of the social conscience of populations of the world: the point of view – as a criterion of questioning – of the moral finality of political (and economic and cultural) deeds, and, somehow within its deep down, the point of view of the human telos, of the what for of our life and our deeds.

* * *

These points of view do not substitute the economic and social class criteria of analysis: first of all, humans act and construct social relations and institutions because of their existential interests of survival at the highest possible parameters in given space-time frameworks, namely and more specifically, according to the preservation of dominant class position or to the trend to arrive at the most favourable class position possible in the domination-submission societies. At the most coherent theoretical level – as well as at the level of practical decisions towards the course of events – the economic and political class interests explain the strategies of all actors in the world: even though, because of complex good and bad political representations, nowadays it is in fashion to speak only about geopolitical reasons. But all of these interests have in their background, even though suppressed – and/or covered – a moral position/the human moral position.

Clearer: the humans have the possibility to question the ultimate human reason of their actions and strategies; in the dominant behaviour, education and position, this possibility is reduced to private inter-individual emotions, and even ridiculed; and this attitude was determined to be taken over in different proportions by the general public taught to pursue immediate goals, isolated from other goals pursued by others and irrespective of “collateral” consequences⁴; and, by pursuing practical political goals, even the left took over, in different proportions, this attitude. It “forgot” to clearly and loudly express its concerns about the ultimate “what for” of its own behaviour. Therefore, once more, one of the most important methodological frameworks pointed out in the paper appears.

So, if these two points of view do not become prominent in the consistent left’s behaviour and motivation – and thus, in the behaviour and motivation of populations in the world – the social/cultural evolution of mankind can turn in a very dangerous direction.

I

(2) A model of estrangement

In 1874, the greatest Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) wrote Emperor and proletarian⁵, a unique creation in the Romanian literature, and not only because it was the first and single presence of the word “proletarian” in the Romanian poetry.

Actually, he made the first draft in 1871, even before the Paris Commune. He was born in the countryside and, despite his moving in towns as a schoolboy and, a little later, as a souffleur in an itinerant theatrical team, he was imbued by the peasant social landscape, overwhelming in the backward Romanian Countries. But when he arrived in Vienna, he was struck by the “big” urban milieu and its social differences. And, obviously, he learned: and found that, opposite to the at least apparently passive submission of peasants to the out-of-date order led by boyars, configuring an inert state of things, in the resolutely modernising Western world, the class opposition was on the agenda. And who opposed, more precisely?

The proletarian – who gave the title of the first draft – and who was not only the industrial worker, but also those employed in all the services demanded by the frenetic construction of modern capitalism celebrating the definite victory of the alliance of the big financial and industrial bourgeoisie with the old noble strata. And in that epoch the future separation of “middle class” layers did not yet take place. The poem highlighted the causes of the inherent and necessary revolt of the proletarians: the unendurable social misery. Indeed, social polarisation in Western cities – to which Eminescu refers – was paroxysmal throughout the 19th century, at least until the 1890s when social security laws appeared. Thus, who was the proletarian? He formed a social class⁶ that does not control the means of production at all (moreover, the means of subsistence) and thus, in order to live, can only sell his capacity for work. And the conditions of this selling are miserable.

At 21 years, Eminescu desired to explain, and not only to express his observations: only the scientific analysis explains, not poetry, but Eminescu was not able to explain scientifically the causes of his indignation. Thus, he explained in his poem what every sensitive human being could observe, beyond deeper questions about what if the misery disappears, does the proletarian still remain proletarian? And, methodologically, his focus on the proletarian shows that the human being should not be described “in general”: 1) even the concept of man is consistent only when it is confronted with the reality of its condition, and this concrete social condition is so different that the causes and the results on the life of every person are so different and opposed to each other that an endless glossing about man becomes absurd. And 2) the description of the social condition of the proletarians is more than necessary.

The second variant of the poem, 1873-1874, is important here only because the pessimistic conclusion of the poem in its final variant is introduced by King Lear. But even the contraposition between the proletarian and the king – later, the emperor – suggests that both personify social classes. What is more suggestive for the concentration of power of class domination than, irrespective of its modern formal impotence and reduction to ceremonial representativity, the crowned head?

And finally, the finished poem in 1874:

a) after the description of the “desperate” situation of proletarians – and desperate not only because the material (that is, also, cultural) state of misery they are forced in, but also because of the overwhelming injustice⁷ they are surrounded by that signals the cancelling of any hope for the future –, thus after the indignation leading to the logical conclusion of the overthrowing of this inhuman system, b) and after the description of the bloody defeat of the Commune, highlighting c) the despair of the defeated proletarians whose mood shifts from rebellion to acceptance of domination as an implacable “natural” given, their unique life no longer being anything more that the fulfilment of a mechanical function in an eternal scheme: where the emperor seems to embody “the natural laws” of clever domination⁸. Which, once more, have no more importance than any other solution: life ceases to be important through its content, it is only a dream, an interlude between the moments of non-existence.

Dryly, the description of this conclusion is that of estrangement. People complain, of course – or, being taught to not care and to think positively, simply ignore – but nevertheless they accept the irrational as an irreversible framework of life.

(3) Why start with poetry?

Because the conclusions of the poem are the same with the situation of the disappointment of people in the face of failures of the beneficial social change. We are interested in the behaviour of the left. When the left fails to induce the transformations which it proposed and militated for, people fall into a deep state of despair. This state may be unconscious, it may be sublimated into a quite right-wing position, or it may be overlooked by a pragmatic analysis of forces, relations, the inevitable bourgeois hegemony of ideology, the historically fragmented left, the complex situations far from the ideal/textbook objective and subjective conditions of class struggles. Ultimately, politics is a cold deduction of the best strategies in the hic et nunc real-world conditions, isn’t it?

But the left must consider just the deep moods of people, the deep state of their conscience. The right ignores them: or, obviously, proacts against the eventual tendencies of disobedience, infringing in its ideology any consideration of the life and dignity of human beings which are designed by it to obey. But the reason-to-be of the left is just to serve the multitude: humanity as the entire human species and as every member of it. Therefore, the main criterion of the left’s endeavour to judge its own facts is to not disappoint the multitude, the people and the peoples. Not only because the disappointed people could be more easily recruited by the right, thus acting against their own interests to not waste their unique life. But, first and foremost, because when humans are disappointed, they lose support points, they lose social ideals, they lose their own reason-to-be, and thus the certitude concerning their life trajectories and deeds. They remain, of course, at the level of existential functions, and they even have joy in them: briefly, they remain at the level of living beings in their environment. But they restrict their human being power to change this environment according to their rational free will, and are limited to working for and adapting to the changes which come from outside them.

(4) The occasion

It is a concept that is much more important than one believes it. The occasion describes the particular complex of tendencies and events that precedes the decisions related to actions which, as any action, are bifurcation points and generate changes in the course of things.

We can decide on one path or another according to the theory of causes as conditions for decision/action; more generally, input →action→output/consequences. But this theory involves finesse: defalcation of different proximate and different distant causes, as well as understanding of their mixture with, however, different weights, and obviously evaluation of results according to all of these.

At the political level, the subjective causes and the objective causes are especially important; both at proximate and distant levels. And, because there is never an optimum proportion and mixture of causes, people must choose the decision/ action best suitable to the real situation: actually, the less harmful concerning its consequences.

These are generalities. But what the left is obliged to do is to think not only of the easiest action (from the standpoint of its feasibility) according to its immediate results, but firstly, of the conscience, the psyche of people. Yes, firstly, because the left fights for maintaining the hope of the multitude of unique human beings – the hope of the people, of the peoples – that they and every one of them will change for the better their own lives. Not only as a living standard but – here, first of all – as the possibility of the embodiment of social justice, as the possibility of living in a world of social justice and peace.

A counter-example – in tone with the above personification of domination by the Crown – is the decision of the Spanish Communist Party in 1975 to promote the monarchical institution as a form of state/governance after the death of Franco. We know that this decision was imbued with “Eurocommunism”, the glide and leaning of Western communist parties toward a bourgeois reformism of “cohabitation”, “concertation”⁹, “consociationalism” – of not only opposite right-wing parties but, besides the already declared “reformist”/pro-capitalist socialist/social-democratic parties, of the communist “elites” mimicking the burden of representation of the people¹⁰ but destroying the reason-to-be and thus, credibility of the communist parties. Because the logic of these parties, in parliaments or not, was not only to press for the most general and social democratic rights, but also always to emphasise the structural contradictions of capitalism – even when it accepts social rights – the causes of both these contradictions and the acceptance of rights, and the structural

9 The bourgeois reformism was and is a world strategy of capitalism, of course, it is not limited to Europe. Its main long-term consequence is the time lost by the working people, the waste of their lives because of the infringement of their dignity. Reduced to political behaviour, this consequence was seen both in shaking moments – as in the support of a majority of the German people for Nazism – and in long rather passive submission to the spectacle of bourgeois democracy. In order to move from Europe, and not ignoring but putting here in parenthesis the vivid Latin American peasants and peoples, see Marcos Roitman Rosenmann, Chili : l’arnaque de la post-dictature consommée, 17 décembre 2025, https://www.legrandsoir.info/chili-l-arnaque-de-la-post-dictatureconsommee.html, taken from https://www.lahaine.org/mundo.php/chile-se-consuma-la-estafaposdictadura (the watchword in Chile is concertation, too). solutions to surpass the capitalist limits of social progress. Otherwise, why would these communist parties be necessary at all? The bourgeois political reformism of cohabitation relied on the old “socialist reformism” à la Bernstein, and both constituted a betrayal of the European and world proletarians: actually, of the proletarian spirit of peoples.

Here, I am – and we are – interested to see the weight (something more than the big influence) of the decisions of the left. The ideal conditions are never met, but the left must decide: and, really first of all, according to the long-term consequences on the mind and soul of people. Because any practical consideration has in its arrière plan the concern about what the people will think and thus, according to this thinking, do. And no, the general mood in Spain in 1975 was not favourable to the monarchical form of state, there would not have been any civil war if the communists would have clearly and loudly propagated the reasons and benefits of the republican democracy. No Western representative democracy, obviously bourgeois, did annihilate capitalism until 1975, and a future Spanish republic would have continued the post-war capitalist development. If, still obviously, the former success would have continued without any impediment brought by the world logic of capitalist competition. But, letting aside this parenthesis signalling the autonomy of economic logic towards the capitalist forms of governance, the symbol of monarchy and of the keeping of monarchy – by communists! – induced sadness and disappointment: “so, everything questionable will continue; and the communists?: are not better than the others”. The following passive rejection of the institutional consistent left activism and the turnout in the electoral spectacles are the proofs till today.

Another counter-example is the Romanian left’s acceptance and promotion post 1990 (!) of the “Royal House” – giving it back all its pre-war properties and paying it big amounts of subsidies –, of the monarchy abolished in 1947, although the big majority of the people had and has resolute republican beliefs. It’s true, this left was and is social-democratic and it should have accepted it in the first decade from 1990 onwards because of the ugly pressure of the right-wing parties and their external supporters; but after 2000, when Iliescu won his second term and no one revised the conditions of subsidies, and especially after 2017, when the “king” – Mihai (1921- 2017) – passed away and his daughter was appointed “Custodian of the Crown” (sic) continuing to extort subsidies from the state¹¹, no left-wing voice¹², be it socialdemocratic, since traditionally social-democracy was republican, or “communist”¹³, dared even to approach the problem.

(5) The temporal aspect of the occasion

As a complex of tendencies and events, the occasion occurs at a certain time, in a certain moment. The moment and the occasion are phenomena of different orders, although people consider them to be tantamount to each other, and as words to mutually signal the presence of the corresponding phenomenon of different order. Perhaps we can relate the occasion to a set of puncta, specific details captured in a photo and even though each detail, punctum, has a unique meaning (pricking us/ stinging in us), actually only all of them transmit to us the coherent uniqueness of the intention of the photo/of the photographed phenomenon¹⁴. In a more up-to-date manner, we can equate puncta with the data of ICT, while their assembly in a set whose unity gives and is given by a coherent meaning, with information. Or, in philosophical and scientific language, the moments are events, constituting a trend that in a moment/in each moment emphasises an occasion.

An epistemic mistake is to ignore the trends unfolding over a long period of time, and to see only the events, disparately, or some present events which are considered as triggers of the occasion to which one has to react. The prestige of Franco’s economic legacy – the postwar economic growth in the framework of Cold War integration with the USA¹⁵ – and his early decision (1969) to impose monarchy as his successor, as well as the power of the conservative big bourgeois parties, should have been understood as facts illustrating the trend of structural class domination: in no way enough to decide the submission of Spanish working masses to them. If, once more, the communists would have clearly and loudly propagated the reasons and benefits of the republican democracy.

Another epistemic mistake is to judge past behaviours with present lenses, monarchy, their slogan being Monarchy saves Romania, and calling Mihai “the King of Romanians”, and “His Majesty”. These, in a republic. namely, as if people in the past would have known what we do know today. The economic postwar Franco era “miracle” was part of the postwar European economic recovery and growth with the help of the new technology and international integration: but, and irrespective of the political forms of governance, it was to evolve through crises. And since the logic of economy is autonomous towards the forms of state, these forms as such are favourable or unfavourable frameworks for the evolution of class structure and dominant ideology.

According to monarchy, not only is the social constitutive inequality between upper classes and the rest “natural”, but also the political one. In every capitalist organisation of society, the hegemony of the dominant class ideology is obvious (Marx, Gramsci), but since in the democratic/republican form of governance the hegemonic ideology insists on the political equality of citizens, the monarchical form of governance cannot demonstrate why, if all members of society are politically equal, “some are more equal than others”: we vote for our representatives at the level of villages, cities, counties, parliament, but not at the level of head of state: he/she is hereditary. Why? Because. No subterfuge calling the modern monarchy “constitutional” – as if this presence of the constitution would annul the absurd hereditary feature of the head of state who has mostly a ceremonial function and is paid by the state for this, thus the “royal house” being the chief of “oligarchs” criticised by the right-wing critique of capitalism, and as if the modern constitution would not have been and would not be the proof of the absolute victory of the bourgeoisie, inserting within capitalism all the old dominant strata, thus over any drag eventually imposed by the “God’s anointed”.

In philosophy, the temporal aspect of the occasion was called kairos. It signified the opportune moment considered by humans for their actions, the internal time constructed by their consciousness because it was related to decisions, and being within the exterior linear time that flows inexorably in a series of accidents as if generated by a child¹⁶.Thus, kairos does not flow, but “is created” by humans and is creative of facts, of the world. It is not the occasion that is given to individuals from outside, but it is the temporal framework they create. However, both because of its mixture with the exterior time and because of the thinking that deliberates before deciding, the kairos is not only a moment but also an interval. Therefore, because it is the subjective time of the thinking humans, the kairos dismisses both the incomprehensible destiny – the time given from a mysterious without – and the explicit imposition of restrictive, irrational and harmful interests of dominant forces. Because kairos is chosen time, and the optimal choice arises only from the freedom to think and propose the best actions for both the individual and all his/her human fellows. Consequently, the optimal choice and kairos depend on the optimal choice and kairos of all the other fellow humans, of all humankind. If so, no kairos should be captured by divisive forces of domination, because just this capture annuls the human decision and transforms the kairoi into fatal constraints. Always the results light the decisions, distinguishing between full use of occasions and waste of time.

The above example of the behaviour of the post-1990 Romanian “left” shows that when the occasion is lost even to promote minimal goals – as the consistent fight for democracy¹⁷, for rights which do not harm the rights of others and for today’s possible and generally accepted social reforms (as universal free health care) – then even a space for the maintaining of the present capitalism is lost¹⁸. Actually, the present system does not have this space, and the good kairoi – rational opportunities – are substituted with the sudden moment, with accidental very short-term political reactions which do not even alleviate the phenomena of global societal crisis. The opportunity is lost, the present time is lost, the future time is wasted.

The question of occasion and its temporal interval to convert it into beneficial actions involves, ultimately, time but, more, the conditions of possibility to freely think, reflect on the societal problems. In front of the present capitalism – and in front of the unimaginable contradictions between the enfranchisement of the intellectual capacities of the individuals/the development of science and, on the other hand, the cognitive state of a big majority condemned to react to phenomena according to patterns of consumerism and physical survival and pleasures – the endeavour of the consistent left suggests to people to think of structurally opposed alternatives to the current social logic: to discuss in terms of concepts almost nonexistent before, but having much more weight than one thinks, in terms of the intolerable, the negation of the irreversible, of the implacable¹⁹. When the conditions to freely think and act are missing, people flee from that country or struggle quietly to make both ends meet by any means in the country: these are the indications of the capitalist ideology. But what if these solutions have limited validity, so limited that they give room to other ones? For capitalism, this “third issue” is absolutely forbidden. And then?

(6) Injustice

Why would justice be the biggest virtue even for sophisticated intellectuals like Plato and Aristotle? And thus, injustice – the biggest vice? As it is known, after the ancient polytheist religions where man was definitely positioned within human society, thus towards other human fellows, the world of gods signifying the entirety of all human capacities and errors, all searches for the fulfilment of human creativity (this fulfilment being equated with happiness), the monotheist religions – or rather Christianity – moved that position as the fundamental relationship between man and God. Consequently, the individual vice lost its internal obligation towards other humans and became ultimately responsible towards God²⁰, as sin towards Him. However, the capital sins – from which issued all the harmful behaviours – were just those manifested towards humans: from the set of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth²¹, only pride and envy would be related to God, as the popular tale The Gold Fish²² warns against not a simple insatiable want, but against the foolish desire of man to be equal to God.

But in the above list of sins, injustice misses, and since the list as such is so important we cannot speculate that injustice would be indirectly present as a sin.

What is justice? Justice expresses the mutuality/symmetry of human relationships in their concrete deployment. It is felt already by children²³, showing the disappearance of that interesting Greek/international journal, as « Le temps d’agir », Analele Universității din Craiova. Seria Filosofie, 44, 2, 2019, pp. 73-97. structural connections and interdependence in society. It is not the simple opposite of rivalry/ competition, as if these two opposite elements would have equal importance and generative power, but the original sentiment in the deployment of social relations. Actually, the social interdependence was thought of as symmetry in the control of the human existence within communities.

The cold academic theory distinguishes distributive justice as fairness of the results of human activities (so, what/how much to share), from procedural justice as fairness of processes leading to results and the fair manner to arrive at and share them (how to share). In the capitalist ideology, the latter tends to cover the first, namely the “philanthropy” that gives “what one can”²⁴ but without changing the framework of domination-submission. But justice is not control of objective resources, of the neutral “what and how to share”, but control of the social relations which involve the definition itself of resources and their sharing.

Why would be so important this difference? Because it implies different attitudes/sentiments: it’s one thing when we cannot control a flood and another one when we cannot control the social organisation within which the flood occurred as a curse of gods. Obviously, we recognise the importance of the historical tendency of capitalism to compensate for its cruel neglect of “the undeserving”, and we support any capitalist “philanthropy” as aid and concrete solidarity with those in need because of exceptional events or “normal decay”: but this aid and solidarity within capitalism must never exhaust our expression that they have structural limits, which can be surpassed with the transformation of the structural relations of capitalism.

A way of the capitalist “philanthropy”, a way in which it tends to reduce itself, is to focus on the extreme poverty – its criteria are not important here – and aid in emergency situations. We should not forget that the focus on extreme poverty and aid is integrated into the capitalist logic: it is based on state-guaranteed funds and on private funds which ultimately represent investments.

Leaving aside this lucrative aspect of “philanthropy”, what it brings is a raping of the deep intimacy of the individuals, generating acute sentiments of helplessness, Cahiers Gaston Bachelard, 9, 2007, pp. 121-136 ; Kristen A. Dunfield and Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, “Classifying Prosocial Behavior: Children’s Responses to Instrumental Need, Emotional Distress, and Material Desire”, Child Development, 2013 Sep-Oct;84(5):1766-76 ; Alexandra Éléonore Didry, De l’influence du sentiment d’injustice procédurale et interactionnelle à la prédiction de la colère-état et de la violence au travail, Thèse, Strasbourg, 2008 ; Sophie Richardot, « Le(s) sens de la justice distributive chez les enfants : revue de la littérature et perspective psycho-sociale », Les cahiers internationaux de psychologie sociale, 2014/3, Numéro 103, pp. 421-454 ; Nasrédine Goutas, Azeddine Goutas. « De la prise de décision de justice aux implications sociales et psychosociales : L’impact du Sentiment d’Injustice Subie (SIS) ». In : Emanuel Jeuland (Ed.), Droit et Emotion, Paris : IRJS Éditions, 2024, pp. 465-506. of implacable and irreparable dependency. In this sense, the old liberal saying that we must not give a fish to a hungry person, but a fishing rod to catch fish, is true: but the fishing rod must belong to the hungry. The Western propaganda showing large groups of children and adults waiting today for food fails to suggest the magnanimity of capitalism: actually, it indicates its bankruptcy. There are no words to express the despair of those who are constrained to be feed: “there is no hope” for them, “what could we hope?”. The implacable, the irreparable are all the more acute as the individuals no longer see any way of change.

The capitalist ideology shows the trend of decreasing differences between incomes in the world – although inequality increases on a national scale – as proof of “nevertheless, there is progress under capitalism”²⁵. But this trend highlights, on the one hand, the middle ground between high-middle-income states, China which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and lower-middle-income states. On the other hand, the average increase – ontologically based on the general accumulation of objects as a result of human labour and generating cumulative effects²⁶ – and measured in the economic statistics as the quantitative multiplication of a conventional unit, covers the worsening of the quality of goods²⁷ of the majority of the world population. But, when all is said and done, actually the inequality rose to the absurd level where “0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity”²⁸.

Also, the word “convergence” – suggesting a future with such a big reduction of inequality worldwide that the different levels of the economic state will converge into a “world welfare”, here, in capitalism – reminds us of the theory of convergence of systems, of socialism and capitalism, based on the objective development and diffusion of science and technology, so, on the assumption that there’s no more need to “oppose” the two systems or to fight for socialism, since capitalism will transform automatically, as a result of the scientific development of productive forces, into something good, into socialism for instance. The theory was a variant of the technophile image about capitalism – “science and technology will solve everything” – and more importantly, was a right-wing solution issued from the capitalist “think tanks” and sometimes assumed by writers from the “socialist camp”: who were incredibly morally blind and egotistic to exclude from “civilisation” the fundamental difference of structural relations of the two systems and their psychical consequences.

But the focus on the quantitative measure of justice as the reduction of differences between incomes once more shows both the irreconcilable contradictions and the spiritual limits of capitalism. Within a state, its perspective is to individually strive to climb the social ladder so as to have more/bigger income. No matter how. While internationally, it implies that the leading strata of each country must accord with the hegemon states so as to be part of the privileged countries from the standpoint of their incomes. If so, every such endeavour is good, isn’t it?

Epistemologically, this theory concretises the methodological individualism: the sociological paradigm that the social is explained by the individual, and, in the common parlance of capitalism, that human society = individual + individual + individual… But the human social cannot be reduced to the individual, because it is in fact, as Marx formulated, the ensemble of the social relations: it would be absurd to explain the human values and, generally, the human culture as individual conatus²⁹, wouldn’t it? But if we can solve the epistemological aspect by emphasising that society can be reduced neither to the individual nor to the social, but is explained through their tandem, the moral aspect of the theory of distributive justice through the capitalist state and private “philanthropy” that would reduce the differences between incomes – as a “proof” of the beneficial character of capitalism – generates stupefaction. Because – and obviously because it assumes that capitalism is the only and ultimate desirable system – it reduces the dignified life of everyone aiming it at the quest and fulfilment of a progressive/high income, and lacks any empathy towards those “deserving” who are on the lower rungs of the social ladder and, as a multitude/as their coherent totality determined by their lack of control of the means of existence³⁰, can never surpass this condition. It is not “an economic theory” that cannot take into account “philosophical problems”, it is/is part of the ideology of class domination, it legitimises it.

Therefore, justice and injustice, too, are the result of the power relations, of domination-submission. They are social relations and defined as values not simply in the cognitive process, but in the concrete deployment of class relations. Their importance as values – and core values, assumed as such by the leading ideology – is, ultimately, the result of deaf and sometimes loud class struggle, of pressure from below.

As demonstrated by Marx, the human estrangement of both the ruled and the rulers arises not from an objective, thus inevitable, difference between and exteriority of the subject towards the object (Hegel), but from the domination-submission structural relations of the social systems which are based on them, that is, from the capitalist structural relations. The human estrangement is, ultimately, an estrangement from the values which synthesise and bear the human unique singularity or, borrowing the concept from philosophy, quiddity as essence: the human moral reason. Human logic and human morals. The estranged humans do not understand the absolute necessity to consistently follow and actualise the human logic and the human moral in their intimate unity. The rulers despise them, considering them catchwords used to fool the ruled, but they being are above them. While the ruled arrive to take over the contempt: it’s because they are in the position to not trust them.

In societies based on structural domination-submission relations, estrangement is a universal feature, although it is counterpoised by the disinterested relations of aid, solidarity, love. Just these relations show that the real – and not the historical, conjunctural – universal human feature is the unity of human logic and human morality: because these relations show the reason-to-be of the human accident in the universe. Why? Are all of these not superfluous pompous philosophical words? Not at all: and the criterion is the universalizability of relations and values. If the estranged, violent, irrational interhuman relations would universalise without any compensating love, aid and solidarity, the humans would disappear. But the universalisation of relations of aid, solidarity and love assures the flourishing of the human species. And as long as the universe exists, the unity of human reason and morality makes this species – unfolded as transient beings who, however, do not cease to act and act and act – equal to the universe³¹, as if the reason-to-be of the universe would be the unity of reason and morality.

(7) Class domination

As it is known and as Marx himself specified³², neither classes nor class struggle were discovered by him, but by bourgeois historians and economists. But in Marx, these concepts which had a concrete empirical determination, became ontologically relevant: just because their former static form – that there are classes, and classes struggle with each other – became dynamic, generated by the evolution and transformation of economic, political and cultural social relations. The ontological relevance of concepts is absolutely opposed to metaphysics: in metaphysics, concepts are posed as the roots/principles of the world, they are not questioned but justified with speculations and life-world examples selected so that they fit their “origin”. In Marx, the human history and its dissection show the concepts – namely, the contents/meanings resulted from the historical analysis.

Traditionally, those below were called slaves, the poor, the villains. Marx took over the metaphor “proletarians” – issued from the analogy between the ancient Roman proletarii, the poorest strata of free citizens who could support the army only by enrolling them and their scions (proles) within it, and the modern wageearners – for instance from the liberal thought suggested by the Swiss economist J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi³³, and from the radical Christian socialist Félicité de La Mennais (or Lamennais)³⁴, and from the socialist literature belonging to the French movement surrounding the 1830 revolution led by petty-bourgeoisie representatives who suffered because of the “treason” of the big bourgeoisie that arrived to control the French Revolution, turning it into a historical event sealing its definite victory over the former dominant layers which became subordinated to and integrated within its logic, and obviously over le peuple³⁵ of the lower class and the lower middle class, to which it signalled the structural continuity of class domination, beyond slogans about LEF (liberté, égalité, fraternité).

With the whole accurate description of class relationships before and in capitalism, and of the concrete conditions of proletarians, the above writers oscillated between the assumption that the domination-submission relationships are necessary³⁶ and the hope that the universal juridical rights established in capitalism – rights which, first of all, allow the freedom of the modern labour force to sell its capacity to work, the freedom to be part of a contract – will evolve toward rights of economic equality³⁷ –. Accordingly, the proletarians were rather a passive class, the moral³⁸ progress of humankind being in fact the result of habitual rebellions from below and preventive reforms from above.

Starting from the peculiarity of the proletarian condition/labour – that of having no propriety that would assure his existence, the proletarian sells his working power for a wage³⁹ – Marx developed the concept of the proletariat as no longer etc.; J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d’Economie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population (1819), Paris: Delaunay, 1827. denominating a particular class opposed to another, the bourgeoisie – although the industrial working class was/is the best illustration of the proletariat – but the universal class of the future developed capitalism. This universal mark does not mean an impossible uniformity of concrete domains, skills and human satisfaction, but, in capitalism:

the universal opposition between the lack of property that would assure the existence, therefore, the lack of control over the means of existence, and the universal characteristic of the producer of all the means of existence, the universal dependency on wages, that implies a savage competition for work and wages between proletarians⁴⁰, and thus, the universal possibility to overthrow this dependency.

From the above, the universal characteristic of the producer of all the means of existence cannot be reversed, of course. It remains to destroy the private appropriation of property. And by doing this, the universal class destroys its dependency on private property: this means the abolition of its class character; from a class opposing to capital, from its proletarian status in capitalism, the universal class becomes, indeed, the people. And, the destruction of the private feature of property relations/ of private appropriation of the means of existence is possible just because its author is the universal class: but is possible only as a conscious revolution – a movement of radical transformation of the capitalist structural relations –. The communist revolution does not work for a new “class balance between the rich and the poor”⁴¹, but for the abolition of this distinction and “balance”.

Not this distinction – actually, naming the capital-owners and the proletarians – and its keeping would solve the problem of “particularity”⁴², of different strata within the world proletariat, thus, of different strata of “middle classes” which arose from the industrial working class of 80 or 50 years ago. Yes, the proletariat within rare individuals who would rather perish than work without taking pleasure in their work: they are choosy, hard to please, and have no use for ample rewards if the work is not itself the reward of rewards. To this rare breed belong artists and contemplative men of all kinds, but also men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, travelling, in love affairs, or on adventures”. capitalism has a contradictory nature: on the one hand, it is/feels/knows that it is proletariat, that is, it has/sees no other future than destroying as a class its condition/ destroying its class condition, therefore, it is convinced of its moral superiority; on the other hand, because of the framework of constraints it lives within, it submits to the capitalist rules, it is a “subaltern” class. But this contradictory nature is not tantamount to its “non-revolutionary nature”⁴³.

Logically, that is, on the basis of the development of productive forces – thus, including the technical abilities of the proletariat – this development constituting the objective condition for the transformation of the idea (strategy) of revolution into actuality, and on the basis of subjective conditions (the revolutionary party, strong class conscience and militantism), all of these conditions being sine qua non, the revolutionary nature of the proletariat will prevail over the “non-revolutionary” one. But this is a logical deduction, and highlights a trend. In reality, the capitalist class⁴⁴, being pushed by competition for profit to develop – even though in a contradictory and unfinished manner – the productive forces, cannot stop the constitution of the objective conditions for the transformation of capitalism; so, it does everything to stop the evolution of the subjective conditions.

And one of the results of the development of productive forces is the generalisation of the material civilisation, that is, the increased affordability and consumption of goods, with big layers of wage-earners becoming “middle class”, no matter its stratification. This economic basis – and we do not consider here the force of the many faces of capitalist ideology and education – allows the capitalist class to more efficiently form the social conscience of this big part of the population: that ignores its proletarian feature and becomes an enthusiastic or passive supporter of capitalism. This subordinated social conscience is highly inertial, even after the impoverishment of even the middle class, and not only of the lower strata of workers. Consequently, even though the intrinsic nature of class relations in capitalism is dual, opposing the proletariat and the capitalist class, in fact it is very stratified: and here not the capital-owners’ strata are taken into account – therefore, all of them no matter the weight of the capital, so also the classical petty bourgeoisie or the real historical middle class – but only the wage-earners able to more or less conspicuously consume (Veblen). All of these – essentially bourgeois and essentially proletarian – strata have more stratified and coloured guises: from the standpoints of types of labour, habitation, country, nationality, political organisations and unions, religion and lack of religion, sex, and result from ideological transfigurations which lead to particular beliefs of group self-enclosure, but within the inevitable, destined capitalism.

Well, the present processes and events in world capitalism – the shrinking of the welfare state, proletarianizing the lower strata of both the recipients of wage-earners and of the petty-capital, the increased explicit authoritarianism that annuls the former hypocritical respect of forms, the direct explicit infringement of even the post- 1945 order, the absolute arbitrariness of discourses, the obvious “capitalocenic”⁴⁵ destruction of nature and the human species – hit the social conscience of the many. There is a deep trend of the “middle class” to act – but not to think to itself – as proletariat, that is, as the people of the world. And at the same time, a more aggressive policy of the world capitalist class to frighten and ideologically control the world population is deployed. Which force will win this class struggle?

In our Marxist optimism generated by the logical – and not speculative – inference related to these empirical facts, we are not utopian. The future is open, meaning that if the effect of the capitalist policy will be stronger, that is that. The conclusion of all the demonstrations about the dystopic guises of this future, is the recalling of the questions put by Dostoevsky: why do humans live at all? What is their ultimate reason-to-be? To feel good at the expense of others, of the entire human environment? Therefore, the philosophical standpoint of the ultimate reason-to-be is not an idealistic deviation from the focus on political strategies, but the consistent left’s absolutely necessary presence in the ideological struggle with the various forms of capitalism’s defence. Only the consistent proletarian position puts forward the problem of the ultimate reason-to-be of humans, which capitalism tends to avoid, to annul with particular goals.

(8) The crisis⁴⁶

Capitalism is in its system crisis. As it is known, Lenin – following Marx’s demonstrations related to the contradictions and structural limits of the victory of capitalism over the feudal regime – gave its first theoretical description: when the former/dominant classes can no longer stabilise the system they created and when the new classes are not yet able to conduct society toward the structure that assures it a better, fairer and more efficient development⁴⁷. Concretely, the conventional starting moment of the capitalist system crisis was the beginning of WWI, which proved that, with the entire development of productive forces (of civilisation), as well as with the ugly extorting of wealth from the colonies covering a much bigger surface of Terra than the imperialist metropoles, the economic competition between these ones is so huge that their peaceful guise illustrated by so many legal documents endorsing beautiful utopian liberal principles cracked.

Capitalism is, by its core relations, a world system. As a world system did capitalism enter its root crisis. For this reason, the cure can be only systemic, on a world scale⁴⁸. And for this reason, the system crisis is a “system of system crises”, as both manifestations in all the countries and as manifestations in all the domains (economy, science and technology, policies, civilisation, culture, psyche, nation-states, geopolitics). Obviously, the intensity of the system crisis was and is not the same in all the places and time intervals. There were and are showcases of countries of capitalism: the “First world” of the core capitalist system, that must to be preserved regardless of the price paid by “the rest” and, generally, by humanity. Also, there are the visible guises of civilisation – the infrastructure of big cities, the mobile phones used by everyone and the casual clothing worn by everyone, the malls and the payment by cards, the values of transience and relativity generally assumed, the spectator feature in front of the mad occurrences which madly succeed one another and are thus, considered an inevitable entertainment – which seem to add to the privileged core, new countries as “allies”, which thus have or will have privileges, too. Those outside this “gold billion”? Well, the single model, the single alternative that is “ours”, is capitalism, and those who oppose it are, if not fools, enemies. And the destiny of enemies is “on the shield”: au fond, they chose it, didn’t they?

The inter-war first official institutionalisation of the extreme-right governance, WWII and then the many wars and events on the edge bringing us closer to the abyss⁴⁹, on its brink, all certified that capitalism is in its system crisis. The postwar welfare-state did not mean that the inter-war fascism was an accident and that

49 We should remember at least the anti-communist civil war in Greece (1944-1949); the Korean War (1950-1953); the essentially anti-communist interest against the left-wing and anti-imperialist forces and tendencies in Near-East Arab countries, by imposing the state of Israel’s policies in Palestine from 1948 on; the 1953 coup, backed by USA and Great Britain against the independentist policies of Mohammad Mossadegh (1951-1953) in Iran; the US-backed coup in Guatemala (1954); the Vietnam war (1955-1975); the military anti-communist radical repression in 1965 Indonesia; the military (actually, extreme-right) coup and rule in Brazil in 1964 until 1985; the extreme-right coup and regime in Greece (1967-1974); the American coup against the elected socialist governance in Chile 1973; the 1974 coup in Cyprus, led by the Greek junta against the anti-imperialist course of the Cypriot government; the US and Latin American extreme-right and right-wing governments sanctions and military pressure against the Cuban patriotic revolution and then communist system (1961, 1962 – the Cuban Missile Crisis, till today (see the non-binding resolutions of UNGA against the US economic, commercial and financial embargo of Cuba, even the latest: https://docs.un.org/en/A/80/L.6, and GA/12723, 29 October 2025, General Assembly Overwhelmingly Adopts Resolution Calling on United States to End Cuba Embargo…, https://press.un.org/ en/2025/ga12723.doc.htm; the pressure, sanctions and imperialist involvement to overthrow the Iranian revolution (1979-today). Therefore: the colonialist military wars against the African colonies after 1945, and the military (dryly, extreme-right) coups to impose neo-colonialism in all the African countries which were previously liberated from the secular colonialism of the Western European countries; the military coups in Latin American countries against the forces which fought for social development, and the extreme-right repression, backed by the USA and Western European powers, against these forces (1975-1983)…); the imperialist and anti-communist policies in Asia, in order to contain communist China (1949-today); and the “Cold War” anti-communist policies in order to contain (this word means to overthrow, to destroy) the USSR and its European allies. As well as the state terrorism in the democratic Western states – through the collaboration of state intelligence agencies and non-state neo-fascist groups, forged and supported by the state – in order to frighten the population and stop the pressure of unions (as in 1969 Italy) and the protests promoted especially by young (1968-1969, especially France and Italy). In this frame, a main strategy was the influence: 1) on left-wing young protesters to respond to the “passivity” of the state and the extreme-right terrorism with opposed terrorism justified as conquest of power with arms, a movement that was to compromise the left-wing ideas, and 2) on the communist leaders to accept and promote the position of not opposing to the right-wing parties in power (this was the “compromesso storico” of Berlinguer), that is, of not promoting the reason-to-be of communist parties: to permanently, clearly and loudly show that the democratic reforms within the capitalist system are not enough for the solving of deep contradictions of this system, and that the only way is to transform the structural power/economic relations.The result of class collaboration in capitalism – as it was in the Western “Eurocommunism” – was neither the presence of communists in governs of “national solidarity/unity” and nor the increase of left-wing policies in the capitalist reforms: but the irrevocable decrease of the prestige and power of communist ideas. The context is always important and the vote reflects it, but the majority’s vote for non- and anti-communist parties in the last decades is highly relevant. “capitalism is democracy (human rights) and general prosperity”: because the democratic “welfare state” was in tandem with the savage wars against the peoples who wanted to remove their colony and dependence status, in tandem with discretionary sanctions in order to destroy these peoples, in tandem with cynical “political realism”.

The continuity of the system crisis is obvious. But the last decades – in an accelerated movement that once more leads to the impression that we are hit by an unprecedented event, the crisis – emphasise it on an unprecedented scale and intensity. It is not about “quantity”⁵⁰, but about the taking over, by the European⁵¹ and world capitalism, of the ugly, non-democratic manifestations of the American capitalism highlighting at least from the beginning of the 20th century the most advanced forms of capitalism and its structural contradictions⁵², and about the transformation of all the “Victorian” “civilised manners” which covered it before. The behaviours of the Western leaders and propaganda deviate from the appearances of politeness, respect of legality⁵³, logic as visible common sense maintained in one way or another before.

We must not forget that, on the one hand, capitalism itself shows the path toward its own overtaking and, on the other hand, hinders this path. Not only the development of technology required and requires a coherent unitary management (a plan and ways of carrying it out) – and, obviously, not only at the level of an economic unit, but at the level of the entire (national and, yes, international) economy – but also the capitalist relations. The technology of flight requires international management of rules, trajectories, time, but the capitalist competition leading to trans-nationalisation of economic activities, to concentration and centralisation of capital, emphasised the necessity to take into account all the national and international connections for necessary functioning⁵⁴. In this, capitalism exposes its structural contradictions related to competition and extortion of profit. With all its stages which, functionally are the industrial, light and heavy, financial⁵⁵, leading to a rentier economy that makes money for oligarchs from money⁵⁶, from speculation, buying of existing assets, and wars rather than from production; while spatially, the stages are national (concentration and centralisation) and transnational. Every stage assured new room for the development of capital, and every stage highlighted the unsolvable contradictions of this development.

On the one hand, everything is connected, according to the economic logic; on the other hand, everything is restrictively forged and shrunk because the capitalist goal is to make money now, and if the economic logic brings money after, it’s better to fragment it and to sell it. Also, on the one hand, to produce valuable goods for (effective) demand is the purpose of economic logic, and obviously this means to catch as many buyers as possible, irrespective of the means used and of their results⁵⁷; on the other hand, because every investor acts according to this same logic, it’s easier to speculate and make money from selling-buying money.

But which are the good goods? Since taste is relative, and the criteria of needs (food etc.) confuse us and do not annul the relativity that dissolves the value of economic goods, the feature encompassing all of these differences and criteria is the universalizability of goods. Everyone eats, dwells etc., but no one buys tanks, bombs, rockets. Therefore, the parasitic and malignant characteristics of capitalism are the result of the deformation of the supply and demand economic cycle: of the production of means of death, wasting matter, energy, human creativity and destroying nature, and directly and indirectly destroying human lives, increasing the suffering and promising a darker future because of the absurd debt of states, resulting mostly from military spending⁵⁸ and paid by the population, while the hegemon states will not pay it⁵⁹. The US “net debt is now nearing 100 percent of national income, (but) creditors at home and abroad showed no signs of debt fatigue”⁶⁰. Why? Because they know that the only solution for them is to continue this absurd carrousel. Once more, the capitalist economy presents itself as a Ponzi scheme, where the speculators at the top obtain profits by determining the permanent entrance of money at the bottom, with all means, irrespective of the malignant results on the economy as such. The only solution of capitalism is to continue and exacerbate the wars⁶¹ and general destruction⁶², hoping that the new sources of profit will bring it not simply profits, but a forever class domination. Once more, capitalism is a world system. And it is a “space-phage”, since it always needs new markets of raw materials, energy and consumers: it is an extensive economy by its nature, irrespective of the intensive marks resulting from the development of technology from the propensity for a circular economy: as if it would be an old society based on the rarity of livelihood. Actually, the profit rate decreased, while the financial profit is not enough for the real economy that must supply the demands; therefore, capitalism must acquire new sources of profit, must tear them out from nature and non-capitalist management, and must absorb them. Thus, capitalism is also a “time-phage”: it wastes the time for innovating new ways and means of economizing and coherently administering the natural and human resources.

At the same time, by showing the path toward its own overtaking, capitalism took over a historical preoccupation of leading strata to alleviate and better the condition of the poor⁶³ in order to discourage and dissuade revolts. But the eventual moral propensity of leading official representatives was and is not enough, and it is countered by both the structural impossibility to universalise a welfare economic regime worldwide – because the capitalist conquest of new economic spaces assures only the welfare state of the conquerors – and the structural poverty of the capitalist moral values, their reduction to prosperity and individualistic happiness.

(9) The social critique

The right-wing social critique was very important for the ideology of domination. On the one hand, the right-wing social critique has developed according to the paradigm of prevention of the social opposition from below. On the other hand, both in order to prevent a popular unity against the savage forms of oppression and to induce the idea of capitalism=human rights/democracy, the right-wing critique’s most significant manifestations were those against the extreme-right phenomena and regimes.

Many beautiful words defending the democratic institutions and rights exist in the right-wing social critique. But this social critique was not tantamount to the critique of capitalism: because it did not attain the capitalist structural relations, that is, it did not explain the root causes of the weak, formal or disappeared democracy and of the ugly and inhuman relationships. It described these perverted forms and relationships,⁶⁴ but only as a result of particular conjunctures and concrete persons: so, somehow as a temporary accident indicating rather the imprescriptible human nature that, here it is, “cannot change its spots”.

The right-wing literature of social critique had a big role in the development of the general social sensitivity in the 19th and 20th centuries, in both a positive and negative sense: because the description of oppression was no longer forbidden, and to discuss about oppression was no longer quite subversive, however not fully advisable; and, because it reduced the structural problems of capitalism to individual and historical accidents, the social sensitivity intertwined with the deep belief in the inevitability of class domination and of submission to it. We can retake Marx’s expression about the proletariat: in this phase, in its deep taking over of the capitalist ideology, the proletariat – even though rather in its “privileged” forms of urban workers and “middle class” – was only a class in itself (having the objective attributes of the proletariat), but not a class for itself, having the full class conscience allowing consistent actions for its emancipation.

Therefore, in order to acquire this full class conscience, the features of the rightwing critique must be disbanded. The social critique of the utopian socialists and of communists was that which constructed the proletarian social conscience: because it showed the root causes of domination, injustice and war – the power relations resulting from the private property relations – and thus, the ways to abolish these root causes.

Today, with the advent of a new phase of the capitalist system crisis, the social critique did not change in its duality of right-wing and consistent left sides.

Economically, this is the phase of the huge concentration and centralisation of capital, that is, the development of transnational capital which, with all its power, did not increase the profit rate: not even with the help of technological discoveries, of financialisation techniques, of neo-colonialist extortion of resources and profit from the vasal “allies” and countries with “democratic regimes” imposed in the majority of countries, and of deregulations of all the former relations between capital and the labour force which assured a necessary basis for the capitalist control of the world, of the social consciences of the world populations. And, not only because of all the contradictions of imperialist countries/of different “national” wings of the transnational capital – so, of their competition – this transnational capital absolutely needs new “vital space”, new “free” (for it) markets of resources: from the remaining countries which did not obey until now the transnational capitalism’s policies to privatise them and de facto insert them within a neo-colonialist system, and even from yards of other imperialist countries (see the warning against Greenland).

Politically, this phase accelerates the inter-imperialist tensions and, more impor- 2007. tantly, the open wars against every country that opposes it. From this standpoint, the danger of general destruction and annihilation of huge human communities once more shows that only world socialism/communism saves the human species from the irrational path determined by capitalism.

From the standpoint of social critique, the phase emphasises the contradictions of the right-wing critique. On the one hand – and obviously facing those who legitimate every movement of imperialism – it knows that this slavish attitude is counter-productive for capitalism, and thus it describes with displeasure the present brutal and cynical assumption of the à la 19th century wild imperialism, that reveals what was previously hypocritically hidden through words about legality, diplomacy, civilisation, peace. It deplores this revealing, the generalisation of the state of exception and the assumed exceptionalism of some imperialisms to the detriment of other ones. But, on the other hand, it considers that the evil is imperialism, but not capitalism as such. It does not understand/ does not accept that imperialism is a structural feature/relation of capitalism, together with exploitation and competition. And when it accuses only US imperialism⁶⁵, once more it shows that it represents capitalism: under the guise of weaker imperialist competitors. Because US imperialism is only the hegemon in the pyramid of imperialist countries, and the pyramid itself is the result of inter-imperialist/ intra-capitalist competition.

Anyway, the right-wing critique always focuses on the direct or implicated effects of “the excesses” of capitalism, be they economic or political. And it analyses these effects absolutely disconnected from the problem of the waste of the human lives. This problem as such does not appear in the right-wing ideology. Thus, nor the problem of the ultimate reason-to-be of human actions. So, the right-wing critique is “technical”, and not humanist. And a characteristic and proof of this is that it is static, namely it avoids the continuity problem of the “excesses” of capitalism, and thus the present moment is always separated from its past: only in this way can the present moment be described as an accident. Nevertheless, the right-wing critique assumed until now, consciously or not, the ultimate reason-to-be of human actions: because, with all its diatribes against the “excessive” moves of capitalism, it always tried to justify that which cannot be justified.

The false left took over the fallacies of the right-wing critique. The consistent left-wing critique is the reverse of all of the above aspects of the right-wing critique. And it deploys as both an insistence on the necessary respect of international law by all the political actors⁶⁶ and generally of the principles of right⁶⁷, and as a logical explanation all the way to the root causes of the present deviation.

(10) Compromise

Politics is the art of compromise, it is said, with the left-wing decision-makers accepting the necessity of compromises. But what kind of compromises can they accept? Analytically, the right is always much more powerful, because it is/represents class domination. Accordingly, the compromise made by the left consists in acknowledging its subordination in the asymmetric power relations. Thus, the left starts from its structural inferiority in the asymmetry of power. But would this inferior starting point lead inexorably to taking over the points of view of the right? Of course not, because this would annihilate the left as such, its telos/reason-to-be.

Political theorists speak about acceptable and unacceptable compromises, according to the gains and the losses resulting from compromises for both parties. If so, since the respectable democratic parties of the right promote the conception that capitalism is “the best of all possible worlds” – more aggressively, that “there is no alternative” – because “capitalism=democracy and socialism/communism= dictatorship”, and thus accepting only the “constructive opposition” of fake left-wing parties and equating the revolutionary systems having in their core the communist ideas from the USSR and China to Cuba with the evil enemy of mankind, then the consistent left cannot accept compromises that fall within that conception.

From the standpoint of compromises, the difference between the fake left and the consistent left is that the first is minimalist: on the one hand, it assumes the inevitability of class domination and thus it considers the questions of social ideals and the politics that develops the ultimate reason-to-be of humans as utopia and idealistic dreams; on the other hand, it strives only for welfare goals and calibrates these goals according to the concrete existing relationship of forces in a given moment: therefore, fundamentally according to the power of dominant classes. Anyway, the fake left is a strong pro-capitalism weapon: its shameful⁶⁸ servile attitude gives the lie to the denominations it assumes (“socialist”, “left”, “democratic”), but, since in the official dominant ideology “it is the left”, people better choose some more honest right-wing candidates.

On the contrary, the consistent left is – and must be – maximalist. But what does this mean? Of course, it struggles for every social reform possible in a certain moment. But it always must accompany its sincere benevolence for a large collaboration for social reforms and peace with a clear, explicit discourse of their temporal and spatial limits, so, of the necessity to surpass these limits. This is not “philosophy”: the social reforms are implemented when capitalism has no other solution to stop the radicalisation of the popular conscience, for example, the post-war welfare state that had to show that not only the socialist countries offer it; while all the improvements of living standards in Western countries even before the socialist example were “in one country”, that is, not in the whole system but only in the countries with the most powerful capitalism and which were and are the core of capitalism; therefore, these improvements were contemporary with and took place at the expense of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation, pillage and horrible crimes.

Not only the social reforms but also the democratic ones were and are the result of class struggle. And this class struggle must be permanent: and only the maximalist view of the consistent left’s struggle determines in fact this continuity, because it is that which gives the deep motivation of the express class positions in political conflicts, not the deterioration of the living standards but obviously on this basis. Indeed, and once more the social critique, the loud articulation of the causes and meanings of political and economic phenomena are that which determine the social conscience.

This importance of theory for the practical class struggle is emphasised in every concrete aspect. And only in the maximalist framework can we surpass the dominant right-wing agenda of problems and discourses. In this agenda, transparency as a requirement and feature of democracy is confined to the laws and committees to supervise them, and indeed the struggle for these laws was harsh. But concrete political decisions as, today, regarding the armament and fuel for wars and the brokerage process to transfer the armament and fuel are not on the right-wing agenda. Neither the fake left raises this issue. But the consistent left must do it. Apparently, there are two main obstacles to discussing this: the complex brokerage that would disclose foreign countries and the vile deception of intertwined capitalist interests, as well as the mostly private companies doing the brokerage. But the consistent left can and must deconstruct just these “obstacles”. Is the entwining of capitalist interests seated in different countries really so secret? And why? And does it not show the world the character of capitalism? And would the concentration of decisions and their opacity in parliaments not be rather a warning about the capitalist representative democracy? And would the autonomy of private companies towards states not be rather a demonstration of both the harmful character of the private property as such, and that it is the main feature of the capitalist state because it is the structural instrument of class domination?

As stated above, ideal conditions are never met, but the consistent left is always anticipative, and must accustom people to anticipative thinking. Yes, we always better understand things after their deployment, but if anticipation is an explicit main criterion of our political debates, we must highlight in our statements what could happen if we accept half-measures. For example, the defence of the unique example of revolutionary Cuba – an example at least of the democratic freedom of the people to choose, since we must discuss also using the ideas of the dominant agenda – should have been stated as a necessary criterion and result of the socialist type reforms and their consistent development that were taken by Latin American governments, because if these governments do not act consistently with the interests of the many, their legitimacy as such is jolting and opens the path towards a stage of right-wing majorities in elections and thus the submission of these majorities to a new, perhaps wilder, imperialist domination in its “backyard”.

Actually, the consistent left must not be shy, trying to please to the middle class and thus giving the impression that it would be “centre-left”⁶⁹: that is to say, the consistent left must not decay as a petty-bourgeois servant of the class domination. Because ultimately, and especially in the present stage of the system crisis, the middle class supports the right-wing policies which give it, really or as an illusion, some possibility to keep its class standing.

During the Enlightenment, the middle class was “left-wing” – that is, liberal – because⁷⁰ it fought for and obtained the rights paving its real and imaginary capitalist type deployment. But, and beyond its behaviour in the bourgeois revolutions era and then in their bourgeois-democratic repetitions when it twice betrayed the lower strata on whose back it thought to obtain LEF but in its particular understanding, with the development of concentration and centralisation of capital – so, with the power shown by the big bourgeois layers, even from the last decades of the 19th century and then in the first half of the 20th century when they fuelled and opposed the WWI even to it, and when they developed the extreme-right in order to subdue everyone, working class and middle class, to their power – the different kinds of middle making visible the new class contradictions; on the other hand, they made more resolute reforms of political institutions, even though in order to stop the possible democratization, so, even though for “restoration”, but this aspect continued to accustom people (especially the intellectuals) to the idea of possible and necessary reforms, while the “restoration” official framework generated a strong propensity for political democracy, even though its understanding had a class seal. And with the development of radical communist solutions, from the utopian socialists to Marx, the influence and prestige of social critique became significant. This is why, towards the end of the 19th century, socialist ideas were assumed by many intellectuals. But this assumption was rather passive and integrated into the dominant ideological mechanism, being deviated towards particularism and fragmentation. The fascist type liberal-conservative convergence was a first liberal/capitalist counter-revolution in the 20th century. It had intellectual representatives (Monica R. McLemore, The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson, 29 Dec 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/). From the last decades until now, the second liberal counter-revolution followed, and there are intellectuals who promote ideas about the “natural” hierarchy of humans and the rarefaction of culture, the nature-culture opposition (See Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons, “The Last Refuge of Scoundrels”, Monthly Review online, https://mronline. org/2022/02/11/the-last-refuge-of-scoundrels). But the biggest role of neo-liberal intellectuals was not so much the promotion of the new economic laissez-faire servicing the trans-national capital, as the strong support and legitimating of the individualist “emancipation” through gender differences and creation, as opposed to class emancipation. The anti-human morality of the individualist emancipation through gender differences and creation ought to be specified: 1) the creation through dominant psychological influence and material privileges/constraints of new members of the group of random sexual deviations (some millions in the USA, for example, starting from adolescents) is an infringement of the freedom of decision of these new members, and the freedom of decision/ freedom to choose is a main feature of human persons; 2) the above infringement and the “right” of the same-sex partners to raise children once more infringe the right of a human person: the right of the children, no matter if one of their biological parents is one of the same-sex partners.The fake left wholly took over the above neo-liberal position, considering it a supreme proof of individual freedom. The neo-liberal ideology was so aggressive that it silenced any critique. Not even the consistent left dared to discuss this problem, being afraid that it will be removed from it the group and it will be accused of conservatism. But it must not be shy: the persons with sexual deviations must not be discriminated against in any way, but this is not tantamount to the artificial creation of genders. Actually, the neo-liberal stance equates them and, moreover, it equates the struggle against racism, and that for social equality of men and women with its pressure for gender “diversity, equity, inclusion”. But the racist discriminations and discrimination of women resulted from class domination as supplementary means of exploitation, and their solution is not to accept this “diversity” and this “inclusion”, while the gender “diversity” is promoted just for its role to blur the class domination origin of discriminations. The consistent left has to show which are the effects of both the discriminations and their capitalist means of treatment for the radical critique of capitalism. class became mostly right-wing. The post-war welfare state seemed to reverse this trend, because this welfare state assured its markets of new buyers who became more prosperous because of class mobility. But with the trans-nationalisation stage of concentration and centralisation of capital, its buyers and its economic space were almost fully captured: the economic relations are getting harder and harder, and its old class standing is hit by the necessity of “survival”⁷¹.

And since the guise of the present world is the result of decades of dominance of fake left politics as an ally of capitalism, it’s clear that the “centre-left” itself is a non-realist solution. The consistent proletarian left is the only opposition and the only opposing force to capitalism.

The consistent left’s task at present is to express and work for a clear, definite anti-capitalist character of the anti-imperialist revolt. To imagine a new “popular front”, in new antifascist or anti-imperialist variants – which, in order to attract the middle class, would express the assumption of the inevitable dominance of capitalist relations since “the bourgeois are now necessary allies” – is to once more betray the ruled of the whole world and to lose the occasion to emancipate them. In other words, we obviously learned from the past, when in order to establish a large antifascist front including “right-wing democratic parties”, the communists accepted the dissociation of fascism and imperialism from capitalism, and this event, thought by them to be temporary, reverberated in the popular conscience until now. Clearer: it would be a tragedy if in the present people would think that the enemy is the “excessive authoritarianism” – manifested even through attacks against fellow imperialisms (as the threat against Denmark) – and would not be able to understand that the origin of this “excessive authoritarianism” is capitalism that, even today, strengthens the unity between imperialisms irrespective of their different gauges against the peoples of the world.

The principles must be defended. Thus, we can rightly so criticise any progressive leader if he had values – why to have these values? – and transferred them into a foreign box, allowing a disastrous image of the ideas that leader seemed to represent. We cannot defend unconditionally the leaders, even if they were treated by imperialism in a way that is acceptable neither to the bourgeois law and order, nor in a way that infringes their dignity as an illustration of the infringement of the dignity of all. If they themselves behave in a non-consistent way according to their historical responsibility, they must be criticised and defined as non-representative of the principles they are considered to represent, and as weapons against these principles.

Once more, the maximalist requirements and perspective are nowadays the only responsible political attitude for a humanist participative social order worldwide. And the minimalist fake opposition did not and does not fool the capitalists. They always knew and do perfectly know that their opposing rulers are enemies and that, ultimately, the goal of the ruled is to overthrow their subjugated status: that this goal is behind any subdued behaviour and accommodation with capitalism, which are only temporary; or, philosophically, an appearance.

If the left does not behave in a consistent, maximalist way, the time for real emancipation from domination is wasted, and this waste affects irremediably those experiencing it, as well as it seals the future, because it generates its own continuity: as domination, as inhumanity.

(11) Capitalism and imperialism: political strategies and the left

Imperialism is a structural manifestation of capitalism, of its Centre-Periphery relations. Therefore, it is not a temporary stage, since the old colonies have obtained their political independence from the Western metropoles, because the following neo-colonialist rule of economic exploitation continued after these metropoles overthrew the socialist type, popular and democratic governments that resulted from the previous struggle for independence.

Capitalism is, inherently, a better student than its opposing forces. It learned to use the local petty bourgeoisie that previously united with the popular classes for independence, and to create new well-off strata as compradors. It obviously used and rather exacerbated ethnical and religious differences: and the result of its strategy was an economy based on monoculture and thus incapable of assuring the livelihood of the many, as well as an economy based on resource extraction, consequently a debt economy where the debt service payment meant new borrowings in an endless vicious circle, and the privatisation of its assets, the neo-colonies becoming more polarised and having more social problems than before.

If these are the urgent problems, then the progressive popular forces focus on their solving. These forces – which may or may not include socialist type parties – may be, however, in the theoretical, and inherently practical danger of dissociating imperialism, their clear-cut enemy, from capitalism. I do not discuss here the class structure that led to this danger, but only the theoretical content of the anti-imperialist policies. Yes, the popular forces must establish “a new development theory for the Global South”⁷², based on the reversal of imperialist neo-liberal domination. And this new development theory includes⁷³: 1. Democratic planning, 2. State-led industrial policy, 3. Capital controls and taxation, 4. Public development finance, 5. Public ownership, 6. Food sovereignty, 7. Technological sovereignty, 8. R egional integration, 9. Debt sovereignty, 10. Universal public goods. But first of all, these directions are not only anti-imperialist, but also anti-capitalist.

Then, because they suppose the maintaining of private property, it’s imperative to control it, somehow as China does not allow the political power of private property owners. And this control means, beforehand and permanently, the transparent specification of the principles and goals of these popular forces: that private property is not tantamount to personal property, that private property is allowed and supported as long as it fulfils its functions to meet the concrete needs of people, that state control is beneficial because it is representative of the entire population, and that it will control itself so as to not become bureaucratic, and that the food and technological sovereignty are not absurd autarchic ends because these directions do not oppose to globalisation/world economic integration, but only to the capitalist type/imperialist globalisation; and that the food and technological sovereignty are only paths toward and challenges of an economy not for profit but for needs: nationally and internationally. The old Ricardian model of the Portuguese wine of Porto exchanged with English textiles – that actually was a model of Centre-Periphery economic exchange – is no longer allowed (through the present imperialist form of extractivism in the Periphery necessary for the Centre’s military and new profitable industries).

However, all of these problems and ways must be implemented coherently and in a unitary, concomitant way. And this means to always clearly state that the fulfilment of the technical aspects⁷⁴ of one direction or another is not tantamount to building an “industrial capitalist economy” that would revert the former rentier one of the national elites’ rentier accumulation⁷⁵: because by keeping the former economic integration within capitalism, the opposed measures will simply not be allowed. In order for the state to “correct market failures and strategically incubate domestic industry”, it is necessary to declare and follow all the above measures.

Not all the communist and socialist parties in the world are similar. Some of them – in the Global South – followed as much as possible the way of social and democratic reforms in order to solve the main⁷⁶ contradictions issued from the secular imperialist domination of countries, even though these reforms⁷⁷, opposed by the internal compradors, coexisted with compromises with the internal and international bourgeoisie. These compromises were determined by the existence of the internal bourgeois layers, the general strong influence of the capitalist ideology, including through the fragmentation of the left, and, obviously, the international imperialist pressure by all means. Briefly and taking the example again, if Cuba led all the way to the end the socialist revolution, the Latin American countries which arrived to have left-wing governments did not follow this path and, ultimately, these governments collapsed just because they could not support a unitary coherent socialist politics without nationalising the Central Bank and the big private capital. And only this politics is able to fight the capitalist ideology and to resist against the imperialist forces.

But, more or less jokingly said, history acts through detours. The giant multi-dimensional power of the communist-led China and the anti-imperialist Russia initiated the geopolitical paradigm of multi-polarity, manifested first of all economically as dedolarisation and investments assuring a “win-win” economy. The adherence of many countries frightened imperialism. Its last brutal intervention in Venezuela generated, nevertheless, a higher level of understanding: of both the more efficient economic response that China could and did⁷⁸ and the coherent strategy of necessary and decisive anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist continuity, with both a focus on the technological sovereignty (especially related to AI) and economic sovereignty and political conscious unity⁷⁹. This understanding is all the more important as even the adherence to BRICS is countered in many countries by contrary interests – as, geopolitically, there is a new redistribution of areas of power –: but the resistance to these interests is the popular sovereignty in popular international concert, “supported by popular participation, social justice and collective ownership of economic choices”⁸⁰. And outside the Global South? The decay of capitalism in its most advanced form of transnational imperialism is illustrated also by the incredible backwardness of the left forces especially in the core countries of this system. Because the first end of all the decision-makers of these countries was to consolidate with material measures and cultural hegemony the alignment and submission of their populations.

On the one hand, either the communist parties do not exist at all⁸¹, or they have no voice – thus, no declarations are heard by the population, but there is an offensive permanent presence in all types of media and in the real world – or, and even when they have no voice, they are expelled from the official political system⁸², while the “socialist”/social-democratic parties are absolutely unanimous with the right-wing, emitting even extreme-right messages. All of them collaborate for the destruction of class consciousness, of any collective hope, and the strengthening of the passive individual quest for entertainment⁸³ in separated “civilised” nations fighting for domination in the name of “the exceptional” they represent⁸⁴.

On the other hand, the series of elections – which were considered by the dominant ideology as proofs of democracy and, more, of the “capitalism=democracy” founding ideological principle – and which, letting aside here the practical manipulations, give the winners, show the strong internalisation of non-proletarian ideas and their methodological frameworks.

The immediate conclusion is that individualism– the opposite of the Marxian logical deduction of revolution where the social contradictions are sharper on the basis of the highest level of productive forces – proletarian type upheavals based on proletarian class consciousness are unlikely. And that the mass support of capitalism in these countries not only gives capitalism the strength, but also at the same time attacks the historical position of the core countries in the capitalist hierarchy of countries: the class contradictions and consciousness are no longer the most developed in these countries, but in the Periphery that arrives to change its peripheral position, and the place of proletarian sensitivity is occupied by a vague mass of selfish “middle class” focusing on its own well-being at the expense of blindness towards reasoning and morals, putting their countries in a backward position. Beyond this immediate conclusion, the complex causes of this situation and, in order to understand the enemy ideology of the world proletarians, the capitalist ideology paradigmatic frameworks should be mentioned.

II. (12) Theoretical paradigms and methodological frameworks

The blindness towards reasoning and morals is constituted, obviously, on the basis of information allowed by the decision-makers. So, if the Euro-Atlantic people is constantly drowned in and only in data and messages about the deep general suffering under the communist dictatorships and rule, or about the popular opposition of the terrorised Russian Federation people to the dictator Putin, as well as about the opposition of Iranians to the republican government and that of Venezuelans to Maduro, they will think that the imperialist-capitalist interventions and wars against the Soviet Revolution in 1918-1922, against the USSR in 1941-1945, against communist Vietnam etc. etc. etc. were fully legitimate. But how can we understand – and once more, letting aside both the distorted information and lies and the material and spiritual constraints of the people – that even after the spectacle of cruelty and death caused by these interventions and annexations of people and lands, many people still consider the interventions and annexations as legitimate?

Psychology teaches us that humans tend to forget and, generally, to ignore the past or present facts which harm their psychical equilibrium. But – and letting aside that the above tendency concerns one’s own behaviour and that of relatives or people who had/have close relations with – psychology emphasises also that humans are sensitive towards both injustice and cruelty, the view of injury and death. If so, the refusal to react in front of repeated and increased cruelty and death is not a normal human reaction but a deviated one, an inert psychic state. And it is generated, determined by the dominant classes which want to stop both the moral awakening and the starting of logical inquiring of causes, meanings, authors, correlations, consequences. The “do not care!”, “, yes, but…”, “think positively!” are not psychological slogans in order to calm stressed patients, but explicit ways to psychologise that which is not psychical, the harsh dominant ideology of “only obey”⁸⁵.

Obviously, all classes in capitalism are estranged, even though not in the same manner and, what is important here, even though it is blurred by the concrete material conditions of the middle class and the gloss of industrialised food and mobile phones for the rest. The intellectuals, too, are estranged because, with all the privileged conditions of the intellectual labour and the superior functions of the economic and political power owners, they must sell themselves to those who buy them. The last decades of the visible increasing role of professionals without which no real scientific and technological improvement would occur, once more⁸⁶ generated, but not only in the “translation” of some political scientists, economists and philosophers, the conception of an “inherent”, “natural” hierarchy of work and thus, a social hierarchy of domination-subordination. As a result, everything that follows this hierarchy is “inherent”.

The lack of empathy towards the subject is epistemically legitimated by this methodological pattern of the natural domination-submission hierarchy. If we take the example of philosophers, the assumption of this pattern, however historically determined, is incredible. Philosophical work implies two structural requirements, highly internalised although not necessarily consciously: that of the critical spirit/ criticism and that of the permanent awareness of one’s own unfolding of reasoning. But the social constraints led to a selective critical spirit: to the technical philosophical topics, but not to everything/not to the social problems from the world of appearances. While awareness slumbers when it concerns one’s own limits of critical spirit.

The analytical deconstruction of concepts is not easy, but the assumption of the hierarchy of types of work denotes the ignorance of the interdependence of social activities⁸⁷. Epistemologically, the knowing is based on the fragmentation and isolation of its objects, because otherwise it cannot succeed, but this pattern of thinking and, generally, of theoretical work was transposed by the intellectuals who were and are in the service of domination, in the representation of society. The result was and is the lack of empathy towards those outside the “inner circle” of those close to the system. The lack of empathy has nothing to do with friendships in the specific areas given by the division of labour and intellectual speciality, but, aside from the misunderstanding because of the capitalist type teaching, with what Rabelais formulated as a lack of moral sensitivity: science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul⁸⁸.

Accordingly, they forged the patterns of methodological individualism according to which society = individual + individual + individual, each pursuing more or less rationally their own interests: and the coherency of society is just the result of the relative compensation made by the exchange feature of the relations, however tense, of the pursuit of interests. Methodological individualism is a weak explicative paradigm – because society is more than a sum of individuals, it is a system of relations, institutions, values, whose structure is not the individual – but it is, consciously or not, a legitimation of capitalism: society is, au fond, a struggle of competing interests and then, “might is right” both domestically and internationally. This pattern is assumed by all intellectuals who legitimise capitalism.

And it manifests through different methodological forms, all of them equally internalised:

• the fragmentation of the approach to social problems, each discussed separately from its root causes⁸⁹, • the isolation of events – the neglect of their past and of their future consequences – and their explanation from conjunctures⁹⁰, • the equivalence of capitalism with a sum of countries in different “natural”

hierarchies of culture, internal economic development, civilisation, and ultimately the leadership of each country being responsible for the living standard of the people; this is the pattern of capitalism in one country. Two more forms/paradigms which are frameworks of the approach of society should be added:

• the equivalence between politics and administration, and • the exclusion of morals from politics.

Concerning the first: politics is the setting of goals and allocating of resources for these goals, directly reflecting the power ultimately resulting from private property and its control over society’s means of existence, thus being the expression of interests and will. Administration is the management of social property in order to solve problems resulting from the common cohabitation of a community, it is a technical activity. For example, the construction of a bridge is administration: it depends on the studies of constructors, ecologists, sociologists, economists, regarding the necessity, feasibility, costs, other aspects. But politics decides the construction as such. Thus, politics subordinate administration, but the huge difference is between types of politics: in capitalism, politics reflects primarily private, restrictive interests and will, and politicians promise before elections that they will construct the bridge: figuratively yes, they will allocate the resources for it, but literally they may negate the technical expertise according to which the bridge is not necessary and even harmful. In capitalism, politics is contradictory to administration⁹¹. Only the socialist transformation of structural relations assures what Engels said, that politics will be the administration of things. And this problem once more substantiates what the role of the state is: it is the coordinating system of the administration of a community, and as an administrative system it will never disappear; only its instrumentality of asymmetrical power, of class domination will disappear, as Marx insisted to the anarchists who did not grasp the difference between administration and class domination.

Concerning the second: already Machiavelli, the realist modern ideologist of politics, proved that the political actions are autonomous from moral and religious precepts, because they pursue ends related to the interests of the state, even though these ends and interests involve religious institutions and the morals of the people. Later on, the ideologists of capitalism developed this realism, covering the deep contradictions between the interests of the ruling classes determining the politics of the state no matter the cost of these interests for the people of the state and for other peoples and, on the other hand, the necessity to compensate somehow for this cost with internal social policies which, however, hamper their priority to maximise their profits – a priority transferred as imperialist-neo-colonialist policies towards other peoples – and also with international laws limiting the means of intra-capitalist competition and struggle and thus “moralising” politics (as the 20th century laws of war). But the capitalist interests are the priority and, especially in moments of economic and political crisis, the aggressive ideology representing this priority attacks both the social policies and the international laws and institutions which are “inimical towards our state”. The present era once more shows that the moral aspect of capitalist-imperialist politics has not the power to counter this politics, and that “politics and morals are two different things”. But are they really so external to one another? The setting of goals and the allocation of resources are dealing with entire communities, with their existential interests, but if the setting and allocation are made from the standpoint of restrictive interests opposing to the community and the communities, they are unjust, thus not moral: because morals means and is based on justice. Consequently, politics must be moral, even though it is made from the standpoint of the reckoning of interests. And it can be: in the communist model where politics is the administration of things according to justice.

* * *

Nowadays, the historical rhythm is accelerating in a tempo not seen before. On the one hand, right-wing intellectuals are shaken by the sudden changes in the world, and they split between the loyalty due to the specific masters each of them served when they were in power and the solution to jump in the boat of the new masters who won the elections. They tend to impose the public agenda of opposition between the “progressist” neo-liberals who carried out to the end the principles of absolute freedom given by the Western system of trans-nationalisation of capital and world civilisation, and the conservative neo-liberals who accentuate the hierarchy and contradictions in this system and envelop the struggle for top position in the hierarchical system of world capitalism with the “one nation/one country first” slogan, actually continuing the old exceptionalism promoted by capitalism, and with the traditional religious brakes of behaviour. And the weaker national capitalisms support this public agenda, as well as the fake left which supports the war against Russia, Iran etc. does.

This right-wing public agenda is logically incoherent but dangerous: because it tends to divert the class struggle to the electoral process, and continues to reduce the options to branches of capitalism/capitalist parties and ideologies. And it would be more than sad if the populations would endorse again one capitalist branch, irrespective of which of them. On the other hand, even right-wing intellectuals arrive to assume the historical acceleration⁹², and a criticism beyond its former restriction to one branch or another, to some or other “excesses”.

But the more the objective capitalist crisis advances, the stronger the capitalist ideological aggression. Both its forces and the level of general consciousness forbid a predetermined bright future. The “predetermination” meant for Marx and means for us only that, logically, the high development of productive forces assuring the end of an extensive and wasteful economy and the advancement of public awareness of the waste, destruction and death generated by capitalist relations will assure the revolutionization of the structural relations and organisation of society. But this logic never meant and means automatic processes.

What is now more important is the understanding of the deep patterns of social thinking which influence the left – sometimes even in its consistent form – framing its messages and determining the prestige and force of its struggle.

(13) Methodological frameworks in left-wing thinking

It is very important to use – and, yes, internalise at the level of popular commonsensical attitude towards life and society – the philosophical perspective that should not frighten for it emphasises concepts since, obviously, it has been developed in the analysis of the real social world. This methodological requirement follows and is inserted within the Marxist-Leninist theory of the construction of the subjective conditions of revolution – and, ultimately, of the general social consciousness of the world proletariat, therefore, of the formation of that popular common-sensical attitude specified by Gramsci –. We can quickly formulate three aspects of the philosophical perspective in the form of caveats, and there is no delicate political phenomenon that may be excepted from their truly dialectical approach:

• never oppose the form to the content, or vice-versa, and do understand that they cannot be considered hierarchically, thus postponing the approach of one of them while focusing on the other; people feel that the form and the content are indestructibly interdependent and immediately remove themselves from the left-wing discourse that does not consider this interdependency⁹³; • never oppose the particular pursued in a choice to the universal contained within the virtual choice of humankind, thus of every human being; there is no group legitimacy of the particular that can annul the universal legitimated by the interests of humankind, thus of every human being⁹⁴; • it is clear that the two philosophical requirements – so, principles – are intertwined, and thus, it is the biggest mistake to procrastinate the approach of one of their components because “this is not the time”; any reasoning in terms of other components lets open the missing one and the unsatisfactory solution pushes to removal from those who provided it; consequently, never procrastinate and always do anticipate things according to the principle of universalizability of choices and actions⁹⁵.

Once more, the power asymmetry in capitalism generates the precedence of themes for the public debate, given by the dominant ideology. On this basis, we can continue the caveats related to the methodological frameworks:

• to not follow the agenda of problems given by the dominant ideology, but to counter it with its own approach pointing out the root causes of phenomena and their systemic interdependence.

From this a main method:

• to not add to the general lament, but to counter it with ways of action, answering to the implied question posed only by the consistent left: what is to be done since the reforms until now led to the present world result?

This practical content of the consistent left-wing criticism directs to the paradigms which reverse those given by the dominant ideology, and which must be assumed as methodological frameworks:

• to no longer discuss capitalism in one country, even though the problem is related to domestic political relations, but always emphasise the more than connections, the interdependence of these domestic problems with international decisions, relations of force and situations; always emphasise that capitalism is not a collection of shop windows in different stores of different calibers, but a system; • to always counterpose to the capitalist unfinished criticism – when it is not simply hypocritical – the indication of both the concrete conjunctural all the way and the structural causes of phenomena; • to always show what the procrastination of both permanent presence in the public debate and solving did and does mean; thus, to oppose procrastination with clear concrete steps: that are feasible, if and when these steps are related to changes in other sub-systems of society; • to always put the problem of the future, and counterpose to the capitalist variants the socialist and communist openings; • to always put – as indeed a specific problem posed by the consistent left – the problem of capitalist solutions’ human costs and waste: namely, to oppose to the capitalist neglecting of collateral output externalised both in environment and society (as “collateral damage”), the anticipative circular integrated nature-society and local-global unitary thinking.

This last point shows a sine qua non paradigm for the political praxis of the left:

• the permanent close collaboration of left-wing forces on the basis of consensus concerning the minimisation of human costs and waste hic et nunc; the consistent left must challenge all the left-wing/popular forces just with the question of what for to inertially follow the capitalist policies; this question shows the impossibility to express the acceptation of the human costs and waste; the permanent close collaboration surpasses the historical differences related to definitions and explanations of the past; it doesn’t mean first of all organised unity, but only organised collaboration regarding the present era of capitalist decay and its existential dangers; it is a proletarian front, not an inter-class front; it doesn’t take place under the starting point of debates about the historical differences of the left, but on that of a non-conventional (philosophical) approach of the present incomprehensible multiplication of the left and its image of redundance and inefficiency: of that of the what for and with which costs; but just this non-conventional (philosophical) approach proves to give the criteria of proletarian class unity now under the guise of close collaboration; if the consistent left clearly posits the criteria of root causes and interests, as well as those of finality of capitalist strategies, thus the criterion of the reason-to-be of the left-wing opposition and activism, then the responses from all the left-wing and popular forces remove from the explicit or implicit support of capitalism.

(14) Concluding remarks

All classes in capitalism are estranged and, even though some arrive to not feel it and others – feel it in different manners, at the bottom of all their quest for lesser social suffering or “troubles” and more pleasure of life is the despair of a dark future already more than visible: and not because now the president of the USA shook the capitalist state of affairs which should not have been shaken – they already were in deep shaking – but because the present radicality of world warmongering destroys even the rest of the former weak stability for life continuity.

However, this deep state of despair, even that covered by rejoicing, involves in its core the impossibility to have a coherent explanation – thus, expressible deployment – of not only the external facts/causes but also of the human capacity to control and surpass them. Human beliefs are not forged by facts – because the facts need to be explained, namely, translated into their cognition – but by logical legitimations, by theories. And all the theories desperate humans face acknowledge and strengthen that capitalism, be it considered through an apologetic or critical lens, does not change their horizon.

But what opposes despair? The possibility to have social ideals⁹⁶. The desperate individuals – who do not arrive on the way of fulfilment of their expectations of members of human society, but renounce – have no social ideals, because any ideal supplied to them in the name of particular values and communities of shared beliefs, wellbeing or despair is confronted with the ideas of injustice towards those outside these communities. A social ideal can be only a universalistic one, in the name of the human species – so, of each of its members – because only the universal value of the human species is congruent with the ideas of justice and dignity of every human being. There can’t be a valuable particularistic⁹⁷ social ideal that cannot be universalised, because, by arriving to clash with other particularistic ideals, it is denied: why would a particularistic social ideal be better than other particularistic ideals? The proletarian social ideal is universalizable, because it doesn’t configure a future of proletarians against the dominant classes – this would be a particularistic ideal – but the abolishment of the proletarian class and the class domination as such: its/their transformation into unique and unrepeatable individual members of the human species freed from oppression and able to “make human life happy, both in the comparatively humble sense of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning, of rendering life, not what it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant, but such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have”⁹⁸.

This paper drew attention to the philosophical perspective and principles which can boost and refresh the proletarian class’s consistent political organisation and action. Briefly, the first is the up-to-date Aristotelian concept of telos, of the reasonto-be of a phenomenon, object and action. By putting the question of what for to the contemporary class relations, political decisions of exploitation and war, and oppositions to them, the malignant character of these relations and dominant decisions appears more clearly in the consistent left’s ideological struggle. For the consistent left, the communist revolution does not follow from benevolent dreams and wishes, but it is demonstrated: inter alia, by the concept of telos, that showed it as the means to arrive at the non-proletarian and non-class divided human species.

The second is the moral basis of the political decisions. Marx did not write about morals: he took over from Kant and developed the concept of man as a species being, each member of the species being its unique and uniquely precious representative. Accordingly, human thinking – indestructibly arising from and leading to human action – after a long historical experience and structuring of existential conditions, is capable of surpassing the victory of normative ethical theories with the idea of practical moral revolution and the complex practical strategy to actualise the potentiality promoted by that idea. Just the work of consistent economic, philosophical and political demonstration of the historical objective formation of revolutionary forces and determination of revolution, as well as the warning against an automatic determinism, as well as the praxis of proletarian struggle, made Marx and the constellation of known and unknown revolutionaries of the world the most morally sensible humans, shedding light on the human structural unity of reason and morals, which alone causes the challenging equivalence of the human being and the infinite universe and maybe the future of incessant equivalence.

Note

1. Professor, Division of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Romanian Committee of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Romanian Academy.

2. @cartoonralph, in Holly Ilia, Jan 12, 2020, https://mastodon.social/@daved3464.

3. These abstract concepts were called by Kant, transcendental: constituting the most important frameworks and criteria of human judging.

4. The well-known formula “all is fair in love and war” was coined from the standpoint of those who dominate, and the lack of scruples it suggests shows not only the deep destruction of moral reasoning, but also the irresolvable contradiction of domination-submission as such, besides the historical determination of this structure of social relations: the development of the modern, capitalist form of this structure brought about moral brakes of “the formula” (the human rights, the laws of war, obviously generated by complex capitalist interests and relations of forces, and contradictory to the structural exploitation, oppression and war), but at the same time, the continuous infringement of these brakes.

5. See here a translation into English, https://www.gabrielditu.com/eminescu/emperor_and_proletarian.asp.

6. The fact that he used the latter notion (the proletarian) to name a social class shows a particular maturity in his social conception: what was known in the socialist/communist literature of the time already indicated more than poverty, more than the state of subordination in all forms, therefore more than a visible quality, hated over time and blamed for being the source of its own misfortunes; but an understanding of the cause of this state beyond particular faults: the class relations.

7. Do not forget: justice is the complete/perfect (teleios) virtue (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). Translated, with an interpretive essay, notes, and glossary by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 92, Book V, Chapter 1, 112. 9b27-30). And Plato, The Republic. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari, Translated by Tom Griffith, Cambridge University Press, 2000/2018, p. 342, 618e1-3, the “worse (life) which leads the soul along the road to greater injustice, and that better which leads along the road to greater justice”.

8. In the conclusion of the poem, Eminescu was not the proletarian. But he was neither the old Lear from the second variant nor the emperor – Caesar – from the final form. Even though the last words of the poem seem to approve Caesar – life is a dream, so why question the order of the dream? – in fact, the proletarian cannot be denied: because we all see that life is not a dream, and we must make our life beautiful and dignified here on Earth. What the proletarian said cannot be refuted in any way.

10. “While populism is, essentially, an anti-elitist ideology, consociationalism is, at its very heart, about power sharing between political elites. As such, consociationalism marks … a theoretical alternative to polarized and/or populist government”, and “while consociationalism in plural societies is premised on inclusion, “militant consociational democracy”… deliberately excludes the extreme right from the consociational grand coalition in order to protect democratic values. In Belgium, the same parties that work together across the country’s linguistic divisions in an elaborate consociational federation have systematically excluded the Flemish and Francophone extreme-right parties from electoral, legislative, and governmental cooperation”, Matthijs Bogaart, Lutger Helms, Arend Lijphart, “The Importance of Consociationalism for Twenty-First Century Politics and Political Science”, Swiss Political Science Review (SPSR), Vol. 25, Issue 4, 2019, pp. 341-356 (342, 343) (my emphasis, AB). (AB: the exclusion of extreme-right parties – observed in 2019 – involves explicit assumptions on behalf of democratic parties, but, letting aside this institutionalised aspect, more and more are the extreme-right attitudes and policies introduced surreptitiously in the “democratic” coalitions; obviously, not those shaking the unbridled neoliberal sexual diversity, but those opposing to the popular democratic right of masses to express and impose their interests. The outside interventions of intelligence states and private institutions in electoral processes, culminating in “colour revolutions”, are an aspect and example countering the formal position of right-wing parties. See the recent elections in Honduras, Maurice Lemoine, Au Honduras, les dessous du coup d’Etat électoral, mardi 9 décembre 2025, https://www.medelu.org/Au-Honduras-les-dessous-du-coupd-Etat-electoral, where the conservative candidate backed by the USA president won, Honduras declares Asfura, backed by Trump, as presidential winner, 12/24/25, https://thehill.com/policy/ international/5662890-nasry-asfura-wins-honduras/). Thus, it is important to question whether “parity, proportionality, autonomy, and minority vetorights” (Brendan O’Leary, “Consociation in the Present”, Swiss Political Science Review (SPSR), Vol. 25, Issue 4, 2019, pp. 556-574) – but keep attention, between elites – are specific only to the capitalist power-sharing. Do they not work better when the rights of the ruled are taken into account?

11. Till today, when the official austerity policy searches for money to finance the armament industry and the participation in the war against Russia, and reduces the wages and income of the majority of the population, as well as reduces all the social expenditures for infrastructure maintenance, culture, health: no one asked why this absurd institution of “Custodian of the Crown” is paid from public money.

12. I wrote Monarhia salvează România?, 28 iunie 2011, http://www.criticatac.ro/8496/monarhiasalveaza-romania/ [Does the monarchy save Romania?], because the right wing, and even socialdemocrats who were excluded from the social-democratic leadership, continued to press toward

13. The social-democracy in power accepted different tiny groups of “communists” led by former and present intelligence officers, which were absolutely invisible and disappeared after some mocked appearances by mass media.

14. Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Notes sur la photographie, Paris, Gallimard Seuil, 1980, p.

49. : “because punctum is also: a prick, a small hole, a small spot, a small cut — and also a throw of the dice. The punctum of a photograph is that chance which, in it, points me”.

15. Sima Lieberman, Growth and Crisis in the Spanish Economy: 1940-93, London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Oscar Calvo-Gonzalez, “American Military Interests and Economic Confidence in Spain under the Franco Dictatorship”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 67, Issue 3, 2007, pp. 740-767; Neal M. Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2014.

16. Herakleitos, Fragment 52, in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Griechisch und Deutsch, von Hermann Diels, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1903, p. 74.

17. As mentioned above, the representative democratic political regime is contradicted by the monarchical form of government.

18. The cut or shrinking of social expenditures, even for the most deprived, who were an old concern of the ruling strata. The example of the USA is significant, because this country embodies the most advanced contradictory trends of capitalism. And the “social state” for instance in Denmark or Israel (with free universal health care etc.) does not contradict the logic of the world capitalist system, because it is today an exception, determined by specific historical conditions, not the trend of the system. This “social state” still gives the system space/time to exist, because it preserves the social conscience of their populations in the area of domination-submission, in the area of supporters of capitalism: at the expense of wars, and domination of other populations.See Understanding the SNAP program—and what cuts to these benefits may mean, November 10, 2025, https://www.hks. harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/social-policy/explainer-understanding-snap-programand-what-cuts.But, because I gave the example of Denmark, see a sample of “modernity”: the Denmark Constitution (https://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/da00000_.html). 1992. Section 12: “…the King shall have the supreme authority in all the affairs of the Realm…;” Section 13: “the King shall not be answerable for his actions; his person shall be sacrosanct”.

19. Ana Bazac, « Le temps d’agir », Diotima, vol. 42, 2014, pp. 6-22, republished because of the

20. It’s not important here that God personified the entire humanity, thus Man – as the young Hegelians Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx already showed – but only that the human forces were severed from the humans now let without their constitutive condition of independence, thus autonomy, ability to give to themselves – from their capacity of reason – the laws of conduct.

21. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins.

22. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Fisherman_and_the_Fish, where Pushkin’s tale in verses (1835) and both the German Grimm and the Russian Afanasyev collections of popular tales in the 19th century were rather interpreted as of popular origin. In my mother’s Romanian village between the two world wars, in the tale the poor peasants asked the Lord who was their guest for a night to make them boyar and boyar’s wife, then prince and princess, and then God and Goddess (AB, not an ancient goddess, but God’s wife). But the Lord got angry and turned them into a pair of hoopoes.

23. Jean Piaget, Le jugement moral chez l’enfant (1932), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 200. 0; Thomas Kesselring, « La rationalité des émotions. Un complément à la théorie de Piaget », 24. See Ana Bazac, “Global injustice: what is known, what is assumed and what is promised?”, Studia UBB, Philosophia, 58, No.2, 2013, pp. 145-157.

25. Branko Milanovic, “The Great Convergence: Global Equality and Its Discontents”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2023; June 14, 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/great-convergenceequality-branko-milanovic.

26. We do not construct a bridge near a village after we did it some years ago (we construct other structures), and if before having the bridge the villagers crossed the river in boats to go to the market across the river, now the proportion of villagers and, thus, the proportion and value of trade increase, generating new opportunities of production etc.

27. John McMurtry, Global Poverty: How the Rich Eat the Poor and the World, August 31, 201. 8, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-davos-blind-eye-how-the-rich-eat-the-poor-and-theworld/5503273; Colin Todhunter, The Globalisation of Bad Food and Poor Health: Sustainable Development or Sustainable Profits?, September 01, 2018, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-globalisation-of-bad-food-and-poor-health-sustainable-development-or-sustainable-profits/5518194 ; and even Joanna Blythman, Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. London: Fourth Estate. 2015; but see Samuel L. Swift et al., “Unsecured debt in early adulthood and premature mortality in adults in the USA: a longitudinal analysis of prospective national cohort data”, Lancet Public Health, 10, 2025, e979–87.

28. Michael Roberts, Extreme inequality – and what to do about it, December 10, 2025, https:// thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/12/10/extreme-inequality-and-what-to-do-about-it/; and World Inequality Report 2026, https://wir2026.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2025/12/World_Inequality_Report_2026.pdf.

29. Conatus is the philosophical concept coined by the first Stoics and taken over by, for example, Spinoza and Leibniz, who defined it as the internal force of things/monads, or vital force (Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics. Translated by George Eliot, Edited by Thomas Deegan, Salsburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1981, III, Prop. VI, p. 100 (“Every thing, as far as in it lies, strives to persevere in its existence”; G.W. Leibniz, “On the Reform of Metaphysics and of the Notion of Substance” (1694), in The Philosophical Works of Leibniz, Translated from the original Latin and French, with notes of George Martin Duncan, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Publishers, New Haven, 1890, pp. 69-70).Not in order to challenge, let’s however grasp a difference between conatus as the force of any individual thing, or the force of the living, and fitra from Islam. Fitra is the disposition/constitution/instinct of man both towards his persistence as a being and towards what is essential for the being to be human: compassion, intelligence and ihsan – (the responsibility to achieve) perfection. Conatus signals the genus proximum of the human being – that it is a being and a living being – while fitra denominates the differentia specifica, the humanity of the human being.

30. Obviously, even those in necessary services. You must read Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app, Dec 18, 2024, https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-12-17-loose-flappingends-luigi-has-a-point-db7e46c1c9c9; and Katie J. Wells, Funda Ustek Spilda, Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care, December 17, 2024, https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/.

31. This equality is felt by the mother: for whom her children give the value of the universe.

32. Karl Marx to J. Weydemeyer in New York, London, March 5, 1852, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm: “no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society”.

33. J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Études sur les sciences sociales. Tome second. Études sur l’Économie politique, À Paris, Chez Treuttel et Würtz, Libraires, M.DCCC.XXXVII, pp. 35, 36

34. F. Lamennais, De l’esclavage moderne (1839), pp. 215-255, in Paroles d’un croyant, Une voie de prison, De l’esclavage moderne, Paris : Michel Lévy Frères, Editeurs, 1869.

35. Ibidem, p. 224: “By ‘people’ we mean the proletarians, that is, those who, owning nothing, live solely by their labour. The type of work is irrelevant; and thus, there are proletarians of every condition and profession. Only the vast majority subsists on physical labour.”

36. J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Études sur les sciences sociales. Tome second. Études sur l’Économie politique, pp. 173-174.

37. F. Lamennais, De l’esclavage moderne, p. 227: “We do not, of course, dispute moral progress or the recognition of rights, and this progress is great, because, by restoring human dignity and enshrining the fruitful principle of natural equality, it prepares the way for another; because it will produce sooner or later the social reality that logically corresponds to it. But, in the present state of affairs, the condition of the proletarian, morally superior, is, with regard to physical life, often inferior to that of the slave”.

38. Ibidem: “But this freedom is only fictitious. The body is not enslaved, but the will is”. Indeed, morality refers to the will to choose.

39. This peculiarity was emphasised by all writers. But see also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (1882), Edited by Bernard Williams, Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Poems translated by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge University Press, 2001, § 42, p 57: “Seeking work for the sake of wages - in this, nearly all people in civilized countries are alike; to all of them, work is just a means and not itself the end, which is why they are unrefined in their choice of work provided it yields an ample reward. Now there are

40. J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Études sur les sciences sociales. Tome second. Études sur l’Economie politique, p. 249: “this universal competition, decorated with the word of limitless freedom of industry”.

41. Ibidem, p. 176.

42. As David W. Lovell, The Concept of the Proletariat in the Work of Karl Marx, Thesis submitted for the degree of doctor of philosophy of the Australian National University, August 1984, p. 423, considered that the universality of the class destined to be the author of revolution would annul the concrete particularity under which the different states and interests of social strata lie. (But the thesis is interesting. It was published as Marx’s proletariat: the making of a myth, Routledge, 1988, aiming to show that Marx’s concept was utopian and, just because of their suffering, the proletarians strive for reforms alleviating their condition, thus accepting capitalism).

43. Ibidem, p. 425.

44. We do not employ the term used by the dominant ideology – “elites” – and also by the critical positions which want to sound respectable, thus avoiding the class denominations. From a quality standpoint: the majority of them are not elite, that is, highly-specialised people able to anticipatively manage the economic units and national and global economic organisations; and the anticipative management involves humanism, that’s absolutely lacking. The use of “elites” is ideological, inducing the feeling of the natural subordination towards the capitalist class and the forgetting of the class and class relations.

45. See Carles Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes’: Why a Correct Understanding of Marx’s Theory of Value Is Necessary to Leave the Planetary Crisis”, Monthly Review, Vol. 76, No 06, 2022; Álvaro San Román & Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Westernocene? On the Ideological Foundations of the Current Climate Crisis”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 34, No 4, 2023, pp. 39-57.

46. As the Greek krisis, coming from the verb krineo, to discern (therefore, to emphasise), that means also a paroxysmal point of bifurcation/inflection (as a result of the discernment of states), the Chinese word wēijī (危机), formed from wēi (危, danger) and jī (机, opportunity), suggests an incipient moment/point of bifurcation (jī), because in fact any point of bifurcation is an opportunity, a window for future (different) paths. (And the word criterion comes from the same root, as well as critique).

47. See also the Gramscian formula: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”, Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971), New York: International Publishers, 1992, p. 276.

48. John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure (1999), London, Pluto Press, 2013.

50. The “quantity” itself does not regard only the “simple” decay of material infrastructure and the decrease of the living standard of even the lower middle class, so, “objective” contexts (Living Paycheck to Paycheck? You’re Not Alone—67% of People Are in 2025, https://www.investopedia. com/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-youre-not-alone-67-percent-of-people-are-in-2025-11812027; or Professor Patricia Thane FBA, How poverty in modern Britain echoes the past, 11 Jan 2019, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/how-poverty-modern-britain-echoes-past/; or Households Below Average Income: an analysis of the UK income distribution: FYE 1995 to FYE 2024, Updated 28 May 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2024/households-below-average-income-an-analysis-ofthe-uk-income-distribution-fye-1995-to-fye-2024#children-in-low-income-households), but at the same time their corresponding feelings and subjective states; see David G. Blanchflower & Alex Bryson, Young Worker Despair in the United States, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 34071, July 2025.

51. The dramatic shrinking of state expenditures for social infrastructure and needs together with the copying of the American manners and topics of propaganda are illustrated in the former EastEuropean Socialist countries, like Romania.

52. See the must-read Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism”, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971), New York: International Publishers, 1992, pp. 277-318; and Jean Baudrillard, Amérique, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986. Dr Warwick Powell, The Bad Dream of Modernity, Baudrillard’s America Forty Years On, Jan 02, 2026, https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/the-bad-dream-ofmodernity referred to the latter, insisting on the “semiotic hegemony” of American capitalism. The results of all these objective processes in economy and ideology are: David U. Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, “Poverty and death in the wealthiest of nations”, The Lancet, Vol 10, November 2025, e897-e898.It’s interesting, however, that America was seen as the future best form of the European economic and scientific civilization, because it will develop all these acquisitions of civilization without being “burdened with an immense class of proletarians demanding work, and who seem on the verge of perishing if a machine were to replace their arms”, J.C.L. Simonde de Sisimondi, Études sur les sciences sociales. Tome premier. Études sur les Constitutions des peuples libres (1836), Bruxelles, Société typographique belge, 1839, p. 129.

53. See L’ attacco USA in Nigeria, fuori da legalità internazionale, svela il piano criminale di Trump che vuole comandare il mondo. E spinge alla crisi totale per scatenare un conflitto totale. Verso una guerra sistemica: l’imperialismo pirata torna a colpire (Editoriale di Luciano Vasapollo), 26/12/2025, https://www.farodiroma.it/l-attacco-usa-in-nigeria-fuori-da-legalita-internazionale-svela-il-piano-criminale-di-trump-che-vuole-comandare-il-mondo-e-spinge-alla-crisi-totale-per-scatenare-un-conflitto-totale-verso-una-gu/.

54. See this also in the development of AI together with the new instruments of financialization (the crypto), Marwan S., Les nouvelles données de l’impérialisme étatsunien, Janvier 2026, https://lapensee-libre.over-blog.com/2026/01/n-269-les-nouvelles-donnees-de-l-imperialisme-etatsunienbitcoin-et-imperialisme-0.html.

55. Michael Hudson, The Neo-Rentier Economy, January 31, 2012, https://www.levyinstitute.org/ blog/hudson-the-neo-rentier-economy/; Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism, Islet, 2022.

56. It’s the financial stage/financialization. John McMurtry, ibidem, developed Marx’s formulas of capital formation – M-C-M (money/investment-commodity production-money – by showing the difference between the M-C-M for life (C being necessary goods) and parasitic M-C-M in two forms: a) C – weapons, harmful products; b) C=M, financialization.

57. See the car industry that pushed for both the creation of suburbs of individual houses far from the workplaces and services, the suffocation of roads, the increase of transportation time, the waste of energy and matter, and the destruction of railways.

58. See Kenneth S. Rogoff, America’s Coming Crash Will Washington’s Debt Addiction Spark the Next Global Crisis?, Published on August 19, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ americas-coming-crash-rogoff.

59. Michael Hudson, Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be, April 10, 2012, https://michael-hudson. com/2012/04/debts-that-cant-be-paid-wont-be/; Michael Hudson, How America Makes Money Without Paying, 11 Oct 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VCsf_sKKXs; Michael Roberts, Debt and the cockroaches, November 1, 2025, https://thenextrecession.wordpress. com/2025/11/01/debt-and-the-cockroaches/.

60. Kenneth S. Rogoff, ibidem. But see https://www.usdebtclock.org/, moving in real time.

61. See Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, War and Oil: Connecting the dots, Jan 7, 2026, https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2026/01/war-and-oil-connecting-dots.html.

62. This general destruction is not tantamount to Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” of obsolete technology in order to give room to the new one, but the counter-productive destruction of nature and resources. See Ana Bazac, “Incompatible Deployment: The Non-Creative Destruction of the Human Constructions”, Analele Universității din Craiova, Seria Filosofie, N. 53 (1/2024), pp. 126- 152. . And, for this general destruction to be accepted by the ruled, capitalism strengthens the belief that nature is able to resorb and dissolve all the malignant facts of capitalist type production.

63. Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Vol. 1 – Report and Appendix, presented to both houses of parliament, London: Wyman & Sons, 1904; Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England, Youth Voices: Child poverty, 2025, https:// www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/youth-voices-child-poverty/; 2025, https://www.unicef.org. uk/press-releases/more-than-400-million-children-globally-live-in-poverty-unicef/.

64. See Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Metropolitan Books, 65. An interesting proof of the dissociation of the political and the economic and of the ignorance of the latter is – as an example of the general tendency to move the analysis from real processes to words (about them), but at the same time as a contribution to the history of ideas and their concepts – the remark about the covering of “imperialism” with “globalisation” (Daniel Arnaud, Globalisme contre impérialisme: leçons vénézuéliennes, janv. 07, 2026, https://regisdecastelnau. substack.com/p/globalisme-contre-imperialisme-lecons). Indeed, the apparent victory of the USA in the Cold War against the USSR (1991) and then against Russia led to the disappearance of the word “imperialism” from the political discourses/theories. That is to say, not imperialism was seen as the specific form of capitalism that is the driving force of the capitalist evolution, but globalisation as the transnational form and phase of capitalism. But these two phenomena are of different orders, and imperialism is a permanent feature of capitalism in all its phases. Thus, instead of substituting one with the other, in fact globalisation leads to more imperialism, irrespective of the means of imposing it.

66. When the US ‘puts Maduro on trial,’ the world also puts the US under scrutiny: Global Times editorial, Jan 06, 2026, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202601/1352485.shtml.

67. Victor Dedaj, Helms Burton, Assange, Maduro, etc. L’extraterritorialité dans tous ses états, 6. Janvier 2026, https://www.reveilcommuniste.fr/2026/01/helms-burton-assange-maduro-etc.l-extraterritorialite-dans-tous-ses-etats.

68. See a simple example: the Portuguese National Assembly adopted a proposition of the Portuguese Communist Party to create an anti-fascist museum in Porto. The Social-Democrats abstained (New FIRs, Bulletin de la Fédération Internationale des Resistants/FIR Association des Antifascistes, No 78, Décembre 2025, p. 7).

69. Like Eurocommunism, for instance.

70. The following reasoning in the text is an abridgement. We can think of the Enlightenment as an era of legitimating the increasing power of capitalist relations in Western Europe especially. These relations required and induced a higher general cultural level and living standard than before. For this reason, the monarchs promoted modernising reforms, even though for old beneficiaries, the rentier aristocrats. The Enlightenment intellectuals suggested, however, that the republican political regime is better suited for the democratic reforms. The bourgeois republics that followed – and which ought to be copied by the new constitutional monarchies – supported, on the one hand, the development of capitalist relations in the economy

71. The social concept of survival is today in fashion, that is, the terrain of ideological clash. It gives the “legitimacy” of savage capitalist behaviour towards all. Concretely, it is conceived as the goal of groups – i.e. as “decent” nations/states “legitimately” fighting against other nations/states which oppose domination. (The formula “decent peoples” is from Rawls). Also, it is conceived as the “legitimate” goal of “decent” individuals fighting against natural phenomena and aliens: it would be too cruel to show a struggle against other individuals.

72. Vijay Prashad, Towards a New Development Theory for the Global South, 14 January 2025, https://thetricontinental.org/towards-a-new-development-theory-for-the-global-south/.

73. Vijay Prashad, We Greet the New Year with Optimism: The First Newsletter (2026), 1 January

202. 6, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/unctad-debt-development/.

74. Javier Hernández, Deuda odiosa y tabula rasa: El derecho de Puerto Rico a comenzar limpio como nación soberana, 5 de julio de 2025, https://eyboricua.com/deuda-odiosa-y-tabula-rasa-elderecho-de-puerto-rico-a-comenzar-limpio-como-nacion-soberana/.

75. Miguel Santos García, Puerto Rico “INDEPENDENCIA Plan B”: Build a Productive Economy Beyond US Neoliberal Constraints, December 23, 2025, https://www.globalresearch.ca/puertorican-independence-productive-economy-us-neoliberal-constraints/5909800.

76. The main contradictions concern the living standard of the majority of peasants and workers, due to the secular colonial/neo-colonial character of the economy, while the fundamental contradictions concern the private property relations which seal the internal and international relations of the country.

77. Bringing the state closer to people: 25 years of Kerala’s ‘People’s Plan’, September 19, 2021, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/09/19/bringing-the-state-closer-to-people-25-years-of-keralaspeoples-plan.

78. Dr. Kurt Grötsch, VENEZUELA: China responde a tope, Publicado el 10 de enero de 2026, https://abyayalasoberana.org/noticias/venezuela-china-responde-a-tope/.

79. Asdrúbal J. Alamilla G., El Contraataque de la Dignidad: Análisis del 3-E como Punto de Inflexión en la Guerra Descolonial, https://abyayalasoberana.org/noticias/el-contraataque-de-la-dignidad-analisis-del-3-e-como-punto-de-inflexion-en-la-guerra-descolonial/.

80. Abdelatif Rebah, Collectif « Échos de la vie ici-bas », Venezuela, Alger, le 5 janvier 2026, email.

81. For instance, in Romania.

82. Appel: Non à l’interdiction du parti communiste polonais, 2 Janvier 2026, https://www.communcommune.com/2025/12/appel-non-a-l-interdiction-du-parti-communiste-polonais-kpp.html.

83. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’esprit professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’Ecole des Hautes Études, réunies et publiées par Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard, (1947), Gallimard, 1968, 1997, pp. 434, 435, is once more worth to be cited.

84. China proposed the Global Governance Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, as strategies for the preservation of the human species.

85. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question What is Enlightenment” (1784), in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Edited by Mary Gregor, Introduction by Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 11, 22 (AA VIII:35, AA VIII:42).

86. Originally, the idea of division of labour was based on the different technical abilities of humans to fulfil specific productive tasks (Plato’s oikeiopragia, The Republic, ibidem, 433a4-6, p. 127; oikeiopragia – to act there where you are the best fitted for; later, the Stoics conceived of oikeiosis, to feel in one’s own skin at home). People have established as logical (or “natural”) not only the principle, let’s call it technical, of fulfilling tasks according to their division and according to the ability of each one to perform some of them better, but also the social-historical framework - with all its ideological legitimations - which forged this principle and at the same time supported it, giving it its concrete historical content. Adaptation to the existing social logic of dominating hierarchy implied a) the remanence of some ordering patterns of social phenomena and b) the inertia of behaviours according to the remanence. In fact, principles as such are retained and followed by people only in their concrete packaging, that concerns the historical context filled with traditions and, especially, with legitimations in which these principles are carried.

87. An example is the inherent contempt towards physical labour, because the intellectuals who work with words do not understand the specific difficulty of the human ability to control matter, so, even one’s own force. The development of skills in both types of labour generated professionals in both types. The hierarchisation of professionals is, at least today, absurd and it hides the hierarchy of power, when the state is confiscated by “the elite” of capital owners and their political and media “chevaliers servants”.

88. François Rabelais, (Les horribles et espoventables faictz et prouesses du tresrenommé Pantagruel Roy des Dispodes, filz du Grand geant Gargantua. Composé nouvellement par maistre Alcofribas Nasier, Lyon : Édition Claude Nourry, 1532), Pantagruel, roy des dipsodes, in Les œuvres de François Rabelais (Éditions Marty-Laveaux, 1868), Tome premier, chapitre VIII, p. 257.

89. For example, the separation of the political from the economical; or the “extreme” phenomena of prostitution, mercenaries, surrogate mothers, and also the controversial ones like abortion, are not discussed all the way to the root causes, but in themselves: and then, the problem is their rights, which rights, why their rights?; the false moral does not accept the rights of prostitutes, or prostitution at all “in our country”, pretending not to see the sexual tourism; the liberal policy considers these rights necessary both for the “sex workers” and for the social peace, etc. And all these wings of capitalist ideology consider prostitution as the inevitable “oldest profession in the world”.

90. One of the most general examples is the isolation of the domestic policies of the state from its international policies.

91. See only the embezzlement of funds from social problems (social infrastructure maintenance etc.) to armament.

92. Editorial, “In desperate need of systems change”, The Lancet Planetary Health, Vol. 9, Issue 12, 101. 420, December 2025.

93. For example, formally – namely, from the standpoint of the right of a people, since in modernity the sovereign is the people and it gives the legitimacy of its representatives – any community has the right to choose its own state. The standpoint of content lights the reasons for the choice, and the necessity to put face to face these reasons and the consequences of the choice according to the reasons.

94. It is now clear that any exclusive privileging of form, or of content, is once more invalid when they are confronted with the requirement of universalizability, thus of universal mutuality of rights.

95. See Ana Bazac, Moral Anticipation, 28/08/2025, https://egophobia.ro/?p=15879.

96. Therefore, social ideals are not tantamount to individual aspirations (to health, a good job, a family, travels etc.).

97. The most obvious particularistic ideals are the nationalisms of capitalism in one (exceptional) country based on the domination of other countries.

98. John Stuart Mill, A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive (1843), Eighth Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1882, Book VII, Chapter V, § 7, pp. 1155-1156.