In this dystopian world, where civilizational rules are violated and chaos reigns at times, there seems to be a desire, an expectation that things must change. It is the only thing on which humans seem to practically agree.
Under this logic, those electoral proposals that promise the desired change are usually the most successful. Perhaps this has always been the case, but what is new is that promises of change are no longer synonymous with progress, with advancement.
The truth is that the ultra-right currents hijacked the form to become the bearers of change, but promising the contradiction of turning back the wheel of history. With a nineteenth-century bias, the solution does not seem to lie in progress, but in going backwards; the more conservative the better: they like to show off. An insurmountable dichotomy is imposed, according to which, in order to change things, it is necessary to reinstall what once was, and for something it should have been replaced.
But, what happened, who is to blame for this problem?
Let's take it one step at a time. The need to change the state of affairs is a systemic consequence of the capitalist mode of production, by virtue of which the concentration of wealth, the increase of inequality and, with it, the generalization of the frustration of the citizenry, which permanently challenges the traditional ways of doing politics, are inevitable.
After the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, capitalism saw its existence threatened for the first time. That feeling produced the first Nazi-fascist monsters, who were given the task of destroying the first proletarian state, degenerating into the Second World War. The epic victory of the Soviet people prompted reforms in the bourgeois system, particularly in the European neighborhood, in which political sectors led a social-democratic crusade, which even managed to engulf part of the left.
By then a political pseudo-competition was set up between bourgeois liberalism, qualified as the traditional right vs. social democracy. But those supposed differences have been blurring over time, leaving a political vacuum that the left has not known how or been able to take advantage of and, as we know, someone must fill that space.
Thus emerges the ultra-right, as an extremist drift of the traditional right/social democrats, with the mission of saving a political system that is overwhelmed by numerous signs of exhaustion, of decadence, marked by the interclass and generational impoverishment of majority social sectors, in the same proportion that wealth is hyper-concentrated.
What is now gaining strength is the notable rise of the so-called ultra-right, something extravagant only ten years ago. Expressions of this are to be found above all in places where the weight of the impoverished middle strata is relevant, both in the first capitalist world and in other emerging countries on the periphery of the system.
In the form of a kind of sect, headed by leaders who claim to be messianic, they manage to unseat or even phagocytize traditional parties, as is the case of the U.S. Republican Party, electoral instrument used by the so-called maga political group of Trump, who needs no introduction.
Political organizations of this tenor are similar in certain anti-values, such as the rejection of any progress of a socio-cultural and inclusive nature, anti-immigrant, with a politically confrontational aesthetics, proposing to implement ultra-conservative rules of social coexistence.
From the electoral point of view, they achieve a high mobilizing effectiveness, they summon every person who feels "abandoned" by fate, they opportunistically equate rich and poor, managing to generate a sense of belonging in a conglomerate of false equals.
Starting from an ideological simplism, including bizarre conspiracy theories, the ultra-right effectively interprets the emotions of millions of followers, who are deceived with relative ease with irritating falsehoods, massively and rapidly diffused by digital social networks, manipulating common sense. In any case, lies are already at the basis of the traditional right-wing politics.
The scope of this phenomenon is difficult to account for; however, the vertiginous rise of extremist right-wing parties is evident in the last elections for the European Parliament, in which these forces went from 118 to 187 parliamentarians. Of course, neither the glittering return of maga/Trump to the White House nor the extremist electoral victories in Our America require further description.
WHAT DANGERS ARE FACED?
WHAT OPPORTUNITIES ARE OPENING UP?
The risks of a society being forced to return to the past, to what already was, are practically infinite; as many as the foot of clay of the manipulated narrative that they raise to justify this regression, certainly useful to win elections, but not so much to govern.
As we have already seen, the authoritarian tendencies, which naturalize the ignorance of the rules of the bourgeois liberal game, the verbal violence, the threatening gestures and decisions towards other nations provoke a permanent state of conflict, prevent any climate that would allow a minimum of social peace, indispensable for the system and the economy in general to function.
In this scenario prone to permanent chaos and new cycles of generalized frustration, when the moderate or conventional option of the right has been overcome by the circumstances, a range of opportunities opens up for a leftist proposal to prosper, but from the antipodes to the ultra-right, and also to the more traditional one.
The logic should be: if the center was swept away, the only alternative to the extreme right is a radicalized left, especially in its priorities and management. So, if the left tries to resemble that center, something that unfortunately usually happens, it will not be able to be the bearer of the true and inevitable change.
Then, there will be repeated, like a nightmare, replacements of ultra governments, undermined by their ineptitude to manage the mentioned and necessary social peace, alternating with moderate governments that have already proved their exhaustion, and so on, with no options of progress for the great majorities.
Is this the destiny of mankind? Will, for example, the disregard for scientific advances in critical issues such as health or climate change prevail? Is the natural state of affairs wars and the associated genocide? Let us not forget Palestine. Can nothing be done to radically change this?
We must insist that the real contradiction, the one that imposes its logic on any other, is that between rich and poor, and that the future must be a society in which there is neither rich nor poor.
It is appropriate to evoke Fidel Castro, in his speech at the Social Development Summit on March 12, 1995: "In a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer... where women, Indians, blacks and other ethnic groups are discriminated against; where chaos and anarchy reign under the blind and savage laws of the market, there can be no social development."
