The left that no longer works. Ideas to get back on track.

48 min read JUAN TORRES

JUAN TORRES

The recent indictment of former Socialist president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is riddled with accusations lacking evidence and based on unproven presumptions, but it cannot be denied that it forms part of a very long trail of frustrations and disillusionments caused by left-wing leaders almost everywhere. Even if his complete innocence were proven tomorrow on all the charges against him, we could not help but wonder what someone who presents himself as a moral compass of the left was doing among commission agents, corrupt officials, and traitors, and what need he has to dedicate himself to making money on the ever-subtle border between right and wrong when, at the same time, he gives speeches as a champion of equality, transparency, and social justice.

However the Zapatero affair ends, it won't be the last instance of frustration, shame, and disappointment, just as it wasn't the first. That's why I believe it's a mistake to continue treating each of these disappointments as isolated incidents. They are recurring because they follow a common pattern, a structural flaw that plagues the left in our time.

I have tried to analyze it on a daily basis for years, in many articles that are all on my website (www.juantorreslopez.comand in longer texts in some of my books. Especially in So that there can be a future (Deusto Editions, 2024), on whose cover I presented it as a book that tried to answer a fundamental question: How to build a better world when the extreme right is spreading to prevent it and the left doesn't know how to do it?

In these pages, I will try to summarize all these reflections, not as a definitive thesis, but rather as the provocation that is necessary to draw attention and to help generate a debate that is hardly addressed in the radical, fundamental terms in which it seems to me that it should be posed.

In my opinion, the left as we know it has run its course and is on the verge of completely squandering its entire cultural, ideological, and political heritage. It is no longer a useful instrument for transforming the world, and a change of course is urgently needed because the threat of violence, chaos, and destruction, as I have also analyzed in many of my writings, is stronger than ever in every corner of the planet. A planet threatened, perhaps as never before, by an ecocide perpetrated by large corporations with no other aim than to continue reaping monetary profit and unlimited power.

In these pages, I want to briefly present two theses. The first is that the left ceased to be transformative when it abandoned the construction of society and tried to replace social counter-power with mere institutional occupation. When it lost daily contact with the concrete lives of the majority of society and sought to combat neoliberalism, it did so (when it truly sought to combat it, because a good part of social democracy embraced and implemented it without reservation) using the same cultural, economic, and communicative structures that neoliberalism itself controlled. This, in my view, is the strategic error that explains a large part of its defeats, its frustrations, and also the contemporary rise of the far right. The second is that when confronted with this failure, we are not at square one. We know on what principles and in what way society can be transformed, and where the real-world experiences are that can show us the steps to take to achieve it. At the same time, I try to offer, therefore, the double plane that I find in reality: the lamentable state of the left in the present, and the hope that can be found by those who analyze it with a long-term perspective and discover in it what the dominant power logically tries to hide from us.

The left that was

For decades, the left has been at the forefront of human progress. This is a clear and undeniable historical fact. There has not been a single significant advance in rights, freedoms, social justice, or democratic achievements that has not been driven, sustained, or won by unions, progressive parties, and left-wing social movements. In the vast majority of cases, this has been achieved through many, and sometimes bloody, sacrifices. The eight-hour workday, universal suffrage, public education, healthcare for all, labor rights, social security, the battles against dictatorships, decolonization, civil rights, equality between men and women (the latter not without resistance from far too many men on the left, it must be said)... all of this heritage of humanity that we now take for granted was won against the resistance of those who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and it was achieved thanks to the organized demands and pressure of the left.

And what's most remarkable is that sometimes they didn't even need to govern to achieve this. Their mere social presence was enough; it was sufficient that they existed as an organized force, as a real counterweight, as a benchmark of what could be demanded and what was just to claim. Their very existence put pressure on society, mobilized collectives, and forced the powerful to yield (not without strong resistance, of course) in order not to lose everything.

The historical left was not just a political party. It was a shared way of life. It was present in neighborhoods, factories, community associations, unions, cooperatives, public schools, cultural centers, and countless other everyday spaces where people lived together, discussed issues, learned, and organized collectively.

Their strength stemmed not only from their ideas or programs but from the society they had previously built. They shared the living conditions of the vast majority of society and were part of their daily experience. They didn't speak from outside of popular life, but from within it.

It is true that there were ups and downs, steps forward and steps backward, betrayals and defeats, and also, many times, a repetition of the worst actions of the most powerful forces. It is true that there have undoubtedly been left-wing dictatorships; and left-wing movements that have destroyed rights and freedoms instead of creating them. That cannot be denied either. But the overall balance of history was unequivocal for more than a century: when progress was linked to justice, equality, and peace, it was because the left pushed it forward.

However, from the 1970s and 80s onward, something began to change. Slowly at first, then rapidly, the left ceased to be the spearhead of progress and gradually became a source of frustration and failure. Even when they have governed, what has followed has too often been disastrous, frequently leading to situations even worse than before: setbacks in hard-won gains, demobilization of the grassroots, loss of credibility, and sometimes something even more serious: the feeling that the left in power became indistinguishable from what it claimed to be fighting against.

It must be said clearly. In recent decades, the left has become, for far too many people, a constant source of frustration, pain, and sometimes even shame.

Why has this happened? Why has the left, which for over a century was the driving force of change, become one of its main obstacles? Why do so many left-wing leaders, in whom trust is placed, disappoint so often and so frequently, with a regularity that can no longer be attributed to bad luck or their personal character? Why is it so common for left-wing individuals who govern us, represent us in parliament, or lead parties to be almost indistinguishable from their right-wing counterparts in their public or private behavior? Why don't they represent a different kind of human being (as has happened with some of them, like Pepe Mujica, for example), but instead transform and clone themselves, fueled by high salaries, perks, and a life of luxury?

These are the questions I intend to answer below. Not by making moral judgments (although those are also appropriate), but by analyzing the structural problem, which I feel compelled to consider with a long-term perspective in order to provide the kind of answers that allow us to regain our bearings and move towards a horizon of progress, freedom, justice, and peace.

The change that knocked out the left

To understand the contemporary failure of the left, it is essential to first grasp the profound nature of neoliberalism. Because neoliberalism was not merely a set of economic policies aimed at privatizing public companies, deregulating markets, or reducing the size of the state. It was much more than that: a civilizational transformation.

Its proponents understood something fundamental: the true historical power of the left did not reside solely in parliaments or governments, but in organized society. They knew that unions, community spaces, collective bonds, and a culture of solidarity were the material and emotional foundations of democratic counter-power.

That is why the neoliberal offensive was directed precisely against that terrain.

The initial response was brutal and violent. In numerous countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, progressive and popular movements were crushed through coups, assassinations, disappearances, and systematic repression. The objective was not merely to overthrow specific governments, but to physically destroy those who organized social counter-power.

But very soon came a second, even more sophisticated and effective phase: the conservative revolution that began in the eighties.

Neoliberalism carried out a genuine anthropological and cultural operation. Its aim was not merely to change economic policies, but to transform people's way of thinking, feeling, and living. Its objective was to create a new type of human being adapted to the logic of the market.

The large factory spaces where thousands of workers could organize collectively were destroyed. Employment became precarious and labor relations were individualized. Former wage earners were transformed into self-employed entrepreneurs, forced to compete with each other and individually assume risks that were previously shared socially.

At the same time, trade unions were attacked politically and culturally, public services were privatized, increasing areas of life were commodified, and community spaces that sustained social bonds were systematically destroyed.

Simultaneously, on a cultural level, a new social morality was established: the idea that individual freedom is the supreme value; success, an exclusive result of personal merit; failure, individual responsibility; the public sphere, something inefficient; and the market a better system than any collective decision.

The result was the creation of what has been called homo neoliberalis: isolated individuals, turned into permanent competitors, unable to recognize themselves as part of a collective subject and accustomed to interpreting their problems as personal failures and not as a consequence of social structures.

This last point was decisive. Neoliberalism systematically destroyed the material, cultural, and emotional conditions that made it possible to build community. In other words, it destroyed the ground on which the left had historically operated.

Unfortunately, the left failed to fully understand the nature of this transformation and did not provide the necessary response.

The trap into which the left fell and from which it has not been able to escape

The deepest and most persistent error the left has made in recent decades is strategic, not moral. It concerns the order in which things should take place, what should precede what.

To understand this, we must first examine what the right wing does, because the right wing doesn't do it. Since the conservative revolution of Thatcher and Reagan began, the right wing has used politics to consolidate the power it already holds over society. It doesn't need to transform society because, in its fundamental structures, it already belongs to them. Economic power, media power, financial power, large corporations, investment funds that decide what is produced and how, the media that dictates what to think and say—all of that is theirs before any election campaign even begins. For the right wing, politics is not an instrument of change. It is an instrument of conservation and consolidation, the mechanism that legalizes, legitimizes, and protects the power it already wields in society. It is what maintains and cements the type of society and power structures that capital needs to safeguard.

When the right wing comes to power, it doesn't need to transform anything because the world it wants already exists. It only needs to defend it, expand it, and shield it from any threat. And for that, institutional power is sufficient, because the rest of the power—the real power, the power that determines the living conditions of the majority—is already in the hands of those who should hold it. The political right wing only uses it by delegation for what it needs to be used for, and when a right-wing politician deviates from the script, their days are numbered.

Right-wing politics is designed to react to the threat of change and neutralize it. It co-opts leaders so they know how to divide people and divert transformative energy toward conflicts that do not threaten power structures. It manufactures fear that paralyzes and resignation that demobilizes. It is designed to contain society, to tame it, and to prevent the development of the impulses for change that always exist within it, so that the suffering and injustice that inevitably produce them do not find organized expression or a real capacity for transformation.

The left, on the other hand, lacks that pre-existing power. It doesn't control the financial markets, the mainstream media, transnational corporations, or the international organizations that set the rules of the global economic game. The world it wants to build doesn't yet exist, or exists only in embryo, on the margins, in the cracks of the system. That's why the left falters and fails when it insists on trying to transform society by doing politics the way the right does, simply by operating from within the government and institutions.

The left has tried to use politics to transform society when its real task is exactly the opposite: to transform society in order to change politics. It has confused the order of things, and this error in order brings with it all the others.

When a left-wing party comes to power without having previously transformed power relations in society, it finds itself in a radically different position than the right wing. The right wing can govern with the wind at its back: the markets, the media, international financial institutions, and major economic powers all work in the same direction as its policies because they share the same interests. The left wing, on the other hand, always governs against the wind, as these same powers actively work to limit, reverse, or neutralize any policy that threatens their interests.

Under these conditions, governing without having previously built sufficient social counterweight allows, at best, for more or less effective management, but not for any profound transformation. The existing system can be administered with the best of intentions and, in the best-case scenario, with greater attention to the most vulnerable, and often even with greater efficiency and success than the right wing, even for the benefit of capital. But in this way, the structures remain intact and the essentials do not change. And as long as this continues, any change that is not in one's best interest can be easily reversed by another government.

We must be fair and acknowledge that left-wing movements that set out to implement transformative, even moderate, changes have encountered a power that plays dirty, that is violent when necessary, that manipulates the justice system, that uses the media as a weapon, and that manipulates markets to discipline recalcitrant governments. This cannot be forgotten when discussing the failures of the left. But neither can it be an excuse to avoid an honest analysis of its mistakes. Because these mistakes exist and are as important as external repression in explaining the pattern of failures.

It must be said clearly, however painful it may be. By acting in the way I've described, the left not only failed to resist neoliberalism. When the left abandons its commitment to proposing a different world and merely proposes better management of the existing one, it not only betrays its very reason for being, but it has also been incapable of mobilizing the transformative social energy that is its only source of real power.

Outdated thinking prevents leftists from understanding how the world they want to change actually works

For decades, the major currents of the left have shared a linear and mechanistic conception of history. They have believed that change is inevitable as a result of the contradictions of capitalism, and that the forces of progress advance without fail. It would be enough, they argued, to simply reinforce these forces from within the system or to provoke a revolution for a new world to emerge as if by spontaneous generation.

This is a misconception, as has been demonstrated so many times, because it ignores something fundamental. The capitalist system is a complex system that evolves in a contradictory and chaotic way, constantly shifting and mixing logics of very diverse natures. Furthermore, the social changes that take place within it are not driven by abstract and impersonal forces, but by concrete human beings—imperfect, contradictory, and vulnerable—who possess freedom, feelings, and emotions, and who interact with one another, though not always coherently.

What the science of complex systems teaches us, and what the left has failed to incorporate into its political thinking, is that change in these systems cannot be decreed or passively awaited. It is inevitable, but not automatic; and, above all, it has no predetermined direction. Complex systems evolve through the constant regeneration of their elements, subject to a dynamic of permanent and gradual change that makes it impossible for them to remain identical over time. Capitalism has already surpassed itself many times throughout history, and the new system that will overcome it is already being born within the old, in an embryonic state, here and now. But that does not mean that change will necessarily move in the desired direction. In every social system, forces of transformation and forces of resistance coexist and clash, and the outcome depends on which one manages to prevail. The system has defense mechanisms capable of absorbing, neutralizing, or reversing the changes that begin. That is why transformation processes are not linear, they do not occur in leaps, nor do they have guaranteed success when they begin: they come and go, they advance or are aborted, they are frustrated or consolidated according to the relative strength of those who drive them and those who resist them.

This has a direct political consequence that the left has systematically ignored. Change must be actively built, with a thorough understanding of how the system works, knowing where and how to act to strengthen the forces of transformation and weaken those of resistance. It is not enough to be right or have the best platform; nor even to win elections. One must know where in the system one can have the most effective impact, what kind of action produces multiplying effects and which disperses them, and how to sustain momentum when the system activates its defense mechanisms. This requires a conception of political time that goes far beyond electoral cycles, and an understanding of social reality that the left, trapped by its mechanistic thinking and its electoral urgency, has failed to develop.

The renunciation of the narrative and the acceptance of the framework imposed by the right.

The left maintains its proverbial intellectual capacity for endless debate and questioning everything. But this energy has not been directed toward constructing a new, far-reaching civilizational narrative, but rather toward recycling itself hundreds of times, endlessly debating and relentlessly refining each other's positions.

The left has relinquished its role as bearer and spokesperson for an Enlightenment that illuminates society as a whole. It lacks a shared narrative and has ceased to lead the major causes that can attract all kinds of people and generate the social majorities essential for transforming reality.

And what is worse, more serious and paradoxical, they have allowed the right to appropriate values that were born as universal, in most cases thanks to the original impetus of the left and progressive movements of various kinds. Surprisingly, much of the left has long considered values such as freedom, democracy, human rights, sovereignty, and security to be "bourgeois" and mere instruments of the system. They scorned them, failing to realize that these are precisely the main weapons of defense for the most disadvantaged, and failing to understand that whoever embraces them controls common sense—the terrain where the real political battle is won or lost and where the effective possibility of changing the world is truly realized.

The result is devastating. While the right, and especially the far right, appropriates the language of sovereignty, security, and identity to offer simplistic and false answers to the fear generated by their own policies, the left becomes entangled in identity and cultural debates that only resonate in the peripheries and are incomprehensible, if not outright hostile, to the truly dispossessed.

The left has not only ceased to be the bearer of common-sense proposals, but has also relinquished common sense to the right and settled into managing particular identities. They have stopped dreaming big and thus lost the capacity to mobilize the majority.

Tribalization that dilutes the left

Neoliberalism constructed a global world by making the values of the market, competition, the sovereign individual, and the logic of profit universal. Meanwhile, the left has fragmented its discourse and the demands it defends. It has become a kind of Persian bazaar where each faction tries to sell its identity to the rest, as long as it identifies with some interest group, however socially insignificant that group may be.

The fragmentation has occurred in the worst possible way: generating micro-identities that respond to legitimate demands in themselves but that form neither a lingua franca nor a collective and synergistic presence. Tribes that speak different dialects, that don't sympathize with each other, that clash with almost always insurmountable antagonisms. In my book, So That There May Be a Future, I counted, at the very least, 16 ways of being left-wing, 24 types of feminism, and 27 environmentalisms. Since all progressive parties, practically without exception, define themselves as left-wing, feminist, and environmentalist, it follows that there are more than 10.000 different possible identities or ways of being one.

This taxonomy projected almost ad infinitum by the left causes each demand to be subdivided, nuanced, and subjected to each of the variants until it generates an unintelligible mosaic of parts that do not recognize each other and from which it is impossible for a common soul, a civilizational model, a different humanity to emerge.

This is how the left has sunk into another era (which they themselves have helped to create) like the one described by Alejo Carpentier in The Century of Lights: "made to decimate the flocks, confuse the languages and scatter the tribes."

What remains once all this settles is the replacement of the logic of transformation with the logic of representation. The question of how to change the world is abandoned in favor of whom each person represents. And since the answer to that question divides rather than unites, left-wing politics becomes a competition between identities that don't communicate with each other, generating a noise incomprehensible to most of the population, and leaving the field open to anyone offering a simplistic narrative, even if it's completely false.

The left has become tribal and materially unrecognizable as the bearer of a joint project of liberation and transformation of common sense that can be embraced by the broadest social majorities.

There are voters, but no community, and away from the people, social change moves further away.

Today's left-wing parties have voters, and often enough to govern. But they lack a society that identifies with them, actively supports them, and becomes consciously complicit in their actions. They don't implement initiatives that can be perceived as the harbinger of a new world, a different system. At best, they try to win people over through the leap of faith that comes with telling them that if they ever had more power, everything would be different. But in the present reality, they are unable to show what this alternative world entails, except in matters of short-term change that are easily reversed when the right wing is in power. They can barely offer a single tangible example of what they propose to build. Moreover, the very things they once built through their direct involvement or thanks to their enormous influence—such as public services and companies—are deteriorating and even disappearing.

And the most paradoxical thing is that the alternative world exists. Not as a future promise, but as a present practice. A legion of associations, cooperatives, collectives, foundations, anonymous groups, and individuals of all kinds and backgrounds think, design, build, organize, create businesses, and launch thousands of initiatives to produce and consume differently, to heal and save lives, to live, study, care, feed themselves, obtain energy, represent themselves, and make decisions as if they were already on a different planet, anticipating the future. But they are, generally speaking, quite far removed from left-wing parties, which, meanwhile, remain organized and active in the old world, constantly inoculating themselves with the poison they supposedly wish to escape.

But the problem isn't just that the left is far removed from this alternative social fabric. It's that they've lost something even deeper and harder to recover: daily contact with the concrete lives of ordinary people. It's not simply a matter of losing electoral support or organizational capacity. I mean that they've ceased to live emotionally and materially alongside broad sectors of the population. And when a political force stops sharing the everyday experience of those it claims to represent, it ends up losing the ability to understand, interpret, and mobilize them, and ultimately, their complicity and support.

For a long time, the left was not merely a political organization. It was a shared way of life. It was present in neighborhoods, workplaces, community associations, public schools, cooperatives, unions, local festivals, homes, and even religious spaces connected to the working class. It was part of the everyday fabric of society and didn't just talk about people, but alongside and within them. It shared their living conditions, their cultural codes, their fears, their aspirations, and their suffering.

That closeness was neither secondary nor sentimental. It is the source of political and moral strength. By being with the people, one can understand how they truly live, what worries them, what language they use to interpret the world, and what kinds of responses they perceive as their own and credible. When the left was with the people, it was strong not only because it had ideas or programs, but because it was embedded in the lived experience of the majority of society.

Neoliberalism was clever and devised strategies to profoundly alter the terrain where the left had historically been strong. It destroyed many of the community and collective spaces where shared life was built. It made work precarious, individualized problems, weakened social organizations, and increasingly turned individuals into isolated competitors. That was its task. The regrettable thing was that the left didn't realize this, went along with it without resistance, and failed to establish a strong presence precisely where this destruction was physically taking place.

Gradually, a significant portion of the left became institutionalized, its leaders professionalized, and its political activity became dependent on media messaging. Its activity shifted from social life to offices, parliaments, television studios, digital networks, and university or party circuits. It became the left whose primary aspiration is to be seen or go viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. It began to speak an increasingly abstract, technical, or self-referential language, often incomprehensible to those who live under the daily pressure of precariousness, insufficient wages, fear of the future, or existential insecurity.

The consequences were tremendous. The left stopped listening attentively to the everyday fear, the silent humiliation, the accumulated weariness, the loneliness, the constant uncertainty, or the feeling of abandonment that permeates the lives of millions of people today. It stopped feeling the very fabric of society as its own.

That's why large segments of the population have stopped feeling a connection to the left, even though they continue to share many of its material positions regarding employment, public services, housing, and inequality. The left of our time hasn't realized that defending objective interests isn't enough without mutual recognition, cultural affinity, and emotional connection. People need to feel heard, understood, and supported, not just managed or represented from above.

The far right has understood this void better than anyone. Although its economic proposals often harm its supporters, it offers something that is crucial today: identity, recognition, belonging, emotional appeal, and a sense of connection. It speaks to real fears, even if it later manipulates and redirects them toward false enemies.

The left will find it difficult to drive profound processes of social transformation again if it doesn't first rebuild that everyday connection with the real lives of the majority of society, and I have a great deal to say that this will be possible while they remain trapped within the apparatuses their political parties have become. It's not enough to politically represent the people. We must live alongside them. We must listen to them, share spaces, rebuild community, and be present again where suffering, insecurity, and also collective hopes are experienced daily. Because social change doesn't arise solely from correct ideas or well-designed programs. It arises from real people, from the living bonds between them, from mutual trust, and from shared experiences capable of transforming dispersed discontent into collective consciousness and an organized will for change.

Without a counterweight of a different nature, the power of capital is invincible.

One of the most serious errors of contemporary left-wing movements has been believing that society can be transformed solely by using the institutions and levers of power of a society already organized by capital. They have thought that simply winning governments was enough to change the world, when in reality, power does not reside primarily in parliaments, but rather in the social, cultural, economic, and communicative relationships that shape daily life and define what a society considers possible or impossible.

History clearly demonstrates this. Leftist movements were effective when, before attaining institutional power, they had already built another form of power within society itself: unions, cooperatives, cultural centers, neighborhood networks, independent press, cultural spaces, forms of mutual support, and experiences of collective living capable of creating awareness, solidarity, and autonomy in the face of the market and the state dominated by economic elites. They didn't just transform laws; they transformed society (even without being in government) by first changing the way large segments of society lived, related to one another, and imagined the future.

Neoliberalism also fully understood this reality, and that is why it directed its offensive not only against redistributive policies or the welfare state, but against the very material and cultural foundations of democratic counterpower. It individualized labor, made life precarious, destroyed community spaces, commodified human relationships, and turned citizens into isolated competitors. The great neoliberal victory was not economic, but anthropological, in creating individuals incapable of recognizing themselves as part of a collective subject wielding power.

Unfortunately, most of the left responded by retreating almost exclusively into institutional politics, accepting the cultural, communicative, and economic rules imposed by neoliberalism itself. It gradually abandoned the task of building society and ended up depending on the very same means, languages, dynamics, and power structures it claimed to be fighting against. It sought to contest power without first altering the balance of power in civil society. And so it became trapped in an insoluble contradiction: trying to change a system using tools designed precisely to prevent it from changing.

Therefore, even when in power, the left can barely manage to temporarily address some of the system's effects without altering its deep-seated structures. Lacking an autonomous social fabric, cultural strength, and the organized capacity necessary to sustain lasting transformations in the face of economic, financial, and media powers that operate in a coordinated manner and with a long-term strategic vision, it lacks power and can hardly bring about any transformation.

No historical power has ever been defeated solely from above, or, to put it more graphically, by challenging the existing power. All profound changes have required first building another lever of power, a counter-power different from the one they seek to combat.

And a counterpower of a different nature than that of capital cannot be built with the same tools or the same values as the power it confronts. It cannot be hierarchical when the power it combats is based precisely on hierarchy. It cannot be individualistic when individualism is the system's main instrument of domination. It cannot be based on accumulation when it is accumulation that must be combated.

Its nature must be radically different. It is cooperative where capital is competitive. It is communal where capital is individualistic. It is based on caring for people and life where capital is based on profit. It is democratic, in the deepest and most everyday sense of the term, where capital is oligarchic. It does not seek the subjugation of the adversary but the construction of a majority that makes the dominant model unsustainable simply because something better exists.

This is the kind of power that history shows can prevail in the long run, because it doesn't depend on the resources that capital controls, but on something that capital cannot buy or completely destroy: the conviction that another way of living is possible and the will to build it. It is the power born from the common sense of a species that knows, when it can think freely, what it needs to live well. And it is, not by chance, precisely the kind of power that neoliberalism has strived for decades to make invisible and unthinkable.

The investment that changes everything: first society, then politics

From all of the above, a conclusion emerges that has the appearance of a paradox but is, in reality, the most important lesson offered by the history of the failure of the left in our time.

The task of anyone who wants to transform the world with the horizons and values traditionally defended by the various left-wing movements cannot be to use politics to transform society. As I said, it's the other way around: society must be transformed in order to change politics.

This principle cannot be understood as a renunciation of institutional politics. It has to do with a different and deeper understanding of how real change works. It means understanding that the conditions for transformative and sustainable politics are built before coming to power, not after. That is to say, these conditions are social, cultural, economic, and organizational before they are political in the institutional sense of the term.

When the left comes to power without having first built the alternative society it needs, it is working against the tide. Every reform that threatens the interests of those in power encounters organized and sustained resistance that neutralizes it, reverses it, or renders it meaningless. And thus, it cannot transform the world.

Transforming it means, or rather requires, going further and building community where neoliberalism has fostered individualism, weaving networks of solidarity and cooperation where the market has imposed competition, creating concrete experiences of alternative ways of organizing production, care, energy, information… that demonstrate in practice that the alternative world is not a utopia but a real practice and possibility. It means constructing a narrative that connects people's everyday experiences with the structural causes of their problems, that gives a name to what is felt but not yet articulated, that points to the horizon without promising paradise. It means developing a collective subject, not just voters and activists, but an organized and conscious community with its own institutions, its own resources, its own role models, and its own capacity to act independently of electoral cycles.

When that groundwork has been done, or when it has been done sufficiently or at least in its embryonic stage, coming to power has a completely different nature and effects. To begin with, the leaders who are there are backed by an organized society and do not arrive alone, but with something behind them. Something that radically changes the balance of power in relation to real power. It does not eliminate it, because the power of capital will remain immense, but it limits it and makes resisting it less costly and yielding to it more costly.

One difference that sums it all up

There is one final difference between the right and the left that is worth pointing out because it is revealing of everything we have analyzed.

The right wing, which uses politics to preserve its power, can afford to have bad leaders because the system works for it regardless of who is in charge. The financial system, the mainstream media, corporations, and international institutions operate according to the right wing's dictates, even if its leaders are mediocre, corrupt, or simply inept. The left wing, on the other hand, cannot afford this luxury precisely because the system does not work for it. It always needs capable, honest, and committed leaders.

Faced with this demand, the left cannot respond in the way it may have tried to respond most of the time, or at best. That is, by seeking out the best possible people, but placing them in a void. Because the problem can only be solved, as I have said, by building the society and the social fabric that fills the void.

Neoliberalism understood this perfectly and has dedicated decades and countless resources to destroying it. To be the vanguard of progress, it will be necessary to understand it very well and dedicate the time and energy needed to rebuild it.

The void that haunts the leaders

All of the above leads to the most uncomfortable question, the one with names and surnames: why do specific leaders end up disappointing so systematically?

Why did Alexis Tsipras sign an agreement in July 2015, exactly one week after the referendum in which 61 percent of Greeks rejected the Troika's terms, with even harsher conditions than those rejected? Why did Tony Blair, who came to power in 1997 with the largest Labour majority in history, end up leading the UK into the Iraq War alongside George W. Bush and building New Labour as a project for the efficient management of financial capitalism, only to later amass a considerable fortune advising governments and corporations of dubious democratic reputation? Why did Gerhard Schröder make the German labor market more precarious with his Hartz reforms and end his career as an advisor to Gazprom and a public defender of Vladimir Putin even after the invasion of Ukraine? Why did François Hollande, who promised that his adversary was the world of finance, end his presidency with a 4 percent approval rating, the lowest of any president of the Fifth Republic? Why did Zapatero, who achieved real progress in civil rights during his first term, implement the very cuts he had criticized when the crisis hit, and why does he now find himself embroiled in legal investigations that have generated profound disappointment among those who considered him a moral compass for the Spanish left? Why did Lula, a symbol of hope for an entire Latin American generation, lead a party that ended up mired in systemic corruption? Why did Rafael Correa, who came to power with a discourse of citizen revolution and powerful anti-capitalist rhetoric, end up at odds with indigenous leaders and groups who had been his closest allies? Why did Obama, who mobilized the transformative hopes of the American left like no other in 2008, bail out the banks without prosecuting those responsible, deport more immigrants than any previous president, fail to close Guantanamo, and allow his military to execute hundreds of civilians?

The usual response is often personal betrayal, weak character, corrupting ambition, power that changes people… All of these may be real and understandable, but in any case insufficient, since they do not explain the pattern or the structural failure that must inevitably exist when this type of case occurs so regularly.

In my view, all these cases can occur because, in the vast majority of instances, left-wing leaders have been operating in a vacuum for decades. This vacuum is one that the left itself has created by failing to build community, to forge networks, to establish counterweights, to implement alternative initiatives that offer a glimpse into the future, and to construct the society that should precede the conquest of institutional power. And, above all, it is because they have caused or allowed their organizations and parties to cease being an integral part of the community they are supposed to serve, transforming them into structures that reproduce the Caesarism of conservatives, stripping them of genuine internal democracy, and where, if not outright disregarded, the rank and file are ignored, let alone the citizens they claim to represent.

When the left hasn't built that foundation, when it lacks the ground beneath its feet of organized society, its leaders are left literally adrift and alone against real power. They don't have an organized community behind them to support them when they do the right thing and to rein them in when they do the wrong. They don't have a network of institutions, organizations, social groups, activists, and citizens to remind them daily why they are there and in whose name and on whose behalf they act. They don't have a mirror in front of them to show them what they are failing to do and what they are becoming, nor do they have the other, alternative world in embryo, growing behind them, in which they could detect the contradictions between what they preach and what they do.

In this vacuum, real power operates with an effectiveness that doesn't need to be conspiratorial to be devastating. Financial markets, mainstream media, corporations, international organizations… all have direct and constant access to leaders. They speak to them every day, flatter them, patiently and firmly explain the limits of what is possible, redraw those limits, and clearly show them the consequences of crossing the lines they must not cross. And since there is no one on the other side with the same consistency, the same constant presence, and the same capacity for organized pressure, the outcome is almost mathematically predictable.

The left-wing leaders who disappoint us haven't suddenly become corrupt or lost their way, neither as a result of their own personality nor possibly as the effect of a conscious and deliberate decision to betray their principles. They have been subtly yielding, millimeter by millimeter, decision by decision, each time the immediate cost of resisting seems greater than the deferred cost of giving in. They yield because the pressure of real power in the present is more potent than the pressure of the community that entrusted them with transforming that power, either because that community doesn't exist, or because it has no voice when its cry is needed. Without an organized community that denounces and combats what is happening in real time, that puts a price on each concession, that demands accountability before the damage becomes irreversible, the concessions accumulate silently until one day the leader who promised to transform the world is defending positions that ten years ago would have seemed indefensible.

When an organized community exists with shared values and concrete experiences of doing things differently, that community functions as an immune system against the viruses that can be spread by corrupt leaders or the mistakes of honest ones. It recognizes deviations because it has a clear reference point for what is not a deviation. It can name what is wrong because it has the words to name what should be right. It can exert pressure because it has an autonomous base from which to do so, one that does not depend on access to institutions or the benevolence of leaders. But when that community does not exist, control disappears. Leadership becomes personalized because there is nothing to limit it, and inappropriate behaviors encounter no resistance because there is no shared culture vibrant enough to recognize them as wrong.

This is the profound reason why Caesarism, the concentration of power in the leader, the lack of real internal democracy, the contempt for the militancy that characterize so many left-wing parties, are not individual moral vices but structural consequences of having built organizations without society.

One engine that no longer works and others that exist and work better.

The conclusion I have drawn from everything I have analyzed in recent years in my articles and books is harsh and difficult to say, but I believe we have an obligation to state it clearly.

The left-wing movements we know today—those operating in governments, parliaments, and even most political parties that claim to be progressive, from the newest to some with nearly 150 years of history—have already fulfilled their historical role. They are political operators who, in their current form, cannot be the driving force behind the transformation of the world. This is not due to their members or what they include in their platforms, election after election. They are ineffective because they are built on the wrong foundations, assuming the same ground as their adversary and the framework within which they impose their narrative. Because they have abandoned the construction of community and a sense of shared identity. Because they have accepted the rules of a game designed to prevent them from winning. And because, consequently, they are incapable of generating the kind of new society that would make real change possible.

This doesn't mean they can't continue to play an important role. They do, and surely they will continue to play, in curbing the worst excesses, defending what has been achieved, and buying time. But I fear it's no longer possible for them to remain the driving force behind medium- and long-term social change. And mistaking them for that driving force, continuing to treat them as if they were, and continuing to place our transformative hopes in them comes at a cost we can no longer afford. The cost of fueling, with each new disappointment, the cynicism that demobilizes, the aimless rage that the far right exploits, and the reactionary populism that is spreading across the world.

It must be said with all the bluntness the moment demands: the systematic failure of the left is one of the main sources from which neo-fascism springs. When people who suffer inequality, precariousness, and neglect see time and again that those who promised to change things don't, that their leaders end up being part of the system they claimed to fight, that the parties that claim to represent them speak a language they don't understand about problems they don't recognize as their own, it doesn't disappear. People's indignation doesn't evaporate; it finds another outlet. And that's where the demagogues appear, offering a simplistic narrative, an accessible scapegoat, and the promise of breaking with everything in order to harness that energy and turn it into their own fuel.

The far right would not have been able to grow as it has worldwide if the left had done its job. This needs to be said without euphemisms.

But the conclusion is not despair. We now come to the most important point I want to make in these pages, which summarize my reflections from almost a lifetime.

Faced with the degeneration and impotence of the left, we are not starting from scratch. The driving force needed to transform the world today doesn't need to be invented: it already exists, it works, and it has demonstrated in practice that the existence of another world based on ways of acting, values, and ways of organizing economic and social life is not a promise or a pipe dream. It is already a present reality all around us, although we must learn to recognize it, connect with it, strengthen it, and give it the political expression it still lacks.

That engine is made up of hundreds, thousands of concrete experiences of organizing economic and social life on principles radically different from the greed and maximum profit that drive the financial capitalism dominating the world. These are experiences that develop without waiting for those who drive them to control institutions or for the right government to come to power to begin building the future, because they are built differently, from the ground up, in the everyday lives of real communities.

In my book How to survive Trumpism and the chainsaw economy (Deusto, 2025), I outlined the principles upon which they are all based, their very different forms, and their vast reach across the globe, both in terms of their scope and their relevance to meeting human needs and safeguarding the environment. It suffices to point out that all these experiences share something in common that makes them the embryo of a different kind of economy, not merely marginal experiments: they operate with a logic radically different from that of capitalism. They do not seek maximum profit for shareholders, but rather the well-being of the people who comprise them and the communities in which they operate; they do not externalize their costs onto society and nature, nor do they concentrate power in a few hands, but rather distribute and exercise it democratically; they are not slaves to short-termism, mortgaging the long term, but rather they build the future and guarantee sustainability.

And they have something more, perhaps the most important thing of all. They demonstrate in practice, with measurable data and results, that capitalism's most powerful claim—that there is no alternative—is false. They demonstrate that alternatives exist and that, in the vast majority of cases, they work better.

What's missing

The problem, therefore, is not that we lack alternatives, that we are living through the end of history. There are many, although it is true that they still exist in a scattered, fragmented, decentralized way, often unknown to each other, lacking political expression and without generating an effective counter-power that would make them a force capable of changing the rules of the game on the scale that the world's major problems require.

They are engines that may be running, but they are disconnected. They function and each one moves in the right direction, but they are dissipating their energy because they are not yet articulating networks that multiply and reinforce each other, and because they have not yet generated a transformative policy that represents them and projects them to the whole of society.

That is the task. And it is a task of a different nature than what the left has attempted until now. It is not about building a new party that promises what previous parties promised and failed to deliver. It is about doing exactly what I have argued throughout these pages: building society first, and letting transformative politics emerge from that society.

Specifically, it involves three things that must happen simultaneously and that reinforce each other.

The first step is connecting experiences. Cooperatives, energy communities, ethical banks, care networks, municipalities experimenting with welfare budgets, climate and labor justice movements… they are all building parts of the same structure, but almost always without recognizing themselves as part of the same project and therefore unable to act as such. When they recognize each other, when they connect, when they learn from one another and act with the awareness that they form a common fabric, their strength multiplies exponentially. For now, they are like an archipelago of highly vulnerable islands. Their interconnection will make them invulnerable.

The second step is to construct a narrative that makes these alternative experiences visible and understandable to most people as part of a broader vision, a future where the daily lives of ordinary people are projected. The alternative experiences we've described are real and valuable, but most people are unaware of them, don't know they exist, or don't recognize them as part of a shared tomorrow. They need a narrative that connects them to each other and to the everyday experiences of people suffering under the current system. A narrative that says: what you see there, functioning, producing well-being, nurturing life, is the world we can build. Not in some distant future, but in a present that is already here.

The third step is to generate the political expression that channels this accumulated social energy to transform institutions and the rules of the game. Not a party to replace existing ones, but a new politics that emerges from below, genuinely represents the society already under construction, draws its legitimacy and program from alternative experiences, and possesses sufficient social counterpower to resist the pressures of real power when it reaches the institutions.

This counterpower, as I've said, cannot be built on the same principles as the power it opposes. It cannot be vertical, concentrated, and dependent on a single leader. It must be what neoliberalism couldn't completely destroy because it resides in the very core of human nature. It must be based on generosity, cooperation, mutual care, empathy, love… on common sense, which knows perfectly well what is truly needed and what is not for a good life. It must be built from multiplicity, from horizontal networks, from the trust generated by shared action, from the coherence between means and ends that the left has so often betrayed.

To change the world, winning elections isn't enough. We must build society, reconnect with the surface of everyday life, rebuild relationships, foster community, cultivate an emancipatory culture, and create spaces of material and symbolic autonomy where a different way of living and understanding the world can emerge. Because only when a different kind of social power exists can truly transformative politics take hold.

The left will find it difficult to drive profound processes of social transformation again if it doesn't first rebuild that everyday connection with the real lives of the majority of society. It's not enough to politically represent people. It's necessary to live alongside them, to listen to them, share spaces, rebuild community, and be present again where suffering, insecurity, and collective hopes are experienced daily. Social change isn't produced by brilliant ideas, well-crafted programs from behind closed doors, or great leaders. It's generated by real people who trust one another, who share real experiences, and who, in that sharing, discover that their discontent isn't individual but collective, that it has common causes, and that it can have common solutions. Without that, there is no left worth having. And I'm not at all sure they'll be able to reinvent themselves to achieve it. Among other reasons, because it will also require new kinds of organizations, leadership, and people.

The final paradox, one more reason for hope

There is something profoundly ironic about all this. Neoliberalism believed that by destroying the social fabric, atomizing individuals, and creating homo neoliberalis, it had won the final battle. And to some extent, it succeeded: it destroyed the foundations upon which the left of the 20th century had built its power.

But in doing so, it produced something unexpected: suffering, loneliness, precariousness, and injustice on a scale that inevitably generates its own response. It produced evidence, visible to anyone willing to see it, that a system governed by a single law—that of maximizing profit for a few—is a system that destroys itself. It created the conditions in which thousands of communities around the world began to seek other ways of organizing their lives in order to survive. In searching, they found them, and in finding them, they demonstrated that they were possible and that they worked better.

The world we need doesn't need to be invented. It needs to be recognized where it already exists, connected where it's scattered, expanded where it's small, and defended where it's threatened. It needs to be given the narrative that makes it visible and the organization that makes it powerful.

That is the task. It is difficult, it is slow, but it is the only one that can work. And unlike all the times the left has promised change from within institutions without having built it from within society, this time there is something that didn't exist before: empirical evidence, in hundreds of places around the world, that it is already happening.