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(Picture: Gustave Doré: Dante, guided by Virgil, observes those guilty of simony in the eighth circle of Hell, 1885.)
Walter Benjamin is credited with the statement, “Behind every fascism is a failed revolution.” This statement (to which I myself have referred at least 10 times) obviously offers itself as a formula that could account for the ongoing conservative populism (not only that of Trump): the hegemonic liberal democracy failed to perceive the discontent of the silent majority of the working class, which didn't recognize itself in the topics of multiculturalism, wokism, and identity politics. Neo-fascist populists filled this gap and presented themselves as the voice of the working class exploited by the liberal elite. However, this formula doesn't address the key enigma: why did the revolution fail; that is, why did the new Right—and not the Left—succeed in capturing the rage and fury of many so-called ordinary people?
Lately, it has become quite popular to blame theory (philosophy) for failing to offer the exploited majority a viable political program capable of mobilizing the people. Otto Paans, in his otherwise very perspicuous analysis, writes:
“One cannot expect academics working within an ideological frame with largely pre-selected topics of inquiry, focused on multiculturalism, enlightened-lite atheism, and simplistic egalitarianism to provide sound political alternatives to contemporary demands. No wonder that Enlightenment Lite left liberals, and especially professional academic philosophers, have been completely bowled over by Trump’s election: regression to a neo-fascist dictatorship was not something that they ever even remotely anticipated. ... Professional academic philosophy has a moral duty to change direction radically, because the absence of real, serious philosophy diminishes virtually to zero the chances of genuine political change or resistance against intellectual dictatorship in either of its politically correct or neo-fascist sub-species.”1
Simple and convincing—but is Paans’s request not a permanent motif of (what remains of) today’s radical Left? Paans refers to Adorno and Horkheimer as great authorities, but did they provide a more consistent answer? In one of his late short texts, Adorno gives a clear answer to the question, “So what should we do today?”: “I don’t know.” And is it not the same with Paans’s text itself? He insists that “professional academic philosophy” should provide a concrete program, without giving any clear indication of what this program should be. What we get are ultimately just two options: the “realist” pragmatism of the Third Way liberal Left and, from circles linked to the Third World, a rehabilitation of “really existing Socialism” (up to a new, more positive appraisal of not just Mao but also Stalin). In this view, the original sin of Western Marxism was that it lost contact with the revolutionary movements outside the developed capitalist countries. My position here is exactly the opposite: Western Marxism was right in rejecting any continuity with “really existing Socialism,” which was, all in all, a gigantic failure—it succeeded economically only by integrating currents of capitalism.
Our only realistic option is therefore to fully accept this absence of an actual alternative, the deadlock poignantly expressed in a message I recently received from a young friend in Japan (online name Cabin):
“I would like to know whether you have noticed the Japanese House of Councillors election that has just taken place. The far-right political party, the '参政党', has achieved an unprecedented victory by winning 14 seats. In the statistical results, the majority of voters are young people. The far right has gained huge momentum among the young by posting a large number of rumors about foreigners or other things on social media through a massive number of paid posters. Meanwhile, on the streets of Kyoto, the sincere but already aged left-wing elderly men and women in their seventies and eighties are making speeches and propagating their ideas in the hot weather, but to little avail. What do you think of this reversal? Has the world become old? As young people, how should we face this situation? Has there been such a period in history? To be honest, I almost no longer believe that the world can be changed. I almost feel that people in today’s capitalist society are coddled, and as a result, they are fragile, short-sighted, and extreme, eventually becoming a breeding ground for the far right. I feel that those left-wing elderly people on the streets of Kyoto, who truly believe that they can change the world, are 'much younger' than me. As young people, what should we do in the face of such a situation? In the next few years, I will study and live in Japan. Faced with such a rightward trend, I feel a sense of powerlessness—where can I escape to? There is no new continent left for us.”
Yes, we should fully accept the conclusion: there is no place we can escape to, no new continent left for us. When, in Munich: The Edge of War (2021), someone tries to convince a German diplomat who plans to kill Hitler that violent resistance doesn't work, and that we should stick to endless negotiations which keep hope alive, the German diplomat replies: “Hoping is waiting for someone else to do it. We'd all be much better off without it.” This is what I meant with the title of my book (taken from a text by Giorgio Agamben), “Courage of Hopelessness”: true radical politics is like Dante’s Hell, at whose entrance a placard says, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (usually translated as “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”), it is ridiculous to blame academic philosophy for this hopelessness: the situation itself, the way we experience it, offers no perspective. While a radical change is needed, it is simultaneously impossible (again, in our reality).
Following the Stalinist turn, Communist revolutions were grounded in a clear vision of historical reality (“scientific socialism”), its laws and tendencies, so that, in spite of all their unpredictable turns, the revolution was fully located within this process of historical reality. As they liked to say, socialism should be built in each country according to its particular conditions, but in accordance with the general laws of history. In theory, revolution was thus deprived of the dimension of subjectivity proper, of radical cuts of the real into the texture of “objective reality”—in clear contrast to the French Revolution, whose most radical figures perceived it as an open process lacking any support in a higher Necessity. Saint-Just wrote in 1794: “Ceux qui font des révolutions ressemblent au premier navigateur instruit par son audace. /Those who make revolutions resemble a first navigator, who has audacity alone as a guide/.”2 Today, even more than in Lenin’s time, we navigate in uncharted territories, without a global cognitive mapping. But what if this lack of cognitive mapping is what enables us to avoid totalitarian closure?3
What our situation demands is clear. A non-negotiable component of any Left is universalism—if for no other reason, then for the simple fact that today’s “late capitalist” society (the often-used predicate “late” is in itself meaningless; it rather signals our ignorance) is globally interconnected to an extent unthinkable until now. To avoid yet another listing of the obvious cases (global threats to our environment, the impact of artificial intelligence, the prospect of social chaos and military self-destruction), suffice it to mention how even things that were once a state monopoly are now part of international trade. Trump has repeatedly floated sending American prisoners to serve prison sentences outside the country—this time threatening to send the people charged with vandalizing Teslas to Ecuador.4 So you can serve your prison term in a country where the act for which you were condemned is not a criminal offense! Ghana and Serbia are preparing to sign a landmark Memorandum of Understanding on labor mobility, which will enable Ghanaian workers to benefit from Serbia’s 100,000 work permit program this year. (The deal was later cancelled.)5 The same thing happened already back in 1970, when the GDR imported thousands of workers from Vietnam (which took part of the salary earned by these workers). Again, workers are sold by one state to another state… North Korea brought this logic to an extreme, basically selling thousands of soldiers to Russia, where they fight on the front and are massively dying. (Would it not be much more appropriate for North Korea to sell its workers to South Korea, which doesn’t have enough of them? For ideological reasons, this is of course impossible…)
How, then, are we to act in such a messy global situation? I’ll take a risk and present here what I cannot resist calling my realist utopia.6 The daily run of things is best done by some moderately conservative force—they are pragmatic enough to avoid excessive risks, always ready to take into account how even the best projects can go wrong. In short, they know that in politics the agent has to take full responsibility: a true politician should never say, “I meant it well, just the unfortunate circumstances ruined it all.” However, such an approach is not enough to cope with the prospect of inevitable catastrophes that haunt all humanity—this is why a kind of new Leninist elite is needed, a group whose main task is not to elaborate old-fashioned Communist dreams but to make all of us ready for the impending catastrophes; i.e., to keep us aware that we are approaching a global emergency state. My utopia is thus a silent coalition between moderate conservatives (who run day-to-day things) and a Leninist elite (which prepares us for the impending breakdown)—but I am well aware that today both these agents are disappearing from the political scene. Moderate conservatives are being swept away by Trumpian populists, and whatever remains of the radical Left is caught in a fake peacenik utopianism.
Insofar as even this crazy dream is all too utopian, what should we do? My formula here is principled pragmatism: we should focus on central goals that concern our survival, and everything is permitted to move towards these goals—democracy when democracy works, authoritarian state control when it is necessary, popular mobilization when it is needed, even a level of terror when things get really desperate. Here is a simple recent example. Our media reported on two initiatives to launch a new political party. First, Elon Musk says he is launching a new political party, weeks after dramatically falling out with US President Donald Trump: “The billionaire announced on his social media platform X that he had set up the America Party, billing it as a challenge to the Republican and Democratic two-party system. However, it is unclear if the party has been formally registered with US election authorities. Musk, who was born outside of the US and is thus ineligible to run for the US presidency, does not say who will lead it.”7 These news are sad because, again, the Right did what the Left should have done: the left wing of the Democratic Party (Bernie Sanders, AOC) should split from its stinking corpse and constitute a new party. So, is the fact that in the UK, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn announced the creation of a new left-wing party good news? There is no name yet—"Arise" and "The Collective" have been bandied about. Corbyn is thought to like the phrase "Real Change," but not necessarily as a party name. The idea is to mobilize the vast reservoir of leftist voters excluded by Starmer from the Labour Party or alienated from it.8
This project looks promising—according to some polls, around half of Labour voters are ready to transfer their vote to the new party—but uncertainty remains. There is no principled answer: sometimes, one should try to take over a big, leading party; sometimes, a split is necessary. That's why the news about new parties is sad: what works better is how Trump reappropriated the Republican Party or how, a couple of years ago, Corbyn reappropriated the Labour Party and effectively made the entire establishment tremble.
In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T.S. Eliot made an often-quoted remark: there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. Lenin did this with regard to traditional Marxism; Mao did this in his own way, and Deng with Mao—all of them with mixed results. Today, the left has not yet done it—it was Trump who enacted a heretical break with global neoliberalism. Again, there should be no prejudices here: we should be ready to take from the enemy topics like patriotism, the defense of our specific way of life, and family life, included. So, we do need heresy, but a heresy that will work, with a chance of becoming hegemonic—not a new, small party proud of telling the truth, although this truth is largely ignored; not a party trembling at each election, wondering if it will remain in parliament.
https://againstprofphil.org/2017/02/13/professional-philosophys-failed-revolution/.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, “Rapport sur les factions de l’étranger,” in Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard 2004, p. 695.
Jean-Claude Milner, “The Prince and the Revolutionary.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/trump-foreign-prison-threats-civil-rights-groups-027162.
https://www.myjoyonline.com/ghana-serbia-to-sign-labour-mobility-agreement-as-bilateral-ties-deepen/.
I owe this idea to a conversation with Nico Graack.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dn04lvgpdo.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cedg56670qdo
How are we supposed to achieve a revolutionary momentum when the masses in the western capitalist world are so indulged in consumerism that the only concern of them is not having enough means to follow the order of the market to "Consume" up to extinction.Unfortunately Nick Land's vision of the future is the most probable one,the end result will be annihilation of humanity,the system is already working as a self driven automation that has turned humanity useless to the logic of its existence.
[in response to the user "Ralphie" and comment about endorsing Nick Land against Zizek].
1) nick land's cynicism is antithetical to any radical political efforts aimed at emancipation. In this way, his theory is tacitly complicit by helping to reproduce the social structure he criticizes because of his presupposition of the unstoppable force of acephalous capital accumulation that reaches a climax of mankind's existence.
2) I agree the West is overwhelmingly pacified, depoliticized and made cynical through consumerism, but there is this weird idea I see among many theorists that it is limited to only this population? China, Russia, Singapore, or 3rd world countries have populations also engaged in consumerism, although not to the same extent. Therefore, it is a structural antagonism of mass consumerism that permeates the globalized capitalist system of decaying neoliberalism.
3) One of my personal central theoretical tasks is to breakdown and argue that the main obstacle in overcoming this "indulgence in consumerism" so as to mobilize "revolutionary momentum", is the psychic-libidinal mechanism called 'fetishist Disavowal'. It basically means: the worker-consumer knows what they do is wrong since it helps to aid all these global crises, yet they nevertheless still do it. Why? It is done in order to maintain their access to the existing array of surplus enjoyments provided by the system (commodities in all its forms) and also demanded by the system in the capacity of an ethical command (Superego). Why do people then do this? It is due their internalized capitalist desires (ideology, fantasy) to: prove their existence (ontology), happiness / success in life (identity), but most importantly, to prove their enjoyment to Others and themselves (to cure their intrinsic lack or alienation). None of these things succeed, but they perpetuate these actions because it is now a death drive they have developed towards these aforementioned aims that can be neatly summarized as: the infinite Enjoyment of commodity consumerism. consumers at some point gain the knowledge (cynicism) that their actions by definition fail, yet this repeated failure is one of the forms of enjoyment the capitalist system provides. Why? because people inherently enjoy failure (lack), disappointment and the suffering that comes from it; especially when it can be commodified and easily packaged-sold to us through convenient products we can buy with one-tap online.
4) It might seem this enjoyment of lack can't be defeated. I argue it can, but it requires two central processes that will be highly difficult and uncertain in achieving. Firstly, it will require a true radical leftist political Master ( Lenin, FDR, Malcolm X, Robespierre) who inspires the consumer to abandon their material hedonism or even the capitalist to renounce their wealth accumulation. Secondly, to embrace your alienation from any identity. Why? because it functions to self-divide (subjective destitution) you from any commodity attachment and psychic/economic investment into the capitalist norms of everyday social life. How? this will take too long too explain, but simply put: to openly confront your anxieties, dissatisfactions and malaise you experience (traverse the fundamental fantasy); consequently using this 'collective unhappiness' to reposition your subjective foundation (how you exist in relationship to society) into hysteria (conscious and active resistance to the status quo). In so doing, true-actual freedom (self-emancipation) is accomplished at the individual level, and this can be extrapolated to political undertakings for liberation (emancipation at the collective level).
5) The anticipated outcome of the two above efforts are: the restructuring of a subject's association to both their enjoyment (lack) and alienation (subjectivity), by means of a new fantasy framework (political-ideological stance and activities) that underpins their new Radical Leftist death drives beyond capitalism and liberal democracy (its logic is to sustain capital).
6) I endorse Zizek's political-economic (a new sociohistorical order) death drive of reinvented global communism. The formula of this is: Lenin's revolutionary logic + Hegel's theory of history + universal aims to actualize; e.g. fraternal justice, new social links (solidarity) greater egalitarian coexistence, greater purviews of freedom beyond systemic class hierarchies, widespread expansion of the public Commons. I agree that this utopian vision is the only appropriate and necessary program that can effectively tackle our zero point basis of crises - for the purpose of avoiding the annihilating doom spelled out by Nick Land.