1. The question of unity

Fausto argues for the need for left-wing unity on the basis of an internal debate within the progressive camp about three of its pathologies: “neototalitarianism,” “accommodating reformism,” and “populism.” Yet this raises a fundamental question: is such unity either possible or desirable, given its risks and recurring failures? Drawing on the historical experience of the Latin American left in recent decades, advocating for the unity of the left seems unlikely as it often proves unfeasible. Where unity has been pursued, it has often taken shape around neo-developmentalist or neo-extractivist strategies that marginalize ecological critique, suppress community-based demands, and silence deeper critique on the mode of production itself. Paradoxically, these strategies have also embraced pro-market policies in the name of political pragmatism. This pattern is visible, for instance, in Brazil’s social-developmentalist agenda of workers party (PT) government (e.g., expansion of agribusiness), in Bolivia’s gas- and mining-centered model under Evo Morales, in Rafael Correa’s extractivist developmentalism in Ecuador (including the oil extraction project in the Indigenous Yasuní National Park), or in Argentina’s dependence on soy during the Kirchner administrations. Across these cases, ecological critiques and indigenous claims were often sidelined in the name of political pragmatism and macroeconomic stability.

These dynamics suggest that appeals to unity tend not to resolve the underlying contradictions of leftist politics but to reproduce them in new forms. The more relevant task lies in constructing political crossroads of encounter that allow for listening, mutual recognition, convergence, and the recovery of the normative core of what it means to belong to the left. Only under such conditions can a coherent orientation be given to the project of social transformation that underpins and sustains leftist political practice. Convergence, when it occurs, tends to emerge not from abstract appeals to unity, but from contingent alliances shaped by concrete class conflicts within society.

This brings into question whether the very concept of leftist identity does not already require expansion or, at the very least, critical reexamination in light of the profound structural shifts currently underway. Any collective political horizon must be grounded in a renewed theoretical grasp of contemporary capitalism: its reconfiguration of class composition, particularly among popular and middle classes; its erosion of traditional solidaristic bonds; its reshaping of subjectivities; and the intensification of forms of expropriation and dispossession that progressively undermine the mean of collective agency and movements.

Unity served as a fundamental strategic orientation throughout the twentieth century. Fordist capitalism operated on the basis of a social pact between capital and labor, in which each side agreed to partially accommodate the interests of the other.Footnote ⁵ This arrangement required a unified political strategy on the part of the subordinate classes – both to contain the tendency toward the unilateral maximization of competing claims, and to make possible the pursuit of achievable gains within the existing balance of forces. Crucially, the success of this pact was underwritten by the colonial super-exploitation of Africa, Asia, and the broader periphery of global capitalism.Footnote ⁶

Its effectiveness depended on the state, which assumed a redistributive role in the allocation of wealth, mediating a fragile balance between the expansion of profitability and protection against the risks inherent to its production. Public interventions, regulations, and institutions thereby assigned rights and obligations to each of the pact’s parties, further reinforcing its internal cohesion within the left—unions, parties, and associations. Even in peripheral capitalist contexts, where this model was never fully implemented, it nonetheless remained a normative promise.Footnote ⁷

Under the political hegemony of reformism, the various factions and political positions within the working class expressed a degree of conflict and internal complexity that proved incompatible with the limited distributive capacity of the system. Fordist accumulation linked profits to increases in real wages, generating a virtuous cycle of growth. Within this positive-sum dynamic, the unity of the left enjoyed broad social legitimacy, as it was associated with tangible material gains. It was also an objective requirement of the developmental conditions of the class struggle underway, insofar as the heterogeneity of positions hindered the coordination of shared interests required by the social pact. Notably, under Fordist capitalism, the central axis of dispute was exploitation, that is, the appropriation of others’ labor time. This process simultaneously differentiated and homogenized social actors, grouping them around the cleavage between wage laborers and owners of the means of production, thereby demanding organizational cohesion to establish a mutually acceptable wage level.

The unity of the left, however, was fractured with the advent of a new accumulation regime, characterized by the dominance of finance. This regime operates according to the logic of capitalization, that is, the expectation that money will continuously appreciate through the payment of interest, dividends, and capital gains. Unlike the Fordist capitalist pact, this new form of accumulation dispenses with social consensus and coordination between capital and labor. On the contrary, it transfers the capacity to allocate resources from the state to financial markets and subjects social reproduction to the imperatives of capital profitability. Its main effect is the fragmentation of social subjects, who reconstitute themselves as new political categories. The erosion of the mass working class destabilizes labor relations and reshapes both the condition and the identity of the working classes.Footnote ⁸ Living permanently in debt is part of this broader process of social disintegration.

The dismantling and redirection of public funds toward private creditors, the gradual transformation of labor conditions, the flexibilization of employment, and the profound changes in the forms of social reproduction gave rise to dissatisfaction and frustration that went largely unacknowledged by the left. The left continued to view the working classes through the lenses of the 19th and 20th centuries—often relying on concepts, dogmas, and discourses no longer capable of revealing the new forms of accumulation and domination. The inevitable consequence was that the left progressively lost its ability to respond to the new patterns of social uncertainty. The reformist path itself made a radical transition virtually impossible. This scenario has given rise to new political categories—with their own subjectivities and platforms for action—that no longer fit within a unitary structure claiming homogeneity. Learning to navigate the absence of unity is a fundamental challenge for the left in the twenty-first century.

2. The disoriented resistance

Fausto has offered an extensive discussion of possible paths for resisting the far right’s offensive in Brazil. For us, however, a second and equally decisive dimension concerns how, after the collapse of Stalinist terror and the final downfall of state-bureaucratic socialism, the left succumbed without significant resistance to neoliberalism, actively participating in processes of expropriation and legitimizing austerity. In power, the left often became a defender of the status quo and the party of order. What emerged—and continues to be seen—are sectors of the left that came to hegemonize the field of institutional politics. Their growing estrangement from the everyday lives of the popular classes has severed their ties with collective action. These sectors continue to speak in the name of the left, yet without interrogating their own practice or its meaning, while systematically rejecting criticism.

Consequently, the left abandoned the radical task of contesting the transition to postcapitalism, finding itself instead compelled to manage the capitalist state. It thus focused on institutional permanence and reproduction, rather than on how to weaken or undermine the foundations of a regime that, beyond exploitation, now fuels multiple circuits and practices of expropriation and organizes the functioning of society as a whole. In power, the left came to embody a project centered on securing cash transfers across all social classes and promoting financial inclusion, that is, advancing the generalized socialization of interest-bearing and fictitious capital. Class politics has, with the active participation of the left, increasingly become a political logic in which everyone aspires to be a rentier, even as they are impoverished by interest. This reflects a broader transformation in which social and economic demands are no longer articulated in terms of redistribution, but rather through access to credit, asset ownership, and participation in speculative circuits—precisely the mechanisms that deepen inequality and dependence on financial markets.

The PT administrations’ social policies illustrate this dynamic. Rather than strengthening egalitarian public provision, they prioritized the expansion of loans, thereby exposing popular sectors to financial expropriation. Lacking collective identities, these groups increasingly turned to market-based projects promising exclusivity and individualized advantages—whether through depreciated exchange-rate policies (which lower the cost of imported goods), the liberalization of financial flows (which eases access to consumer credit), or the attraction of foreign direct investment (linked to greater availability of luxury items). Despite mounting unease with expropriation and indebtedness, working and lower-middle classes—without any egalitarian alternatives policies offered by the PT—paradoxically came to see market mechanisms as the only viable response to frustrations generated by the very dynamics that marketization had intensified.

As a result, the state-oriented left, having become institutionalized within the management of financialized capitalism, ends up sterilizing the potential for the new. This potential draws its vitality from dissent and confrontation, from social conflicts over the distribution and redistribution of the commons, which have shifted in both scale and dynamics. Frequently, such leftist formations resort to repression and the criminalization of resistance, with the immediate effect of inhibiting collective action. One need only recall the Latin American Pink Tide and its recurring pattern of responding to social protest not with dialog or structural change, but with coercion and the policing of dissent.Footnote ⁹ This repressive posture is directly rooted in the very pro-market policies these governments adopted. Such policies became engines of disillusionment, whose very effectiveness depends on a level of social tolerance that can no longer be sustained.

In Brazil, the outbreak of the June 2013 uprisings offers a particularly illuminating example. These protests can be understood as a profound malaise triggered by measures taken by the PT administration that made middle- and working-class sectors increasingly dependent on private services to meet their basic needs—and on the financial system (especially loans and household indebtedness) to pay for them. These demonstrations were met with heavy repression by the Rousseff administration, including the use of anti-organized-crime legislation against protesters. At the same time, since then, the PT has tended to interpret June 2013 and the dissident voices that emerged merely as part of the dynamics that paved the way for the far right’s resurgence. Paradoxically, in the name of combating the extreme right, it ended up obstructing democratic channels of participation and contestation.Footnote ¹⁰ In this regard, the Bolivian case is even more illustrative, as the 2019 attempt to force an unconstitutional reelection of Evo Morales produced disastrous consequences for the population and paved the way for the strengthening of the right.

What do left formations lose, then, by stifling or displaying indifference toward collective action? They lose the possibility of revitalization, for they sever their organic ties. Likewise, they fail to grasp the unfolding historical dynamics that are giving rise to new subjectivities and profoundly transforming the material conditions of life’s reproduction. This myopia displaces the left’s capacity for reflection and action in the face of the continuous advance of commodification in its various forms. To truly resist and confront, the left must oppose all that runs counter to its core principles. This rupture—a break with the Blanquist model of the left—has not yet been assimilated, nor does it appear to be on the horizon.Footnote ¹¹ The task is not to rebuild the left, but to forge new lefts for the twenty-first century, conceived from outside the boundaries of their inherited frameworks. For now, it is the far right that has seized the mantle of novelty—hijacking rebellion, radicalism, and the language of disillusionment amid increasingly precarious everyday life. Yet, the future it offers is nothing short of dystopian.

Models of (neo-social)development today are already captured by the logic of financial accumulation. To envision them as viable alternatives is to follow a closed route. Whereas in the past the state promoted industrialization and, through public investment, created favorable conditions for social and economic development, under the current regime of financial dominance, new productive arrangements, patterns of integration across functional sectors, technologies, and labor relations are coordinated by interest-bearing and fictitious capital. In this transition, the reformist path becomes sterile and illusory, as it is subordinated to the primacy of the right of property over financial assets.

So long as this right continues to structure the mediation of political and economic relations, the possibility of reconstructing the social will remain obstructed. It functions through highly expropriatory conditions designed to guarantee the flow of future income. In other words, collectively forged emancipatory perspectives can only move forward through a radical critique of the form of property that grants money its command over life. Such perspectives cannot be reformist; they must be anticapitalist.

3. The task of reconstructing theory and practice

The third dimension proposed by Fausto for rethinking the path of the left is the construction of a program that is anti-authoritarian (committed to democracy and freedom), anti-capitalist (rejecting marginal reforms), and anti-populist (avoiding charismatic devotion to leaders). We, however, see the need to reopen the question of socialism and to acknowledge that, just as unity is not an end in itself for political action, renewing theory and practice requires letting go of the centralized model inherited from past traditions—a difficult task for a generation of intellectuals and activists shaped by concepts and horizons that now appear anachronistic. We are not open to conceiving decentralized paradigms, whose projection remains difficult precisely because they run counter to the way the left has historically operated. Which leads us to ask: how might a decentralized socialism take shape?

We do not yet feel ready to develop this reflection in a more systematic way, but some initial insights can be outlined.

A political program that breaks with capitalist property relations would entail the collapse of the power center of the global economy, represented by the transnational corporations that control highly complex corporate networks. Just consider the degree of concentration driven by the Big Five. Profit expectations based on the logic of shareholder value are structurally incompatible with environmental preservation and with the dignity of human conditions. For this very reason, it becomes necessary: first, to discuss collective forms of property reappropriation and socialization, including the possibility of maintaining private ownership in the small and medium business sector; second, to encourage the multiplication of the commons; and third, to embrace all other alternatives that may emerge as utopian horizons. But how can we begin to imagine such a process?

Recalling a libertarian warning by Engels in Anti-Dühring, the principle stating that state ownership does not in itself signify the overcoming of capitalism took on new meaning after the 2008 crisis: the state became a property holder in order to bail out leading investment banks.Footnote ¹² Socialist societies, regardless of the configurations they may eventually assume, require decentralized property relations—different modalities of social and collective ownership that are reproduced according to the concrete needs and lived experiences of groups, associations, or communities. According to Dörre, this involves “collective self-ownership that, while collectively owned, does not stifle personal responsibility but instead promotes self-initiative and self-organization.”Footnote ¹³ We would add one further element: autonomy. From solidarity economies to workers’ associations and cooperatives, as well as broader societal projects that give rise to new forms of sociability, these experiences are marked by diversity—not by the unity, identity, or concentration that characterize capitalist property.

This, however, does not exempt them from engaging in decisions about production. On the contrary, they are continuously challenged to reconcile the protection and preservation of the common good—including nature, human dignity, equality, autonomy, freedoms, and democracy – with the need to ensure their own forms of social reproduction. Achieving this balance requires a redistribution of decision-making power, whereby collectives actively participate in deliberations on vital matters and councils of direct producers formulate plans and budgets according to their preferences, while also taking into account the choices of individuals and their communities. Rather than centralized planning, what is proposed here is a horizontal and participatory form of socialism, grounded in cooperation and in shared, decentralized coordination.

For this to be possible, the left must develop a new political culture—a condition we have yet to fulfill. Our tradition has been organized around a project of negative conciliation, which, at this moment, translates into subordination to the terms of financialization, thereby abandoning a trajectory oriented toward emancipation. This new political culture must be guided by a radical way of thinking and acting that opens up new horizons of freedom and fulfillment, as opposed to the concentration and centralization that characterize the social forms of capital This new political culture must be grounded in a thought and praxis of rupture that opens new horizons of freedom and realization, in direct contrast to the concentration and centralization that define the forms of domination exercised by our adversaries.

4. Future directions

In conclusion, what remains is the task of continuing to pose meaningful questions—in the best tradition of the socialist lefts. For now, this may be the most immediate horizon capable of bringing us together: producing crossroads from which we can deepen critical theorization on how to intervene in the present and expand our collective capacity to forge new directions and make our action effective.

Such a crossroads, however, depends on a diagnosis of what Ruy Fausto termed the “pathologies of the left”: the practical and theoretical deformities that have eroded the left’s ability to sustain itself as a genuine alternative to the status quo. As discussed above, these pathologies are “neo-totalitarianism,” “accommodating reformism,” and “populism.” The first embraces emancipation at the level of discourse while practicing authoritarianism. The second accepts economic liberalism as the end of history. The third mobilizes charismatic leadership and redistributive policies aimed at the poorest as sources of political legitimacy that ultimately sustain corrupt oligarchic power structures. Against this backdrop, the problem is not, as Fausto suggests, the fragmentation of left-wing forces, but rather their unity. The Latin American case makes clear that this unity has been constructed in negative terms. The bureaucratic–repressive inclination of governments such as Maduro’s, as well as the oligarchic liberalism of the PT in Brazil, represent models that converge toward extractivist economies highly vulnerable to global financial markets–not only to fluctuations in international commodity prices, but also to speculative dynamics surrounding those prices.

In the twentieth century, Stalinism and Castroism demonstrated that it was possible to combine strong market regulation with authoritarian political practices. In the contemporary context, however, as shown above, left-wing governments—even populist ones—have made the state available for market deregulation or have transformed it into a holder of financial assets, thereby shielding large investors from financial risk. This apparent contradiction suggests that any legitimate left project must be grounded in a critique of the state and of property. If state ownership tends to generate an antidemocratic technobureaucracy functional to managerial and financial power, the centralization and concentration of capital, in turn, suppress collective policies toward the self-organization of small-scale autonomous properties. In these terms, the critique is directed neither against the state as such nor against private property per se, but is fundamentally anticapitalist in orientation. The principal challenge that demands political courage from the lefts is to fully embrace both the critique of and the imperative to rupture with the capitalist accumulation regime. The fourth dimension outlined above by Fausto runs through all the preceding reflections.

In the current conjuncture, this entails rejecting financialized capitalism while simultaneously confronting the implications of a postgrowth society—another challenge that exposes one of the most significant fractures within the lefts. Meeting this challenge requires a far-reaching renewal of socialist conceptual frameworks and practices of collective action. The conservative left cannot continue to impede this process without, ultimately, relinquishing the terrain of collective politics to the very autocratic forces it claims to oppose.