Inside liberal circles Trump's return to the presidency of the US has rekindled uneasy questions about the health of "democracy". For them the word comes without adjectives, but we need to qualify it with "bourgeois". His farewell gesture from his first administration in January 2021 — inciting a reactionary horde to storm Capitol Hill, resulting in ransacking and murder — made it clear, if more clarity was needed, that the leader of the MAGA movement had a "flexible" interpretation of the formal respect due to bourgeois institutions. With his re-election to the highest office in the state, the billionaire property developer has not only done nothing to deflect accusations of his own "illiberalism", he has also increased fears in the democratic-reformist world, which sees his administration as a decisive and brutal step toward the dismantling of the Constitution, or at least its spirit. In other words, the establishment of a kind of 21st-century fascism. Moreover, if we're not mistaken, unlike any previous administration, the executive branch is packed with billionaires⁽¹⁾ both from traditional sectors of big capital and recent arrivals from the digital technology sector, so-called Big Tech. Beyond their self-evident class affiliation, both are united by a particularly reactionary, even obscurantist, vision of the world. This is the re-proposal, adapted to the present day, of ideologies which accompanied and reflected the transformation of capitalism from free-trade to monopolies and imperialism between the 19th and 20th centuries, and which comprised the "theoretical" foundations for the development of fascism in all its variants.

Thus, the MAGA world — like the entire right wing populist and nationalist movement in general — retrieves social Darwinism from the most putrid ideological cellars of the bourgeoisie, that is, the theory that only the most gifted (essentially, the bourgeoisie) "rightly" assert themselves in society. It evokes the technological myths of Italian Futurism — which exalted technology and imperialist war — predicting the fusion of man and machine, while despising women and socialism. It revives their hatred, expressed with aristocratic detachment, against the proletarian masses, who they literally consider to be ugly, dirty, and evil: ready to seize power by exploiting the mechanisms of capitalist democracy, to the detriment of the chosen spirits, the superior minds, the exclusive prerogative of the ruling class, or rather, of its narrow circles: to be precise, the elites.⁽²⁾ An "underworld of intelligence" where an apparently scientific idolatry of the machine combines with anti-rationalist obscurantism, which seamlessly goes so far as to deny the philosophical and political origins of its own class — the Enlightenment — by embracing the most opaque mystical-esoteric conceptions to prophesy a struggle between "Good" and "Evil". The latter embodies everything that opposes those delusions: first and foremost, of course, communism, whatever that might mean to the fanatical theorists of such hallucinatory visions. This is the irrationalist breeding ground which generated anti-vax fanaticism, naturally capitalised on by the so-called "sovereignist" right, but which has not spared significant sectors of an "antagonistic left" who in turn no longer distinguish scientific research from its use for profit, capital's sole raison d'être. From the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion(3) to the dark pagan rites of the SS, to the fight against Armageddon orchestrated by a phantom occult world government — theorised by big tech billionaire Peter Thiel — obscurantist irrationalism is the recurring ideological theme regurgitated from the burst manholes of capital's sewers which are clogged up by the crisis in the accumulation cycle.

Nevertheless, we are not interested in a "learned" examination of such ideological miasmas and we willingly leave that activity to armchair revolutionaries. Our concern is the connection between all this and the class struggle. Thus we need to begin from the fact that these miasmas increasingly serve as a political compass for capital to direct its frontal attack on the proletariat, with ever-increasing firepower. The capitalist class is increasingly aware that the only way out of the historical crisis is to rid themselves of every obstacle to the extortion of surplus value — whether social, economic, or political — and the increased subjugation of labour power to capital. The celebrated crumbs falling from the bourgeoisie's banquet to benefit the working class are becoming increasingly scarce. In other words, the crisis has severely reduced the room for manoeuvre. Resources for social welfare are no longer available. Indeed, that portion of indirect and deferred wages, the so-called "welfare state" produced in the ascendant phase of the accumulation cycle, is now being plundered by the capitalists, not so much to support investments in the "real economy" as the abnormal financial speculation that underwrites and directs the global economy. Profit rates in the "real economy" are inadequate in relation to the level of the organic composition of capital (c:v)⁽⁴⁾, and since it is much more difficult for the capitalists to influence the costs of c, it becomes a priority to focus on reducing the so-called cost of labour, strengthening the capitalist ecosystem — that is, the overall framework within which, we repeat, surplus value is extorted (exploitation) and the society it fuels is governed. The decline of capitalist democracy, the spread of authoritarianism and the way it manifests politically, in some respects resembling fascism, all this is rooted in the shit produced by a crisis that has been festering for decades and which is leading the entire world toward climate catastrophe and the prospect of generalised war.

Those who paved the way for this decline were not the "trolls" of Trump, Milei, and their shady ilk, but the "polite salons" of the bourgeoisie who, with the first signs of the end of the post-war economic boom in the final decades of the last century, began to attack the working class (understood in the broadest sense, i.e. wage-earners): a class drugged by the ideological and political control of the capitalist left and the unions, whose concern was (and still is) to contain proletarian struggle within the confines of capitalism (the infamous "good of the country"), until it is extinguished. Indeed, they offered to collaborate in the anti-worker measures taken by the administrations of those years: one example, among many, is the national unity governments in Italy in the late 1970s. And if they didn't participate in or directly support the governments, their opposition to the first measures against our class was, to put it mildly, very bland and thus ineffective. Reagan, and Thatcher who provoked the UK miners' year-long struggle that was destined for consummate defeat because it was dominated by the political and trade union left, stand as proof of this.

The all-out offensive against the "Western" working class involved the dismantling of large concentrations of wage workers, strongholds of worker insubordination to employer despotism,⁽⁵⁾ and their resurgence in the regions of delocalisation, from Latin America to Asia, from Africa, North and South – to the regions of the former Soviet empire, where wages were – and are – lower, often much lower. Where, moreover, the "anti-democratic authoritarianism" of employers' guaranteed by their governments, knows virtually no limits. As we noted a few years ago,⁽⁶⁾ here the working class, strictly speaking, has grown significantly, more than offsetting the relative decline in the capitalist "metropoles". Capital has moved en masse to where parliamentary democracy is not so much a useless embellishment, but rather an obstacle to the extortion of surplus value to a degree that can effectively counteract the fall in the profit rate, thus ensuring a mass of surplus value capable of adequately remunerating invested capital.

To achieve this, it's not enough to pay mere survival wages, impose endless working hours, and exhausting schedules in virtually non-existent health and safety conditions. These "industrial life sentences", must be guaranteed. That is, there must be a state apparatus ready to repress, if possible at birth, any outbreak of proletarian struggle, any challenge to the inordinate power of employers: in short, by "keeping the workforce in its place". Moreover, in many of these countries the migrant proletariat constitutes half, if not more, of the population. Needless to say, this working class, crushed by the iron heel of near-slave like conditions, obviously has no right to vote (for what it's worth), nor the "right" to strike and fight to ease the harsh conditions of exploitation.⁽⁷⁾

Although the re-location of entire productive sectors to different regions of the globe, not least China, has provided a huge breath of fresh air for capitalism's ailing lungs, the mass of surplus value extorted is unable to spark a new cycle of accumulation on a global scale: too much excess capital (over-accumulation) is in search of remuneration. Thus, some fringes of international capital are beginning to consider that, alongside the post-war boom itself, the economic and political theories which accompanied it have been, so to speak, mothballed. They are no more than ideological survivals of eras definitively past. Characters like Barry Goldwater — US presidential candidate in the mid-1960s — or Milton Friedman — an economist who preached the return to the "liberal" capitalism of the first industrial revolution — have gone from niche figures to become the "founding fathers" of new trends that gradually gained ground among significant, if not dominant, segments of the global bourgeoisie. To put it another way, Friedman and his school provided theoretical support for what international and "local" capitals in various parts of the world were already doing and would increasingly do, as they were driven by the structural crisis. The return, as it were, of what thirty years ago we called "Manchesterism"⁽⁸⁾: an impossible rejuvenation of a capitalism that has over two centuries of life behind it and which now has entered a phase of decline, due to its insurmountable contradictions, primarily the falling rate of profit. It is no accident that Friedman became the "maître à penser" of the Chilean generals who in 1973, at the instigation of the US, ferociously crushed Allende's reformist government. The exhaustion of the post-war boom paved the way for the agony of reformism. In Chile this new phase was inaugurated by bloody repression. Moreover, Friedman was clear: "while economic freedom is a necessary condition for civil and political freedom, political freedom, desirable though it may be, is not a necessary condition for economic and civil freedom".⁽⁹⁾

Years later, the major investment bank, JP Morgan, further clarified the concept when it "scolded" the governments of Southern Europe, guilty, in its opinion, of having reacted poorly to the economic turbulence following the 2008 financial crisis, due to the "socialist" constitutions born after the military defeat of Nazi-fascism:

[these] constitutions tend to show a strong socialist influence ... weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labor rights … and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo.⁽¹⁰⁾

It is clear that by "socialist", JP Morgan means reformism, the reformism that was made possible by post-war capitalist "prosperity". And although, as previously mentioned, since the mid-1970s governments of all stripes had already been ushering in austerity for the working class — a period that has never ended — the "reforms" ​​(or rather the social war against the proletariat) were proceeding too slowly for an investment bank that was entangled in the thorny branches of "socialist" constitutions.

Were it not for the fact that we are talking about the anger, tears, and even blood of the European proletariat, this analysis could be dismissed as a cheap joke. By 2013, the time of the JP Morgan report, global capitalism, including that of the Old Continent, had already begun the work of converging, at least in principle, the political habitat of the so-called liberal democracies with the "new" paradises of capital: precisely, those countries where liberal democracy does not exist or exists only as a pale simulacrum. This process has proceeded uninterruptedly for years because the only force capable of countering it, the working class, has been silenced, disoriented, and confused by the "betrayal" of the "left". A left that has betrayed for more than a century and which by now has completely embraced the interests of the class enemy. Thus, in turn the proletariat has abandoned the "left", but, all too often has ended up in impotent fatalism or in the clutches of the most reactionary sectors of the bourgeoisie. Evidence of this is produced by trade unions and bourgeois-democratic research institutes, "institutions" that, we repeat, have contributed — and continue to contribute — to this global trend in varying ways.

Thus the 2025 report compiled by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) on the Global Rights Index records a deterioration in all the indices examined (the right to strike, to bargain, to assemble, etc.), in an uninterrupted progression since 2014, the year the survey began. To cite some data, only 7 out of 151 countries received the full score of 1 (the decreasing scale goes from 1 to 5).

The right to strike was violated in 87% of countries – unchanged from the Index high of 131 countries in 2024 … Workers had no or reduced access to justice in 72% of countries, a sharp increase from 65% in 2024 … Attacks on the rights to free speech and assembly were reported in 45% of countries – a record high for the Index and an increase from 43% in 2024. … The right to collective bargaining was restricted in 80% of countries (121), up from 79% in 2024.⁽¹¹⁾

Despite a slight improvement as a result of progress in Oman (from 4 to 3), the worst ratings are confirmed for the states of North Africa and the Middle East — regions, incidentally, which many of our leftists consider to be bastions of anti-imperialist struggle and, therefore, to be supported, despite the fact that they trample on their own working class.

But the "surprise", so to speak, is that on two continents the climate for workers has worsened, that is, for the Americas and Europe. In the former, the index went from 3.56 to 3.68, the latter "remains, on average, the least repressive region for workers, [but] there has been a steady deterioration over the last four years. The average rating dropped to 2.78, its worst since the Index began and compared to 2.73 in 2024". Surprise within the surprise (again, so to speak), the strongest deterioration concerns Italy, whose ranking fell from 1 to 2 "due to draconian actions [taken by the government] to undermine labour and protest rights." We do not know if this assessment already takes into account the "Security Decrees" (probably yes), certainly, the Minister for Transport Delays, being the hard worker he has always been, has made his personal contribution to increasing the chains weighing down on the working class.

It is not only the unions that condemn the progressive restriction of "labour rights", other bourgeois-democratic studies also record the repressive crackdown implemented by governments worldwide. According to Freedom House, a liberal-leaning organisation, 2024 was the nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in political freedoms with more than 60 countries experiencing declines in political rights and civil liberties. Nearly three-quarters of the world's population now live under autocratic rule, and less than 3% live in countries with open civil space. And the downward momentum continues: 42 countries are undergoing a process of autocratisation. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of people living in countries with a closed or repressed civic space increased by 67%.⁽¹²⁾

Even the Confindustria [Italian equivalent of CBI, trans.] newspaper, citing a Swedish institute, reports similar data, which illustrate the leap backwards made by the US in just one year — falling from 20th to 51st place of 179 countries, i.e. returning to 1965 "when civil rights laws effectively introduced universal suffrage."⁽¹³⁾ The US has been downgraded from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" due to the general practice of issuing presidential executive orders and the tendency towards the disappearance of the separation of powers — executive, legislative, judicial — a typical element of open political dictatorships. But if American democracy is "in tears", it is not that in Europe we are "laughing". Here governments increasingly proceed through votes of confidence, demonstrating what they in fact are: empty shells, mere executors of decisions already taken outside of the official assemblies by those who really hold power and who thus, tend to exercise it in person without entrusting its administration to lower-middle-class political staff. More and more, if ever there was a need, parliamentary institutions show themselves to be what they are, mere executors of decisions taken outside the institutional assemblies, by those who, in short, hold power and, in fact tend to exercise it personally, without entrusting its administration to a small-medium bourgeois political staff. It seems like we're going back to the 19th century, when the big bourgeoisie sat in governments — such as the Historical Right in Italy (1861-76) — elected by a narrow fraction of the bourgeoisie. Today, the big bourgeoisie — often referred to as oligarchs — are co-opted into governments (Musk, above all) or are elected by a part of the proletariat which, having lost all class character, are reduced to plebs; one could say, aping a fashionable language, a là Vendée and the Sanfedists⁽¹⁴⁾ who supported the most reactionary sections of the class who exploited and oppressed them.⁽¹⁵⁾ These masses — including proletarians, but also de-classed or proletarianised petty-bourgeois — would essentially like a return to the capitalism of sixty years ago, to the world of the economic boom, when, moreover, a substantial part of them comprised emigrants from the four corners of Europe and the world, squeezed, oppressed and despised just like the immigrants of our time.

But to return to the earlier discussion, the process of nullifying bourgeois democracy is not only attributable to the sovereignist "ogres" who are brutally accelerating policies already taken up by the political personnel who preceded them. If people like Trump, Milei or Salvini have come to power — not to mention others who may get there — it is because the crisis has progressively restricted the room for manoeuvre. It has burned out many of the traditional political parties, which have lost electoral support as a result of the austerity policies they have been implementing in their attempts to stem a historic crisis of capital that is worsening decade after decade.

Years ago, one of the most lucid and acute minds of reformist thought, the sociologist Luciano Gallino, described the IMF approved measures taken by the EU in response to the severe economic turmoil caused by the subprime mortgage crisis which erupted in the US between 2007 and 2008 as a "coup d'état". "Austerity" means cuts to healthcare, education, and pensions — the plunder of indirect and deferred wages; to be precise, cuts in public sector wages, and (new) regulations that encourage and facilitate the spread of underemployment (precariousness) and low wages. The pinnacle, as it were, of the "coup d'état" was the EU’s imposition of the memorandum on Greece,⁽¹⁶⁾ followed by the cowardly about-face of the "left-wing" government, which accepted it despite the opposition expressed in a referendum called by the government itself (2015). The memorandum truly meant a time of blood, sweat, and tears for the Greek proletariat (and sectors of the lower middle class). It anticipated Milei's anti-proletarian measures in Argentina by a decade: a different political "style," but the same class content.

But why a "coup"? Because, Gallino argued, the decisions to impose austerity, while bailing out the banks, were made by the infamous troika — the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF — while parliaments were asked to ratify the measures, without any real debate. To be fair, Gallino himself pointed out that opposition to the measures from the national assemblies was weak, that is, apart from the sovereignists where they were in opposition, and the left, but for electoral reasons. Let's add: Syriza in Greece and the sovereignists in government did, and are doing, the same things, if not worse. The sociologist correctly emphasised that governments were carrying out "the task entrusted to them by the ruling class, of which they are a representative fraction."⁽¹⁷⁾ This, in fact, is one of the differences between us and reformism: the latter believes — deceives itself — that capitalist democracy can establish governments representing the interests of all classes, keeping the upper classes on a leash. We, on the other hand, believe that in this society every government represents the interests of only one class: the ruling class.

A society divided into opposing and irreconcilable classes cannot be anything else but anti-democratic (if we want to use this expression), founded as it is on the power of a tiny minority who exploit and oppress the vast majority. In 2013, Gallino calculated that the global ruling class, strictly speaking — the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie — numbered 29 million adults, or 0.6% of the world's population, and owned 39% of total wealth.⁽¹⁸⁾ Since then things have not changed, except for the worse: "The poorest half of humanity holds just 0.52% of the world’s wealth, while the richest 1% owns 43.8%"⁽¹⁹⁾ To elaborate, today "the wealthiest 0.001% alone, fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires, control today three times more wealth than half of humanity combined. Their share has grown steadily from almost 4% in 1995 to over 6% today, which underscores the persistence of inequality."⁽²⁰⁾

We discussed earlier the West's inclination to return to the general conditions of the time when Great Britain was "born" in the early decades of the 19th century, and it is no coincidence that this process is particularly marked in the area that epitomises high-tech: Silicon Valley. Behind the glittering windows of start-ups, (so-called) artificial intelligence, and humanity's "magnificent and progressive destiny," lies a level of exploitation that leaves little for someone from Dickens's time to envy. According to a journalistic investigation, "Several American companies are adopting the '996' work schedule [which] involves a shift from 9am to 9pm, six days a week."⁽²¹⁾ According to local venture capitalists, such a gruelling workday is essential to defeat enemy number one: China, where such working hours, or worse, are the norm.

As usual, those "visionary" scum — the high-tech bosses — believe that young people should enthusiastically accept their particularly oppressive despotism, in view of the experience they gain (they say); so much so that they often don't pay overtime (it's all experience...) and demand total submission from the workforce. It's no surprise that the most well-known representative of the Big Tech world, Musk, the recently appointed head of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), fired tens of thousands of public employees and officials, applying the same systems used when he bought Twitter. Then, it was "a succession of summary dismissals, dismissals communicated via email, department heads unexpectedly summoned and asked to justify the usefulness of their employment in 60 seconds, severance pay withheld. An economic 'restructuring' made the scene of cruelty, based on ritual and punitive humiliations."⁽²²⁾ This approach — that is, viewing and treating the workforce as nothing more or less than toilet paper — isn't, in fact, exclusive to the "weird" Musk; it's typical, if not a pressing necessity, of the ferocious bosses of Big Tech (and not only them, to be honest). Oracle "is betting heavily on AI [and has initiated] a massive shift of capital toward building data centers and developing AI solutions for businesses. In early April, approximately 30,000 employees … were laid off without warning, informed with a terse email sent at six in the morning."⁽²³⁾

This is even more true for the assumptions on which artificial intelligence — always "so-called" — is developed. It's well known that in order to "train" the infamous algorithms, companies employ millions — some say 420 million — of people spread across the planet, paid piecework, a few cents per operation, who scrape together a mere survival wage, when things go "well". Some call them "ghost workers, the invisible spectres, the 21st-century slaves who labor for the pharaohs of the big tech multinationals, literally building the pyramids of artificial intelligence ... In comparison, the millions of workers assembling smartphones in Chinese warehouses seem like super-protected workers."⁽²⁴⁾ Companies in the sector are investing enormous capital, "according to the latest estimates, it will cost American big tech more than $700 billion in 2026," but so far, "the economic return is yet to be proven."⁽²⁵⁾ It's no surprise that there is a lot of talk about a financial bubble fuelling largely fictitious economic growth, as is the nature of fictitious capital, whose abnormal increase is fuelled by the crisis of the accumulation cycle. Tesla "has a market capitalization equal to 372 times company earnings [$4.46 billion, if we've calculated correctly]," and SpaceX's valuation is $2 trillion, equivalent to "250 times earnings [$8 billion: the same as before]."⁽²⁶⁾

In short, "the AI bubble comprised approximately 40% of US GDP growth in 2025 and up to 80% to the rise in the country's stock prices ..."⁽²⁷⁾

The difficulty of capitalising on enormous, ever-expanding capital, this is the problem gripping global capitalism, and perhaps especially that of Big Tech. They can't stand any regulation and, through the White House, are railing against the EU, which would like to impose — and in part does impose — soft rules on the platforms' excessive power, so as not to cede sovereignty to imperialism, their nominal ally, but their de facto worst enemy, for that very reason. The sensational case of the European judges of the International Criminal Court, stripped of credit cards, emails, and other important services — all "stuff" managed by US companies — because they declared Netanyahu a war criminal, demonstrates that control over the management of essential services is a knife to the throat of capitalism with a European identity card.

By the commodification, and subsequent commercialisation, of data plundered from the internet Big Tech makes stratospheric profits: "Every day, people across the world spend 11.8 billion hours (over one million years combined) consuming content on social media platforms founded by billionaires."⁽²⁸⁾

Raiding, depredation, speculation: we are nevertheless still in the realm of the redistribution of wealth circulating in society — a redistribution that benefits the tech monopolies exclusively, of course. This is not the creation of additional wealth, of new primary surplus value, but a turbo-charged drain on existing wealth. Thus, even the glittering Big Tech companies suffer — obviously — from the fundamental problem that is afflicting global capitalism, namely, the lack of surplus value, because, as we often say, the level of exploitation, paradoxically, although it has been rising for decades, is not high enough compared to today's organic composition. Hence, they evade taxes,⁽²⁹⁾ task their Governments with drastically reducing taxes for the few who pay, while cutting food subsidies for poor children, healthcare, and social services in general for the poorest sections of the proletariat (the Big Beautiful Bill...).

This ferocious bottom-up redistribution is accompanied, and must be accompanied, by the crushing of the working class, starting with the attack on direct wages, in the US as well as the rest of the world. We have spoken several times, obviously citing capitalist sources, of the decline in the wages' share of GDP that has been underway for several decades, which Covid-19 and geopolitical crises — that is, inter-imperialist conflict — have accelerated. A document compiled by Oxfam and the ITUC, examining 1,500 large companies in 33 countries, confirms the picture once again:

Global real wages for workers have fallen by 12 percent since 2019. This means they have effectively worked 108 days for free between 2019 and 2025 (31 days for free last year alone). Meanwhile, CEO pay has skyrocketed … a 54 percent increase in real terms.⁽³⁰⁾

The attack on wages in all forms, on the working conditions of the working class, is the obligatory path that the global bourgeoisie has undertaken to try to prevent the (economic) collapse of capitalism. When Peter Thiel poses as a "theologian of capitalism,"⁽³¹⁾ reiterating, as Friedman said, that democracy is now incompatible with freedom, he is essentially repeating that capitalism, in order to survive, must increasingly shed the bourgeois-democratic trappings that characterised the post-war upswing of capital. This was the case, we might add, between the two world wars, when traditional bourgeois democracy had become an intolerable hindrance for the "national" capitalisms most in difficulty, due to the particularly acute class struggle and the crisis. This does not mean that we are necessarily about to witness the return of full scale fascism, like that of the last century, but that the possibilities for managing the crisis are dwindling and that the bourgeoisie is increasingly considering more authoritarian forms of managing the state, that is, of controlling class conflict. Indeed, despite the idiocies, good only for debates among middle class intellectuals, so-called anarcho-capitalism, that is, a capitalism without the state, is nothing but flatulence. Without the state, the economy would collapse;⁽³²⁾ without massively state-funded research, for example, there would be no internet and many other technological and scientific innovations, from which private capital draws enormous benefits. Without the state, in short, the ruling class cannot dominate and keep the proletariat submissive. The "weak state" of the anarcho-capitalists — as the tech capitalist "barons" are often called — means a state even more aligned with the interests of capital — as is its nature — and with an iron fist, without the velvet glove of bourgeois democracy, against the proletariat. The ICE squads, an articulation of the state, not "extra-legal" armed groups like the Blackshirts and Brownshirts (certainly supported and protected by the state), are there to prove it.

A hundred years ago, Fritz Lang made the film Metropolis (released in 1927), in which a handful of capitalists ruthlessly reigned over a working class reduced to a passive herd, forced to live underground. A "mad scientist" used electromagnetic waves to create a robot to capture Maria, a teacher rebelling against the city's despotic order. It is almost like a foreshadow of Musk's dreams (or nightmares), who, with Neuralink — "a producer of chips implantable in the brain to enable direct communication with computers"⁽³³⁾ — would like to merge machine and human beings, who would obviously be controlled by those who control the machine.

Those familiar with the film know that it ends with the dissolution of the dystopia: bosses and workers are reconciled, and a new life begins. But for us, this is precisely the "dystopia" we are immersed in: a working class that "accepts" the social order where we are all in the same boat, a class that doesn't fight, or fights too feebly, against its enemy: capital. A class which is thus neglecting to create the vital tool it needs to put an end to the dystopian, yet very real, nightmare we are facing of universal war and environmental catastrophe. This tool is the revolutionary party.

Notes:

(1) Elena Tebano, Il governo dei miliardari: come Trump ha trasformato la Casa Bianca in una super-plutocrazia (The Billionaires' Government: How Trump has Transformed the White House into a Super-Plutocracy), Corriere della Sera, 30 June 2025

(2) These are the ideological miasmas that permeate, for example, Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1895 novel The Maidens of the Rocks. In 1958, Ludwig von Mises wrote a letter to Ayn Rand, a fanatical ideologue of capitalist "libertarianism" – that is, of the absolute power that capitalists should enjoy, as they are naturally superior to the proletarian "rabble" – with words reminiscent of Cantelmo, the protagonist of D'Annunzio's novel who despised the masses. In the complimentary letter, the Austrian economist wrote: "You [Rand] have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you." cdn.mises.org

(3) This anti-semitic document was a forgery by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to justify the pogroms against Jews and would later be part of the Nazi lie that it showed there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, thus justifying the Holocaust.

(4) That is, the ratio between capital employed in machinery, raw materials, energy, etc. = c and labour power = v.

(5) An expression of opposition to the bosses only adopted by that radical variant of social democracy and Gramscism that was operaismo (workerism).

(6) Trilussa, teorico della borghesia (Trilussa, Theoretician of the Bourgeoisie), in Prometeo, No. 28, 2022.

(7) For a survey of the "Edens" of contemporary capitalism, see Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2024)

(8) "Manchesterism" here is a reference to the capitalist economic liberalism promoted by the free traders Cobden and Bright when the British economy was the most dynamic in the world, not to be confused with the current usage in support of Andy Burnham as Labour leader.

(9) Milton Friedman in his 2002 preface to Capitalism and Freedom (1962).

(10) JP Morgan, The Euro area adjustment: about halfway there (2013), europe-solidarity.eu

(11) International Trade Union Confederation, Global Rights Index 2025, ituc-csi.org

(12) quotidianosanita.it Similar figures on civic space can be found at: business-humanrights.org

(13) Riccardo Barlaam, La democrazia USA (e globale) in declino (US and Global Democracy in Decline), Il Sole 24 ore+, 17 March 2026. The article comments on the tenth annual report of V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy Institute, University of Gothenburg).

(14) "La Vendée" was a reactionary movement against the French Revolution led by nobility in Western France but involving many peasants. The Sanfedismo movement in Calabria and Puglia, Southern Italy, was also a reactionary, largely peasant movement led by the clergy against Napoleon's overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty in Naples and Sicily and the establishment of the Parthenopean Republic there.

(15) These words of Damen capture the condition of significant sectors of today's proletariat and raise the perennial question about the development and role of the revolutionary party:

The proletariat would reduce itself to being mere plebians if it lost its class character as the antagonist of capitalism; and its possibility as an exploited class which struggles for its own defence and liberation would be thwarted and rendered null and void if the motivation and physical forces for a revolutionary leadership were not produced from within it through its own struggles.

Onorato Damen, Overturning Praxis, in Bordiga: Beyond the Myth, pp.34-5

(16) Luciano Gallino, Il colpo di stato di banche e governi. L'attacco alla democrazia in Europa (The Coup d'état of the Banks and Governments – the Attack on Democracy in Europe), Einaudi, 2013, Gallino refers to the two memoranda – 2010 and 2012, followed by a third in 2015 – which caused a drastic, dramatic impoverishment of the Greek proletariat and some sectors of the petty-bourgeoisie.

(17) Gallino, op. cit. p.16

(18) Gallino, op. cit. p.12

(19) Oxfam, Resisting the Rule of the Rich (2026), oxfam.org

(20) World Inequality Report 2026, wir2026.wid.world

(21) Kate Knibbs, Altro che settimana corta, nella Silicon Valley il nuovo mantra sono le 72 ore lavorative (Forget the shorter working week, in Silicon Valley the new mantra is the 72 hour week), Wired Italia, 24 July 2025

(22) Luca Celada, Il piano di Silicon Valley per impadronirsi dello stato (Silicon Valley's Plan to take over the State), il Manifesto, 17 December 2024

(23) Andrea Nepori, Ma non è (tutta) colpa dell'algoritmo (It's not (all) the fault of the algorithm), la Repubblica, (supplement) 22 April 2025, p.39

(24) Antonio Dini, I nuovi schiavi che nutrono le macchine (The New Slaves who Feed the Machines), la Repubblica, (supplement) loc cit., p.35

(25) A. Nepori, loc. cit.

(26) Taking a Good, Long Look Into Elon Musk and "Muskism" (Interview with Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian) jacobin.com Or to cite another source "For a company like Open AI to be valued at $800 billion when it hasn't earned a cent yet, and in 2025 recorded losses of $8 billion (against a turnover of $20 billion...), expecting to generate profits only in 2030 and considering spending another $600 billion in the meantime, one must admit that the delirium hypothesis isn't all that delusional." (CWO translation) Frédéric Lordon, Vi sono piaciuti i "subprime"? La crisi anomala (Did you enjoy the Sub-prime crisis? An Abnormal Crisis"), Le Monde Diplomatique – il Manifesto, May 2026.

(27) Luigi Pandolfi, Gli alieni del capitale (The Aliens of Capital), il Manifesto, 27 Februrary 2026

(28) Oxfam, loc. cit.

(29) See, for example Antonio De Lellis, Non è comunismo, ma giustizia sociale (It's not Communism but Social Justice), il Manifesto, 16 May 2026: "Just consider Trump's tax system for the rich, where the richest 1% of the population will save around $1 trillion over ten years thanks to the tax cuts granted by the US president. Altreconomia tells us that the four corporations — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla — paid an average tax rate of 4.9% in 2025, with Tesla and Palantir, in particular, avoiding 100% of their taxes". See also Elena Tebano, (see note 1 above), "Tesla hasn't paid a dollar in American taxes for more than twenty years and neither has SpaceX", Corriere della Sera, 20 April 2026. (both quotes CWO translations)

(30) May Day 2026: Top CEO pay increased 20 times faster than workers' pay in 2025, ituc-csi.org

(31) Luca Celada, Peter Thiel, il nuovo mondo degli oligarchi "oltre" la democrazia (Peter Thiel, the new world of oligarchs "beyond" democracy), il Manifesto, 15 March 2026.

(32) Incidentally, Big Tech companies have received and continue to receive billion-dollar government contracts, from Palantir to SpaceX, to name just the most famous or infamous cases.

(33) Taking a Good, Long Look Into Elon Musk and "Muskism" (see note 21 above).