In the few weeks between the end of September and start of October 2026, two vast mass movements occupied the world stage, adding to the ceaseless massacre of proletarians in Gaza and the West Bank and the military-diplomatic quagmire in the Persian Gulf (now with their Red Sea appendices) and in Ukraine. In Spain the disastrous housing conditions for the great majority of the population, with particularly disastrous effects on proletarians and the half classes undergoing proletarianisation, sparked off widespread demonstrations, immediately manipulated by bourgeois politics for electoral purposes. In France, high-school pupils, supported by university students and teachers, came out onto the streets against an educational structure with evident class biases, clashing violently with the police. In both cases, these were events with roots reaching far further back than the original pretext or the social make-up of those giving voice to them, investing questions purely of class: in practice, how to scrape a living in a regime of profit and capitalist exploitation.
If, indeed, housing is a primary need, widely obstacled and denied by building speculation, financialisation of the economy and the very trend of the capitalist mode of production, the regulation of schools has increasingly proved to be a tool of selection (often entrusted to algorythms) for turning out „officials“ faithful to their duty to the state and to state power, both on the receiving end (students, above all those from poor or immigrant neighbourhoods, abandoned to their own resources in dilapidated buildings, with curricula that fail to take into account the reality of their surroundings), and for those working in it (teachers and other staff who for some time have been suffering from the gradual erosion of their salaries and a growing workload, faced with constant rises in the cost of living).
These, then, are class issues, which are once more exploding at the heart of so-called „advanced capitalism“ and demonstrate once again the failure of democracy and reformism, faced with the objective, material dynamics of the capitalist mode of production immersed in its umpteenth crisis of over-production.
In fact, just as war, massacres, genocide, ethnic cleansing run riot on the world scenario and financial bubbles destined to blow up with massive explosions continue to inflate exponentially, the bourgeois ideologists ask themselves with concern: „What’s happened to our Sacred Democracy? How has good old Reformism ended up?“ Because it is clear that for eighty years democracy and reformism have been the ace in the sleeve of capitalism after the Second World War, for the purpose of social control. But now what has become of them? Recently the neologism „democratorship“ was coined to characterise the present mainstream political system, whilst someone else concluded that „capitalism has done away with democracy“ (the Financial Times’ leading economist Martin Wolf)! As to reformism, time seems to be up for welfare reminiscent of Keynes, even in its British cradle (with the well-known extensions to Scandinavia), despite useless attempts to reanimate it: not a scrap of flesh remains. To sum up, it appears the bourgeois ideologists acknowledge that both democracy and reformism have ended up bankrupt and before their very eyes looms the disturbing shadow of a new, enormous financial crash and all that this brings with it in social and political terms: as well as the consequent threat of a return to the scene of an open class struggle.
For us clear-headed critics this is no surprise and not a cause for concern. With Marx and Lenin we have always defined democracy as one of the bourgeoisie’s methods of rule, destined, in the post Second-World-War, imperialist phase of capitalism, to be increasingly permeated by a fascist method, inheriting the substance if not the form itself. And, since its nineteenth-twentieth century phase, reformism (Bernstein, Kautsky, Turati, Serrati, to name just a few individuals), has been „modernised“ into fascism itself (State intervention in the economy with regulatory functions, the integration of trade unions into the State, to give some examples). Today, not by chance, many opionionists and analysts regard Roosevelt’s New Deal with nostalgia as a democratic-reformist experiment (as, by the way, also happened in Russia with so-called „really-existing socialism“), failing to grasp its explicit proximity to contemporary Italo-German fascism – all of them rallying in defence of big capital, shaken by the successive crises following the First World War and confronted by a militant proletariat, despite being reduced to a desperate, defensive position by the betrayal of social-democracy and Stalinism.
What remains, then, of this hugely boasted democracy and celebrated reformism, as the economic crisis advances, the contradictions within the ruling system multiply and social reserves run out? A quick answer: the reform of the „police forces“, increasingly militarised using the latest technology (the most recent innovation in France is constituted by the cops’ shields, which emit blinding rays of light) and the progressive and unstoppable increase in war spending, with the militarisation of society, aggressive and widespread nationalisms, the progressive reintroduction of military service… In practice, what is reaffirmed is the monopoly of violence in the hands of the bourgeois State, closure of the illusory spaces for mediation and the reinforcement of the raw and basic ones of the truncheon. As a new world bloodbath is prepared.
We communists, a counter-current minority, regard these mass movements with positive interest, with all their inevitable limits and ambiguities, linked to their initial, necessarily inter-class nature, and are working so that from them may emerge the avant-garde revolutionaries who are needed to overthrow this mode of production, so obscenely bloodthirsty in its historical death throes.
12/10/2026
