“Put the Musks in charge!” – This seems to encapsulate the era we’ve already entered. No political vision or clear strategy shapes this process. Instead, it’s a cultural and anthropological evolution of the system governing our world. Public opinion plays an active and passive role in this, just like its political “leaders.” The power of Technology (the global apparatus made up of economics, finance, science, innovation, and development) has long ceased to be perceived as a means to meet our needs or even surpass them. It has become the Sovereign Authority that dictates and creates them. Technology now determines humanity’s moral imperatives and has, quite evidently, become the new religion. It claims to guide us through the fog, promising to eliminate the distressing unpredictability of the future if we entrust ourselves to its intelligence.
What Technology proclaims turns into a kind of prophecy. But how transparent are the algorithms it relies on? How accountable are its oracles? These questions increasingly seem irrelevant. What is universally felt is that the Machine—now intelligent, even “spiritual”—has become the fundamental force in our lives. Consequently, its masters have necessarily become the new sovereigns. To be surprised by the political rise of figures like Musk might, in the eyes of sober realism, sound like a pathetic lament.
In recent decades, political cultures have emerged that have supported this process, bearing little resemblance to the left and right-wing ideologies of the 20th century. Those earlier movements, even when opposed and in conflict, shared a political will to harness the power of the technical-economic system for their own ends. They still regarded Technology as a tool. Everything changed between the 1970s and 1980s. That was the true revolution, marked by figures like Reagan and Thatcher.
The neo-conservative and neo-liberal right retained only a few traits of historical right-wing politics as ideological ornaments for demagogic purposes: nationalist and identity-based rhetoric, civilizing ambitions (promoting their own as the sole authentic civilization), and an emphasis on punitive measures as a security mechanism. In reality, their strength lay in fully aligning with the global power of the economic-financial system driving the technological revolution of the new millennium. Their sole political purpose became eliminating obstacles to this system’s dominance and managing the cultural and social context to internalize its “values” (the foremost being individual success, to be pursued at all costs, modeled on the grand achievements of Technology). This is all that remains of the “political vocation.”
The resistible rise of the right in Western democracies finds its explanation here. In their entirely unprecedented form—present across all political alignments—they reflect the dominant system, whose truly revolutionary nature the old left is perhaps only now beginning to understand. Faced with the successes of Technology, the right radically changed its core strategy (retaining only the remnants of its populist past), while the left played the role of the “good conservatives,” those who sought to soften a transition that is both irreversible and traumatic. Instead of confronting this shift or attempting to politically and unionize the concrete individuals it affected, they merely tried—almost always ineffectively (as evidenced by the tragedy of immigration policies)—to defend “human rights,” a concept that has never been clarified when detached from enforceable laws to penalize violators.
Since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, the new right has been ready to embrace figures like Musk. The old left, meanwhile, failed to see them coming. It spent a while discussing a bourgeois capitalism that no longer existed, then became enchanted by ideologies like the end of history and the idea of economic and financial globalization as a universal harbinger of democracy and peace. While the new right jumped on the winners’ bandwagon, even managing to give the impression they were steering it, the left clung to archaic ideas of parliamentary and electoral assembly centrality, with no vision for reforming them.
Does the political power of the right prevail? No, it’s the image of power expressed by the Musk-system that wins—a system the new right, the ones that matter and are entirely detached from the parliamentary geographies of the 20th century, idolize. The left loses because it seems out of touch with the factors shaping our destiny. Its stance has been one of abstention—both from effective participation and meaningful criticism of the status quo—since the 1980s. This “abstention” has caused the collapse of its representativeness, particularly among the most vulnerable and affected social sectors. And this, upon closer inspection, is entirely logical: those who are least protected need protection the most. And where else would they look for it but from those who appear the most combative?
Since we are not at the end of history but rather in its midst, and since contradictions are multiplying, nothing is definitive. However, Western leftist movements will only have a future if they truly understand the objective reasons for their failure—reasons that go far beyond tactical flaws or leadership errors—and if they can not merely “reposition” themselves within the new social structures of production but act as a living contradiction within them. This contradiction must challenge the inherently monolithic thinking of the “spiritual” Machine with critical awareness, and juxtapose dependent, commanded labor—including that of researchers and scientists—with the overwhelming demand for freedom that science itself inspires.
Without utopianism, with feet firmly grounded in the real possibilities offered by the achievements of human intellect, the left must seize these opportunities before they vanish like snow in the sun. It requires a politics capable of equitably distributing produced wealth and creating the conditions for a federation among peoples and nations, beyond every hegemonic delusion.
La Stampa, January 13, 2025
