Article by Enikő Vincze, originally published in romanian on criticatac.ro
State interventions in the market economy to save capital have become increasingly explicit and normalized through and after the pandemics, the energy price crisis, galloping inflation, the rise in the costs of credits, and geo-economic and geopolitical wars. The green and digital transition and the industrial-military complex (armament, wars, and post-war reconstructions) are the new favorite sectors of capital through which it destroys the insufficiently profitable old and creates new solutions to new crises of capital accumulation, in Europe being supported by national public funds or public funds flowing through EU funds. This is happening at a time when the free movement of capital across the borders of nation-states or economic interest blocs, facilitated for five decades by Washington and then by the Wall Street Consensus, is being restricted by protectionist measures or reciprocal sanctions.
In this article, drawing on several of my own analyses over the past two years without detailing them, I propose two things:
1) to produce a complex diagnosis of the situation surrounding the Romanian elections, tracing global trends and local effects, the current political spectrum in the European Parliament and the Romanian Parliament, the capitalist transformations of the last 35 years in our country, the creation of conditions for the formation and strengthening of the far right, its 2024 moment as a moment of generalized revolt, the discontent of the working classes, and the political vacuum created by the agony of neoliberalism; and
2) to present a vision of the necessity and possibility of the formation of a movement of labor, housing, feminist, environmentalist, LGBTQ+, and ethnic and racialized minority movements characterized by their coalescing within the internationalist and anti-imperialist socialist left and around class struggle, which I see as the most integrative struggle to counter what feminist economist Amaia Pérez Orozco calls the conflict between life and capital.
Global trends, local effects
All the above-mentioned signs, together with the various forms of trade wars, are destroying the world order based on neoliberal hyper-globalization and are transposing us into a new era of capitalism. In Romania, people have felt the phenomena of this new phase, for example, through the austerity resulting from unpayable food, housing, energy, and credit costs resulting from inflation, which feeds company profits, but also through the effects of the economic recession in countries on which Romania’s economy is dependent or the rethinking of multinationals’ outsourcing policy, even in the field of information technology.
Supporting new trends of private capital investments by public investments has increased government debts and budget deficits in all countries. From a leftist perspective, of course, it is not the state’s turn towards investments that is the problem but the fact that this is dedicated to the supremacy of the private sector and the continued weakening of the state’s will and ability to make non-profit investments in the public interest.
In addition, today, the European Commission, after the temporary loosening of the rules on macroeconomic stability, is becoming increasingly anxious to re-align the European consensus around traditional financial discipline. This time, budget spending will have to be cut in EU member countries while spending on the militarization imposed by NATO will increase. All this is happening in a generalized atmosphere of fear, insecurity, and societal tensions, characteristic of a cold war with islands of effective proxy wars with the potential for regional and global escalations. We are in a new epoch of poly-crisis created by the capitalist world system, bleeding from the wounds of neoliberalism decentered from new economic trends and suffering from the belligerent competition between forms of capitalism located in diverse geographies and rearranged into multiple poles of power.
The idea of the new European Commission to support the private sector with public money and European funds is not new; it has always been an essential part of the neoliberal European Union, as has been, since 2014, the support, in particular for institutional investors, to ensure economic growth. After the well-known waves of privatizations in Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe, which have significantly multiplied the opportunities for increasing the profitability of private capital both through territorial expansion and the opening of new societal areas for its investments, capital in the European Union now needs new geographical spaces (e.g., the former Soviet states) and areas of activity to expand into. In parallel, Trump’s new presidency is taking the US into a new era of the struggle for supremacy through trade wars, protectionism, and confrontation with China, but also for the cultural cleansing of Americanness.
This is the continental and global context in which we must situate the developments in Romanian political life that have become visible in the November 2024 elections.
As we know, the more severe the daily economic conditions are, imposed or not from one direction or another, resulting from structural constraints or political decisions, the greater the possibility of popular uprisings. The question is, where will they be channeled? The anti-EU and anti-NATO orientation preached by Călin Georgescu will not stop the tendencies of post-neoliberal capitalism, will not bring demilitarization, and will not stop wars, nor is it an alternative to capitalism. The most undesirable scenario regarding widening social and territorial rifts in Romania is about to unfold. There is a risk that, through the actions of cultural conservatives, the revolts and criticism of the disappointed will be channeled against stigmatized identity categories, but also vice versa, that the mobilization against fascism will turn against workers affected by material problems and ridiculed by liberals. In this situation, the socialist left must also ask itself what to do.
Political Spectrum 2024: European Parliament and Romanian Parliament
For 2024-2029, the seats in the European Parliament are distributed as follows: on the right, between the traditional political family European People’s Party (188 seats) and Renew Europe (77), and the sovereigntists gathered in three groupings, European Conservatives and Reformists, Patriots, and Europe of Sovereign Nations Group (in total 187 seats); Greens/European Free Alliance, a political family self-positioned between the status quo parties and the demands for radical, progressive and green change; on the left, between the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (136 seats) and The Left, the only party that does class and peace politics (46 seats); 32 seats are occupied by MEPs who have not declared their membership to these political families, but they too can probably fit in the right wing, because, as we know, the lack of ideological assumption hides liberal ideologies. So, of the 719 seats in the European Parliament, 75% are occupied by various right-wing and far-right forces.
Things are somewhat similar in Romania. The final information that the second round of the presidential elections will be between Georgescu and Lasconi, with Lasconi legitimizing the right by widely mobilizing anti-fascism as an imminent danger to the far right, came at the same time as the announcement of the final results of the parliamentary elections. The latter shows that, in the Chamber of Deputies, the far-right parties reached a representation of 31.83%; the right-wing parties, PNL & USR, at 25.6%; the social-democratic left, PSD, at 21.96%; and the UDMR (which, in terms of social-economic policies, is also right-wing) at 6.34%. In the Senate, the far-right parties have 32.45%; the right-wing parties, PNL & USR, 26.54%; the social-democratic left, PSD, 22.3%; and UDMR, 6.38%. So, a predominantly right-wing political landscape has been created, and a lesson learned the wrong way from the rise of the far-right, after 35 years of capitalist transformations by the traditional parties, that they all need to become more nationalist, traditionalist, and conservative, “because that’s what the Romanian people want.” This is the context in which it is necessary to assert an internationalist and anti-imperialist socialist left capable of integrating progressive cultural values into the system of values and material interests of the working classes, which means the elimination of exploitation, inequality, poverty, and imperialist wars.
Capitalist transformations in Romania
Romania’s economic transformations over the last three and a half decades have been marked by the transition from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism or the destruction of socialism by capitalism. This has meant the privatization of former state-owned enterprises, the country’s deindustrialization due to the bankruptcy and closure of most of the old factories, and the loss of jobs, followed by the forced choice of emigration.
Re-industrialization through private multinational or national companies in places where and to the extent that it served the interests of private capital investment did not improve workers’ conditions, security, and wage gains to the extent that they could secure a decent living in Romania. Even if the post-2000 revival based on foreign investment and European funds has resulted in economic growth, this has not meant social welfare for all workers and pensioners and has generated new crises and forms of labor exploitation.
The privatization of the housing sector and the privatization of the banking sector created the conditions for the emergence of real estate development and its financialization as a new sector of capital accumulation and exploitation of labor through its housing needs and housing as a commodity and financial asset. This has led to generalizing the affordability crisis of adequate housing beyond the most vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged social groups.
The high value-added services sector, dependent on the desire for outsourcing in the countries of advanced capitalism, has created a social stratum with greater consumer power in Romania’s regional and university urban centers, but for many workers in this category, the cost of housing (rents, real estate loans, utilities) also involves enormous efforts. However, they are, in fact, the foundation on which the exploitation of housing and its tenants is based by real estate capital intersected with financial capital, together, of course, with the very rich, consumers of luxury housing, while low-income workers are displaced from urban centers made very expensive by these processes.
Workers in various sectors are increasingly alienated, more and more people know that they cannot control the significant global trends that are also acting locally, and more and more people, each in their way, are retreating into life strategies in which they seek happiness: from traditional religions to mindfulnesstechniques, or simply into retreat and isolation in small circles of trust. These everyday responses constrained by harsh socio-economic realities are a barrier to political solidarity expressed in protest actions against the political and economic actors responsible for and beneficiaries of financialized, rentier, and war-mongering capitalism.
Creating conditions for the formation and strengthening of the far-right
Throughout the capitalist transformations briefly described above, all the political parties that have been moving their representatives through parliament, government, and presidency have contributed to the creation of the conditions necessary for the political success of the extreme right in Romania today:
– The social democrats who worked hard to privatize the economy and the structural adjustment of the country towards foreign investments under the conditionality policy practiced towards Romania by international financial organizations;
– (neo-)liberals who know no other solution to the crises created by capitalism than cutting social spending and public investment in public services and public goods, directing state investment towards serving the interests of capital;
– right-wing anti-state parties, self-defined as anti-system, which want to privatize public health, public education, pensions, and social protection, dismantle the state through their anti-corruption fight and furiously attack, from people experiencing poverty to the militant, all those who demand public investment in public services and public goods;
– a progressive left that forgets about the working classes and defines itself as radical by supporting sexual freedoms and environmentalist demands, and fights against the social democrats, creating alliances on the right;
– a civil society dominated by a depoliticized NGOism encouraged to move in this direction by the state retreating from and externalizing its social roles, also helping to promote people in poverty through charity and social and green-washing through corporate social responsibility;
– the reluctance of left-wing political parties to draw inspiration from anti-capitalist social movements and their refusal to realize the serious socioeconomic problems of the population and give voice to them through radical economic measures beyond the provision of the minimum income as a universal right, which is not enough to cover the costs of a minimum decent living;
– the complacency of the trade unions in the idea that they are not engaged in class politics, reducing their power, which is in any case diminished by the coalition between state and capital against the labor force;
– the dominance of anti-communism delegitimizing socialist internationalism as an alternative to capitalism across the political spectrum, with more radical tendencies in the USR camp, also reflected in the 2019 “ban communism” bill (Ghinea law, a person posing as a victim of harassment by fascists, whom he associates with communists).
The above local processes happened, of course, in the context of global mechanisms such as:
– the revenge of the global South and East against Western economic hegemony, justified by cultural conservatism;
– the involvement of the semi-peripheral countries in militarization and wars by the central capitalist countries fighting to maintain their global hegemony and diverting state finances away from public investments necessary for workers’ welfare towards the industrial-military complex;
– the authoritarianism of neoliberal capitalism that has destroyed economic democracy, and of post-neoliberal capitalism, which dismantles the institutions of liberal democracy and supports austerity as society adapts to the war economy.
The far-right moment: the revolt of whom?
The well-known arrangements of political life in Romania were turned upside down in 2024 as the cumulative discontent of the people surfaced, and the voices of the least or not-at-all-represented social categories of the last decades began to be heard. Of course, Romanian business people may also be dissatisfied, wanting more room for investment from foreign investors. Those earning above middle income may also be outraged, believing that public investment in militarization could be used for other purposes, such as environmental protection. Also upset may be nationalists disturbed by the cultural progressivism associated with Western dominance. But as well as those critical of big pharma or food industries that produce junk food.
But I would refer here to the discontent of the working classes, without forgetting that the extreme right has managed to solidify revolt against traditional political parties from several social classes through nationalism, Christianity, traditionalism, and naturism. This looks to be an à-la-carte recipe. On the one hand, because of its ability to offer people who feel cheated by the politics of the last decades a recognizable alternative as something familiar (nation, church, family, nature) instead of distant promises that are perceived as “empty concepts” (social-economic rights, equality, elimination of exploitation). On the other hand, because of its ability to manipulate the exploited classes by promising divine salvation or a return to pre-modern relations of production, which, however, will not serve their material interests and are not alternatives to capitalism, only new capitalist alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.
The promise of sovereignty in this recipe, without clarifying strictly how political and economic independence could be achieved in an interdependent capitalist global order, has also functioned as a binder between classes, culminating in the collective euphoric ambition to transcend the status of a nation always situated on the path of dependent development. This dependency existed during the period of state socialism, not just before or after, when the developmentalist state needed foreign loans and creditor organizations imposed reform conditions against which the regime, part of the world system, could not resist other than by imposing austerity on the population.
Working class grievances
Returning to the experienced wrongs of the labor classes, let’s consider the situation of the 80% of employees in Romania who earn wages at or below the national average income. For example, a family in this category made up of two adults and two children, where each parent earns a medium income and thus has a total revenue of 10,236 lei/month, remains below the minimum consumption basket necessary for a decent living (10,450 lei/month). Such families cannot ensure a decent minimum subsistence due to the constant increase in the cost of renting a house, food, and energy. Not to mention the minimum wage earners, who comprise 30% of employees. It is evident that, for example, the purchasing power of a person earning 2,363 lei per month is far from covering the minimum consumption basket necessary for a decent living for an adult person, which is 3,972 lei per month. Of this amount, housing costs would amount to 1,914 lei, which would be 48% of the expenses and 80% of the income of an adult with the minimum wage.
Yes, wages have increased over the last year in Romania, but the increase in salaries does not result in an increased ability of workers to make a decent living. In the context of excessive inflation, wage growth could not even cover the continued exponential rise in prices for two years, let alone the ability of the latter to improve workers’ purchasing power compared to the pre-inflation period. Although the minimum wage rose 9.5% at the start of 2024 compared to the previous year, the survival basket on groceries has become almost 20% more expensive. Between September 2020 and December 2023, household maintenance spending, including energy costs, saw the most significant increase – nearly 58% (information here, March 2024).
The reduced demand from the population, in parallel with the reduced accessibility of bank loans, which have also become more expensive, negatively impacts economic production in various sectors. This is why state intervention in favor of capital through public investment, subsidies, and state aid was and is necessary, which is very visible today in the energy, traditional, and green sectors and in the industrial-military sector.
The political vacuum created by neoliberalism
As I have already argued, what happened in Romania in 2024 must be seen through the prism of the three and a half decades that have passed since 1990, i.e., the capitalist transformations in this country and the whole world. These, passing through various stages, have continued to formulate new promises of well-being for old and new generations while making Romania’s economy increasingly dependent on the West.
At a time when, through privatization, the former socialist structures had been completely dismantled in the country, as well as regionally and globally, the traditional political parties in Romania (PSD, PNL, PNȚCD, UDMR) that were supposed to make the transition of the country from a frontier market to the emerging market status and beyond, could no longer think of an alternative to capitalism, but only of a national form of capitalism adapted to the needs of global capitalism. Compared to these old parties, having lived out its missionaries by appropriating the grievances of the new middle-class generations, the role of the new right-wing party, USR, was and remained to take privatization further, from the productive economy, housing, energy, and finance, to health, education, pensions, and social protection. Something which is not suitable for middle-class workers either, beyond the politically constructed ambitions in the name of that class.
The far right was born in the political vacuum created by all the above parties through their policies dedicated to criminal neoliberalization. Today, those who react against the extreme right are mobilized by the same parties to legitimize the option for militarization and austerity as a pro-Western option or against anti-Western political extremism. Anyone who does not want fascism must want the European Union and NATO as they are today, we are told, adding that this is also to avoid Romania being taken over by Russia and to eliminate the danger of communism.
Here we are, then, in a new historical moment, that of the agony of neoliberalism, in which the organization of the socialist left is becoming increasingly difficult and even tougher to imagine. It is not impossible, however, and undoubtedly it is desirable since it has become clear how much popular revolt there is against those responsible for the disasters produced by capitalism that cannot be solved within capitalism. To direct the revolt against the real causes of these disasters, it is necessary to pinpoint the specific problems from the perspective of class exploitation and the transitional and maximalist measures to eliminate exploitation and to build alliances for socialist action between various left-oriented social movements.
The perspective of the socialist left on specific problems: the example of housing.
Labor is not only exploited in the labor market, where employers appropriate the surplus value created by it in the form of profit. Labor is also exploited in the housing market, where large landlords, banks, and institutional investors extract a good part of the wages received by workers as a source of their profit through rents, bank interest, or dividends. Laborers are tenants, and tenants are also laborers, so all those who do not own the means of production are exploited in both capacities.
The working classes include all persons who sell their labor to employers irrespective of their social status and form of employment contract (including atypical forms of employment), authorized natural persons, and informal workers and their families, whose members perform unpaid domestic work necessary for the reproduction of labor. Since all workers need housing where they can reproduce their labor power, the struggle for a system that provides adequate housing for all at affordable prices according to income unites the various segments of the working classes, including groups disadvantaged and stigmatized by their cultural identity choices.
On the other hand, all the political parties and independents that have rotated through parliament, government, and the presidency over the last 35 years are responsible for the housing crisis. Responsibility also exists, of course, at the level of the European institutions. States and supra-state structures have elaborated and implemented economic, fiscal, monetary, housing, and urban planning policies that have created the conditions for the emergence and evolution of real estate development for profit, including its financialization through the penetration of the real estate market by the financial markets. We are not surprised that people are now rioting. But to solve the housing crisis, we don’t need religious miracles and the criminalization of minorities, and we certainly need to make sure that anti-poor and anti-working-class fascism is not perpetuated either.
Instead, we need a financial system and a system of non-profit housing production and distribution, which will take housing out of the market and its subordination to the interests of capital accumulation, be it foreign or domestic capital. Below, I present a series of nine issues, messages, and demands related to the housing crisis in Romania. They have been elaborated in the 2024 campaign of Căși Sociale ACUM!/Social Housing NOW, Public Housing for Workers, and subsequently published in this new booklet of the movement.
- Solidarity between housing and labor movements is crucial! – Rising wages can only improve living conditions when housing costs are also reduced, which requires an increase in the public housing stock.
- Being a homeowner does not mean living in good conditions! – The alternative to privately owned homes characterized by overcrowding, housing deprivation, and high overburden rates with housing costs is to live in public housing that provides adequate and affordable conditions.
- Home ownership does not mean security! The alternative to privately owned housing is to live in public housing, which significantly reduces housing costs and provides security.
- If you don’t own a home, you are pushed into the expensive private rental market! – Without public housing, anyone who does not own a home is pushed into the rental market. Here, prices are very high because housing has become an investment. Without price regulation on the market, landlords continually increase the price of property in line with rising wages. Thus, out of rising wages, the workers pay more and more of their income to real estate developers from whom they buy a house, commercial banks to pay the costs of real estate loans, or landlords from whom they rent.
- Private renters are overburdened with rental costs! – To avoid renting from the market, those studying or working temporarily in a locality should be eligible for social housing. They significantly increase demand in the rental market because there is no supply in the public housing sector. If there were a significant public housing supply, the private rental market demand would be lower. So, the provision of public housing, through construction or other means, is one of the ways by which the cost of private rents can be controlled.
- The market does not solve workers’ housing needs! Increasing the supply of public housing can reduce market demand for housing and the price increases related to increased demand.
- The market follows the needs of capital accumulation! – The solution to the housing crisis is to increase the public housing fund.
- On a minimum income, you cannot escape housing poverty! – From the point of view of the people with the lowest incomes, Romania has an extremely low number of social housing units, so their housing needs are not covered either.
- The average income does not provide decent housing! – Not only those living below the poverty line but all those earning below the median income need social housing. With support from the state, municipalities must realize a sufficient number of such dwellings to ensure access to adequate housing for the various categories of workers who are not paid enough to secure a home from the market.
The aim of this campaign, run in parallel with the November 2024 election campaign, was to demonstrate that the solution to the housing crisis is to significantly increase the number of public social housing, as this solution meets the housing needs of many categories of workers. Implicitly, in addition to the direct beneficiaries, this solution helps to reduce the demand for housing on the market, so it is also suitable for those who rent from private renters. The 50% share of public social housing in the total housing stock would radically change the housing sector. This percentage can be achieved through new construction by local public authorities with the support of the central government, but also by converting empty buildings into social housing blocks, as well as by confiscating real estate developers by transferring 25% of the housing they create to the public housing stock (see the petition Social Housing NOW! launched in the context of this year’s local elections).
During the period of state socialism in Romania, this was about the same percentage in urban areas (at the national level, it was 30%); the ability to create public housing was facilitated by the existence of the non-profit financial system, the state-controlled price system and the institutions and mechanisms of the planned economy. As a transitional measure generating radical change in today’s capitalism, the increase in the number of social public housing units that can be rented at a price not exceeding 10% of income should be complemented by market regulation. Thus, even if housing could be bought as a commodity, it would not become the object of speculative transactions. In the existing socialism in Romania, the mixed housing regime (in which the significant share of homes in personal ownership was controlled by the state) was conceived as a system that could keep pace with the need for housing under intensive urbanization and industrialization. Bearing in mind also the prospect of a socialist alternative in the more distant future, today, we should be thinking about a transitional program in the housing sector, with measures that can interrupt the social reproduction of capitalism and are in line with the maximalist socialist perspective.
Beyond specific problems: solidarity for socialist action
In these times, when the ruptures between the poorest and the richest, between the ruling classes and the exploited working classes, but also between the various sections of the laborers, between regions, counties, localities, and even between intra-urban areas in terms of accessibility, quality and security of living, are becoming more and more explicit, it is crucial to talk about the grievances that link the various segments of the working classes, their systemic causes and the solutions that bring the different social categories closer together. In this way, the revolt can congregate and solidarize them against capitalism that creates multiple crises.
If this does not happen, the current systemic crises will continue to endanger people’s lives, intensify exploitation, reproduce, and deepen poverty because capital is guided by the principle of profitability, which destroys the various forms of life. Today, capital is seeking to extend privatization to new sectors (such as healthcare, education, pensions, and social protection), and states will implement austerity measures to direct public investment towards the military industry, wars, or post-war reconstruction, all of which are sources of profit-making.
Now, after the electoral competition, the parties in Romania are talking about a government of national unity because they need a broad consensus to implement militarization and austerity policies; it would be time for the left social movements to make alliances that matter in countering capital. That is, alliances around class politics, which have the most significant capacity to integrate labor, housing, environmental, feminist, LGBTQ+, ethnic and racialized minority movements on the axis of their common material interests. Beyond Romania, this is needed because of what is coming in 2025 and after as an effect of right-wing and far-right politics in Europe and beyond, i.e., militarization and austerity as new methods to save capital in the face of the dismantling of neoliberalism dominant for five decades.
Multiple social movements, if made permanent and not only in a reactive way but also by organizing for the socialist alternative, have the potential to mobilize against capital in various fields, separately but also together, forming alliances. This can increase the political pressure to change capitalism. The condition for this would be that the various segments of workers, some of whom belong to categories that self-represent themselves through identity choices, realize that they form the same integrative working class.
Today, there are few signs of optimism about creating broad alliances based on internationalist and anti-imperialist socialism. Neither in Romania nor globally. However, there are several groups in Romania focused on various socioeconomic issues, which can contribute to the generation of broader social movements and have the potential to build alliances around class interests. Critiques of capitalism and political education on fundamental issues and solidarity also have critical political roles in this approach. So do long-standing radical visions alongside demands for transitional measures. Of course, theoretical critique cannot replace mobilization and organizing. Theory and practice must go hand in hand. If coagulated cells grow, they are more likely to become visible and to be joined by similar groupings so that from individual nuclei that organize movements, movements of movements can be created that function as integrative frameworks representing the interests of all working classes.
If that doesn’t happen, the new government of national unity will all too easily serve us “national pride” in the next phase of austerity and, also from this source, could call on us to sacrifice our lives by directly participating in wars.
Epilog
Neoliberal and financialized capitalism has destroyed so much that its end cannot be anything other than super-destructive. The destruction typical of capitalism includes the process of capital’s continued occupation of non-capitalist spaces and domains and the destruction of the idea of an alternative to capitalism. Thus, no one seems to know what to do and who brought us here to this point of mass self-destruction, as if it were natural destiny that would bring us to wars, militarization, securitization, and impoverishment.
What is also happening in Romania today, somehow as a reaction from various directions to the rise of the extreme right, is the association of cultural progressivism with the left. In a context with a muscular far right, even progressive liberalism on cultural identity issues will be associated with the left. Anything further to the left of what some call the illiberal or conservative right will be said to be “The left.” For this reason, it is essential to point out that to fulfill its destiny, the left should be in the position of class struggle that is integrative, socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist.
Right-wing candidates who call themselves sovereigntists know that political and economic independence cannot be achieved because the world’s economies are interdependent. That is why they need the idea of God and national heroism as imaginary factors from whom the people should expect salvation while they, the sovereigntists, are working on other global, anti-Western alliances within capitalism. In reality, only the socialist left could think of independence from the decisions and interests of the great Western or Eastern capitalist powers, but only if it has an anti-imperialist and internationalist position. Moreover, fascism being an instrument of anti-communism, anti-fascism must also be a class struggle for living conditions and political subjectivities free from exploitation, dispossession, and manipulation, emancipated from the enclosures and fragmentation of the working classes by the ruling classes and the state apparatus and media that serve the latter.
In this article, in addition to analyzing the local situation exploded by this year’s political elections, a problem to be seen in the global context of the agony of neoliberalism, I have sketched a vision of the possible rise of an internationalist and anti-imperialist socialist left through two parallel paths: 1) focusing on the knowledge about and solution of punctual problems in the interest of several segments of the labor classes, through transitional measures generating radical changes that are part of the logic of transforming the system in the longer perspective; and 2) expanding individual militant cells towards workers’, housing, feminist, environmentalist, LGBTQ+, or ethnic and racialized minority movements, and solidifying a movement of movements within the framework of an integrative, socialist class struggle. This means redirecting the revolt of the working classes against the structural causes of exploitation, inequality, injustice, and the violation of human dignity, which today is fragmented by the manipulations of the far right and the right, or even by the non-socialist left.
04.12.2024.
