Once upon a time, people believed in God; then they believed in Science; and in between, some romantics—like yours truly for a while—believed in the Party. I’ve been listening to the speeches by the Perissos leadership, and I must confess, I’m overcome by a sweet, almost adolescent nostalgia. How beautiful those old certainties were! A working class with clean hands and grimy faces, a Party that led the way, and an all-powerful Theory that explained everything: from the fall of the Roman Empire to why the milk in the fridge went sour. A ready-made, solved puzzle for adults who refuse to grow up.
Except that, alas, reality has a nasty habit of not following the party playbook.
Capitalism, that diabolical system that renews itself by devouring its own flesh, changed the scene while our people were sleeping with his book Chapter under the pillow. The large factories, the shipyards, the strong labor unions that fostered pride in craftsmanship and class consciousness—all went up in smoke. Cornelius Castoriadis once said that classical capitalism had to invent roles in order to survive: the honorable judge, the serious public servant, the risk-taking entrepreneur.
If you asked me what the most symbolic profession of today’s late neoliberalism is, I would point to the delivery person.
This modern-day slave to «flexibility,» this hunter of part-time gigs, who rides a scooter through the rain for a crust of bread, with no tomorrow, no union, no job security. The service economy no longer produces «proletarians» in the traditional sense; it produces precarious, fearful, and deeply anxious people. And somewhere along the way, amid the various «training sessions» and last-minute seminars, the process of emasculation is complete. Professional pride is lost. And along with it, the ideological compass is lost.
People today have become malleable and fragile. They are aggressively selfish because they are desperately melancholic. They live under the illusion of consumer freedom, freely choosing their cell phone brand, while at the same time being the system’s most obedient subjects. The militant euphoria of the 20th century has been replaced by a cynical indifference.
Look at how the trap was set. The good old class pyramid has been replaced by a colorful circus of «conflicting identities.» Workers no longer clash with Capital, but are consumed by a civil war of trenches over who is more wronged—culturally, historically, or sexually. The fragmentation is absolute. When collectivity gives way to the aggressive selfishness of race and religion, political representation suffocates and dies. Political parties turn into advertising agencies, the traditional two-party system rots away, and the Center-Left and Center-Right merge into an eternal, tedious neoliberal embrace, while young people withdraw into their private lives, viewing politics as a dull affair for middle-aged people.
And what about the Left? Oh, the Left is busy writing copy-and-paste manifestos. If people don’t follow its prescriptions, so much the worse for them!
Take a stroll through the university lecture halls or party offices to marvel at the grandeur of distance. There, the so-called academic Left regurgitates old clichés using jargon that requires a translator, trying to hide its aversion to action. It is a Left that sets up its stall in the squares, selling reheated food and vague proclamations that don’t even come close to the delivery guy’s reality. Split in two: on one side, those who refuse to get their hands dirty with power so as not to lose the purity of their convictions, and on the other, those who covet the seat without having the slightest idea what they’ll do with it if they get it.
This is where politics meets that bit of psychoanalysis that the dogmatists hate so much. Freud taught us that grief is liberating: you lose something, you cry, you get over it, and you move on. Melancholy, however, is failed mourning. The melancholic refuses to accept the loss. He identifies with the lost object.
What we are experiencing today is «leftist melancholy.» The revolutionary who is more in love with the very failure of his ideal than with the need to seize the opportunity in the present. It is the narcissism of minor differences, version 2.0.
It is this melancholic stagnation that gives rise to the most malicious divisions. Today, we are witnessing the tragic death throes of a movement that once promised to tear up the memoranda. The New Left is disintegrating into its constituent parts; the remnants of SYRIZA are experiencing an unprecedented internal explosion of entropy, and its historic leader is rushing to disavow his own creation in order to save his posthumous reputation. This is not a political disagreement; it is a psychotic attack on their closest comrade, who is viewed not as an ally but as a menacing doppelgänger, a mirror of their own failure that must be shattered with hatred greater even than that reserved for the class enemy.
As the students said in Paris in May ’68, this Left is simply looking for «a new master.» It prefers to betray the vibrant world of delivery workers rather than spoil the sweetness of its old, imperfect certainties.
We need to come to terms with this, comrades. You need to come down from the ivory tower of your ideological purity and look at the reality on the ground. Because while you’re moping and squabbling over which sub-faction of the movement is right, neoliberalism is leaving you in the dust and moving on. And the worst part? In a few years, no one will even remember you.
