Natimorto

  • Nihilism, Stoicism and Capitalist Control

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    To say that nihilism can become a form of capitalist control is not to claim that capitalism invents meaninglessness in a simple or conspiratorial sense. Nihilism, as Nietzsche understood it, is a deep historical and metaphysical event: the collapse of inherited values, the erosion of transcendent foundations, the death of God not merely as a religious statement, but as the disappearance of any unquestioned moral centre capable of organising existence. Yet under capitalism, this collapse does not remain a purely philosophical condition. It is absorbed, administered, commercialised and made useful.

    Capitalism does not need people to believe in nothing absolutely. It needs them to believe that nothing exists outside the market. It does not require the destruction of all values; it requires the conversion of all values into exchangeable forms. Love becomes lifestyle. Rebellion becomes branding. Identity becomes consumption. Freedom becomes choice between products. Even despair becomes an aesthetic, a mood, a genre, a market segment.

    In this sense, nihilism is not simply the absence of meaning. It becomes the management of meaninglessness.

    Nietzsche diagnosed nihilism as the moment in which the highest values devalue themselves. The old moral systems lose their authority, but no stronger values have yet replaced them. The danger, for Nietzsche, was not only despair, but passivity: the emergence of the “last man”, a figure who seeks comfort, safety, distraction and minor pleasures rather than greatness, risk or creation. The last man does not suffer tragically; he avoids suffering. He does not believe in anything intensely enough to be transformed by it. He blinks, consumes, adapts, survives.

    This figure is disturbingly compatible with capitalist modernity.

    The capitalist subject is encouraged to experience freedom not as self-overcoming, ethical responsibility or collective transformation, but as personal preference. One chooses clothes, platforms, diets, entertainment, partners, careers, spiritual practices, political identities. Everything appears available, yet this abundance often conceals a profound narrowing of the imaginable. The individual is told: you may choose anything, provided that your choice remains within the grammar of consumption.

    Here nihilism functions as control because it prevents revolt from becoming metaphysical or political. If nothing truly matters, then exploitation is merely unfortunate. If all ideals are naive, then cynicism becomes maturity. If every collective project is doomed, then private survival appears as wisdom. If every truth is only a perspective, then power can present itself as realism. Capitalism thrives not when people are passionately committed to its values, but when they cannot imagine any alternative.

    This is close to what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the sense that capitalism is not necessarily good, just inevitable. It is easier to imagine ecological catastrophe, social collapse or personal burnout than a different organisation of life. This is nihilism in its most politically effective form: not the dramatic declaration that life has no meaning, but the quiet conviction that the future has already been cancelled.

    Marx gives us the economic anatomy of this condition. In capitalist society, human relations are mediated by commodities. Labour, time, attention, desire and even personality become objects of exchange. The worker becomes alienated from the product of labour, from the process of labour, from other people and finally from themselves. Alienation is not merely sadness; it is the structural separation of human beings from their own powers.

    Under alienation, nihilism becomes almost inevitable. If one’s labour appears meaningless, if one’s time is sold, if one’s body is disciplined for productivity, if one’s desires are shaped by advertising and competition, then the self begins to experience life as something externally administered. The person does not live; they function. They do not create a world; they adapt to one. They do not ask what is worthy of devotion; they ask how to remain employable, visible, desirable, efficient.

    The tragedy is that capitalism then sells compensation for the emptiness it produces. It exhausts the subject, then sells wellness. It isolates the subject, then sells connectivity. It destroys attention, then sells mindfulness. It generates insecurity, then sells self-optimisation. It empties life of shared meaning, then sells identity as an individual project.

    It is here that a contemporary version of Stoicism becomes especially useful to capitalism.

    This requires care. Ancient Stoicism, in Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, was not a doctrine of corporate resignation. It was a demanding ethical discipline concerned with virtue, reason, self-mastery, mortality, justice and the distinction between what depends on us and what does not. At its most serious, Stoicism teaches that human dignity cannot be reduced to external fortune. It reminds us that wealth, reputation, social approval and bodily comfort are unstable. It asks the subject to cultivate inner freedom against the chaos of circumstance.

    There is something genuinely noble in this. A slave such as Epictetus could formulate a philosophy of interior sovereignty precisely because the external world was structured by domination. Stoicism, in its original context, could become a weapon against humiliation: if power owns my body, it still need not own my judgement. If fortune takes from me what I possess, it need not take from me what I am.

    But capitalism does not usually receive Stoicism in its tragic, ethical and political complexity. It extracts from it a narrower command: endure. Control your reaction. Do not complain. Adapt to what you cannot change. Transform suffering into discipline. Convert injury into self-improvement. Accept the world as it is and become stronger within it.

    This is where Stoicism can become a technology of capitalist control.

    The neoliberal subject is not only asked to work. They are asked to internalise the conditions that wound them and treat their wounds as personal training. Burnout becomes a failure of boundaries. Exploitation becomes a lesson in resilience. Poverty becomes lack of discipline. Precarity becomes an opportunity for reinvention. Loneliness becomes a self-care problem. Anxiety becomes poor emotional regulation. The social is privatised into the psychological.

    A simplified Stoicism fits perfectly into this machinery. It tells the exhausted worker not to ask why life has become unliveable, but to master their response to unliveability. It tells the precarious subject not to question the economy that makes them disposable, but to cultivate detachment from outcomes. It tells the humiliated employee not to confront domination, but to preserve inner calm. It turns political pain into individual exercise.

    In this form, Stoicism becomes the moral vocabulary of adaptation.

    One can see why capitalism prefers this language. Anger is dangerous because it may seek causes. Grief is dangerous because it may reveal what has been taken. Despair is dangerous because, if politicised, it may become refusal. But “resilience” is safe. “Mindset” is safe. “Discipline” is safe. “Emotional control” is safe. They return the individual to productivity without requiring the world to change.

    The capitalist appropriation of Stoicism therefore resembles the capitalist appropriation of nihilism. Nihilism says: nothing can truly change. Popular Stoicism says: your suffering is not the problem; your response to suffering is the problem. Together, they form a closed circle. The first cancels the future; the second disciplines the subject inside the cancelled future.

    This does not mean that Stoicism and nihilism are philosophically identical. In fact, ancient Stoicism is not nihilistic at all. It believes in reason, nature, virtue and moral order. But when detached from its ethical horizon and absorbed into capitalist culture, Stoicism can become nihilism’s administrative partner. It gives form, posture and emotional technique to a life emptied of collective meaning. It does not say life has no value. It says: value yourself by becoming more efficient at surviving what devalues you.

    This is why the contemporary cult of Stoicism often appears beside entrepreneurship, productivity culture, financial self-help and masculine fantasies of invulnerability. The Stoic sage is replaced by the optimiser. The discipline of the soul becomes the discipline of performance. The question “how should one live virtuously?” becomes “how can I remain calm, competitive and productive under pressure?”. The ancient practice of examining one’s judgements is reduced to a managerial tool for tolerating intolerable structures.

    Seneca’s reflections on the shortness of life, for instance, are not merely an invitation to maximise output. They are a critique of wasted existence, of a life dissipated in ambition, servility and public vanity. Marcus Aurelius’ meditations on mortality are not motivational slogans for corporate endurance; they are reminders of finitude, humility and duty. Epictetus’ distinction between what is and is not in our control was never meant to excuse injustice. Yet in its neoliberal translation, this distinction is often mutilated: everything structural is placed outside our control, while the burden of adjustment is placed entirely on the self.

    The question becomes: if wages stagnate, control your expectations. If work consumes your life, control your time. If housing becomes impossible, control your desires. If politics collapses into spectacle, control your attention. If the future disappears, control your breathing.

    Control, control, control.

    The irony is brutal: a philosophy of inner freedom becomes a discipline of social obedience.

    Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality helps clarify this process. Modern power does not operate only by coercion; it also shapes the ways people govern themselves. The ideal subject no longer needs constant external discipline because they have internalised the norms of productivity, responsibility and self-surveillance. They monitor their moods, correct their thoughts, optimise their habits, regulate their body, brand their personality, and interpret failure as insufficient self-management.

    A capitalist Stoicism becomes part of this governmentality. It teaches the subject to become the guard of their own emotional prison. Do not rage. Do not break. Do not ask too much. Do not expect justice. Do not depend on others. Do not be weak. Do not be affected. The result is not wisdom, but numbness with a moral vocabulary.

    This is not accidental. Capitalism needs emotional subjects, but only in profitable forms. Desire is useful when it becomes consumption. Anxiety is useful when it becomes productivity. Loneliness is useful when it becomes engagement. Insecurity is useful when it becomes self-improvement. But collective anger is dangerous. Shared mourning is dangerous. Solidarity born from pain is dangerous. Therefore suffering must be individualised before it becomes political.

    The Stoic command to govern oneself can thus become a way of preventing people from governing the world.

    Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle is also essential here. In the society of the spectacle, social life is mediated by images. What was once directly lived becomes representation. The spectacle does not simply entertain; it organises perception. It teaches people to relate to the world as spectators rather than agents. One watches politics, watches catastrophe, watches intimacy, watches other people live. Even one’s own life becomes something to be displayed, edited, circulated and evaluated.

    In this context, nihilism appears as overstimulation without transformation. People are exposed to war, poverty, ecological breakdown, political violence and personal confession through the same visual machinery. Everything is visible; little is actionable. Everything is urgent; little changes. The moral faculty becomes overstimulated and underpowered.

    A vulgar Stoicism then arrives as a remedy: detach. Protect your peace. Do not let external events disturb you. Focus on what you can control. On one level, this advice may preserve psychic survival. No one can absorb the whole suffering of the world without collapsing. But politically, when this becomes a general ethic, it trains the subject to withdraw from the common world. Catastrophe becomes background noise. Injustice becomes emotional disturbance. The disciplined self learns to remain calm in the presence of the unacceptable.

    Here nihilism becomes a political achievement. Not because people are persuaded that injustice is good, but because they are trained to feel that response is futile, excessive or personally unhealthy.

    Max Weber’s analysis of modern rationalisation also helps clarify this condition. For Weber, modernity is marked by disenchantment: the world is increasingly organised by calculation, bureaucracy, efficiency and instrumental reason. The sacred retreats. Mystery is replaced by administration. The question is no longer “what is the good life?”, but “what works?”. This does not abolish meaning violently; it proceduralises it. Life becomes a set of systems to navigate.

    Capitalism intensifies this disenchantment by treating value as measurable output. Time must be productive. Education must be employable. Relationships must be healthy, optimised, mutually beneficial. The body must perform. Even rest must justify itself as recovery for future performance. The person becomes a project under permanent management.

    A domesticated Stoicism fits this disenchanted order because it moralises efficiency. It teaches composure, focus, endurance, routine, discipline. These can be admirable virtues when directed towards a life freely chosen. But under capitalism they are often redirected towards the preservation of a life externally imposed. The worker learns to endure the cage elegantly. The subject polishes the bars from within.

    The Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Horkheimer, understood how mass culture could become a mechanism of domination. The culture industry does not merely reflect popular taste; it standardises desire. It offers pseudo-individuality: the feeling of choice within a system of repetition. One may choose between genres, brands, moods and styles, but the underlying structure remains unchanged. Difference itself becomes a commodity.

    The same happens with philosophical traditions. Capitalism can sell Buddhism without liberation, feminism without structural critique, rebellion without risk, and Stoicism without virtue. It sells fragments of wisdom as lifestyle accessories. The difficult discipline of ancient thought becomes a portable aesthetic: quotations, morning routines, cold showers, productivity journals, controlled affect, muscular detachment.

    This is not philosophy. It is branding with classical references.

    And yet its appeal is understandable. In a world of instability, people want something solid. When institutions fail, when work becomes precarious, when relationships are fragile, when the future seems foreclosed, the promise of inner sovereignty becomes seductive. If the world cannot be trusted, perhaps the self can be fortified. If politics seems impossible, perhaps discipline remains. If meaning collapses, perhaps control can substitute for meaning.

    This is precisely the danger.

    Control can imitate meaning for a long time. A disciplined life may look purposeful even when it is spiritually empty. One may wake early, exercise, work, regulate emotions, avoid dependence, cultivate indifference, and still never ask whether the life being disciplined is worth living. This is capitalist nihilism in Stoic clothing: not chaos, but order without transcendence; not despair, but endurance without horizon.

    Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour, work and action is useful here. For Arendt, action is the realm of political freedom, where human beings appear before one another and begin something new. Capitalist society tends to reduce life to labour: repetitive cycles of necessity, consumption and survival. When action disappears, freedom is reduced to private behaviour. Public life decays. The individual becomes less a citizen than a consumer, less a participant than a user.

    A depoliticised Stoicism reinforces this reduction. It tells the subject to retreat from action into self-command. It privileges composure over appearance in the public realm, endurance over speech, adjustment over beginning. The individual becomes morally impressive but politically absent. They may master themselves while the world is abandoned to those who master institutions.

    This is a terrible bargain.

    The ancient Stoics were not necessarily apolitical. Marcus Aurelius was an emperor; Seneca was entangled in imperial power; Epictetus taught moral freedom under conditions of hierarchy. Their texts contain tensions, compromises and historical limitations. But they did not reduce the human being to a productivity machine. They did not imagine virtue as market competitiveness. They did not teach that injustice should be accepted because emotional disturbance is inconvenient.

    The capitalist version does.

    It tells us that the highest achievement is not to be affected. But to be affected is part of being human. Grief, anger, longing, shame, tenderness, outrage and fear are not merely errors of judgement. They are forms through which the world reaches us. A society that teaches people to neutralise every disturbance may produce efficient subjects, but not necessarily free ones. Freedom does not consist in becoming untouchable. Sometimes freedom begins when we allow ourselves to be touched enough to refuse.

    This is where Marx must be returned to the centre. Alienation cannot be solved only by inner attitude because alienation is not only an inner condition. It is produced by material arrangements: ownership, labour relations, class power, time discipline, commodification, dispossession. To respond to alienation with personal resilience alone is to mistake a social wound for a private weakness. It is to ask the individual to adapt morally to a structure that should be transformed politically.

    Of course, one must survive. There is dignity in psychic discipline. There is dignity in not allowing every external force to destroy the inner life. The problem is not self-mastery itself. The problem is self-mastery when it is severed from solidarity, critique and action. The problem is calmness when calmness becomes collaboration with the intolerable. The problem is acceptance when acceptance becomes obedience.

    A radical recovery of Stoicism would have to insist on virtue rather than productivity, justice rather than adjustment, courage rather than numbness, temperance rather than consumer minimalism, wisdom rather than optimisation. It would have to remember that the distinction between what depends on us and what does not is not fixed by capitalism. Collective action changes what appears controllable. A single worker may not control wages; organised workers may. A single tenant may not control rent; tenants acting together may. A single citizen may not control political life; movements can alter history.

    Capitalism wants us to interpret “what I can control” as narrowly as possible: my habits, my reactions, my schedule, my body, my purchasing decisions. Radical politics expands the field of agency: what we can control together is much larger than what I can control alone.

    This is the point at which Stoicism can either serve capitalism or resist it. If it teaches isolation, it serves. If it teaches courage, clarity and contempt for false goods, it may resist. If it teaches that wealth and status are indifferent, it can undermine capitalist values. If it teaches that virtue matters more than success, it can expose the vulgarity of market morality. If it teaches fearlessness before loss, it can free people from blackmail. But if it teaches only endurance, it becomes an elegant language for submission.

    Therefore the question is not simply whether Stoicism is good or bad. The question is: who is using it, for what purpose, and against whom?

    Capitalism is extraordinarily capable of absorbing its own critique. Anti-capitalist imagery can be sold. Punk can be sold. Feminism can be sold. Spirituality can be sold. Minimalism can be sold. Even the refusal of consumption can become a luxury aesthetic. What once appeared as resistance is reintroduced into the market as style. Stoicism is absorbed in the same way: the philosopher becomes a productivity coach; meditation on death becomes motivational content; ethical discipline becomes personal branding.

    This is one of capitalism’s most subtle nihilistic operations: it detaches signs from commitments. A symbol of revolt no longer has to revolt. A concept of freedom no longer has to free. A philosophy of virtue no longer has to ask what the good is. It only has to help the subject function.

    Walter Benjamin saw, in another historical context, the danger of aestheticising politics. When political energies are converted into images, moods and spectacles, they may lose their capacity to reorganise material life. Under contemporary capitalism, this aestheticisation is everywhere. One may feel politically intense while remaining practically immobilised. One may possess the correct vocabulary, the correct objects, the correct cultural affiliations, and still remain integrated into the machinery one claims to oppose.

    Nihilism here is not ignorance. It is knowing too much and doing too little. It is the fatigue of consciousness without praxis.

    Stoic capitalism intensifies this fatigue by giving passivity the appearance of wisdom. One does not fail to act; one “accepts”. One does not fear conflict; one “protects one’s peace”. One does not surrender politically; one “focuses on what can be controlled”. One does not become numb; one “masters emotion”. Thus withdrawal is moralised, and adaptation is spiritualised.

    This is not entirely false, which is why it is powerful. There are moments when acceptance is necessary. There are forms of rage that destroy the person who carries them. There are circumstances in which the only available freedom is internal. The problem begins when exceptional survival techniques are universalised into a social ethic. What helps a person endure oppression today may become, tomorrow, the ideology that keeps oppression intact.

    A mature critique of capitalist nihilism must avoid romanticising the past. Pre-capitalist societies were not pure worlds of meaning. They were often violent, hierarchical, patriarchal and theologically coercive. The collapse of inherited certainties also opened real possibilities for emancipation. Nietzsche was right to see in nihilism not only danger, but opportunity. When old values collapse, new values may be created. The problem is that capitalism colonises this open space before genuine creation can occur.

    It offers ready-made meanings in the form of commodities. It offers identity without transformation, community without obligation, pleasure without depth, freedom without risk, rebellion without consequence, and Stoicism without virtue. It does not abolish the human hunger for meaning. It redirects that hunger into circuits of purchase, performance and self-discipline.

    Historians of modernity have shown how capitalism developed not merely as an economic system, but as a reorganisation of time, discipline and social imagination. E. P. Thompson, for instance, described the historical transition into industrial time-discipline, in which older rhythms of task, season and communal life were increasingly subordinated to clock-time. This matters philosophically: when time becomes abstract, measurable and saleable, life itself is experienced differently. The question is no longer whether time is meaningful, but whether it has been efficiently used.

    This transformation reaches an extreme in contemporary digital capitalism, where even attention becomes a resource to be captured. The subject is no longer exploited only as a worker, but also as a viewer, user, data source and self-promoter. Leisure is no longer outside production; it is integrated into the economy of attention. Even boredom is monetised. Even loneliness generates engagement. Even outrage keeps the system moving.

    A capitalist Stoicism adapts the subject to this permanent capture. It teaches attention management without asking who profits from attention theft. It teaches emotional regulation without asking who produces the anxiety. It teaches self-discipline without asking why life has become a battlefield of individual optimisation. It teaches serenity without asking whether serenity in an unjust order is always a virtue.

    The result is a civilisation that both produces emptiness and prevents people from fully confronting it. True nihilism would be terrifying because it might lead to revolt, spiritual crisis or philosophical revaluation. Capitalist nihilism is safer: it keeps people busy. It gives them screens, metrics, pleasures, anxieties, deadlines, feeds, aspirations and techniques of self-control. It does not say “life has no meaning”. It says: “meaning is your private responsibility — and here are some practices, products and routines that may help.”

    This privatisation of meaning is central. Collective sources of meaning — religion, class solidarity, neighbourhood, extended family, political movements, shared rituals — may be weakened or fragmented. In their place, the individual is told to construct a meaningful life alone. But this construction often occurs through market forms: lifestyle, career, consumption, therapy-language, aesthetic self-presentation and disciplined self-optimisation. The burden of meaning is individualised, while the causes of meaninglessness remain structural.

    Thus nihilism becomes a form of control because it isolates the subject at the very moment they most need collective interpretation. A person suffering under capitalism may think: I am failing. I am empty. I am unmotivated. I am not resilient enough. I have not found my purpose. I have not mastered my reactions. I have not disciplined my mind. They may not see that their despair is socially produced, historically situated and economically useful.

    Mark Fisher’s great insight was precisely this: many forms of private suffering are not merely private. Anxiety, depression, exhaustion and apathy are not only medical or personal conditions; they may also be symptoms of a social order that has made meaningful life increasingly difficult. To politicise sadness is not to deny individual pain, but to restore its relation to the world.

    This is where the critique of nihilism must become ethical. The answer is not simply to “believe in something”, as if any belief were better than none. Fascism, fanaticism and authoritarianism also feed on the hunger for meaning. In moments of nihilistic exhaustion, people may become vulnerable to violent certainties. When liberal-capitalist society offers only emptiness, competition and private self-management, reactionary movements may offer identity, myth, belonging and enemies. They answer nihilism not with freedom, but with submission.

    Nor is the answer simply to “be Stoic”. That response may offer composure, but not necessarily liberation. The question is not how to become unaffected by the world, but how to become affected in a way that leads neither to collapse nor obedience. The problem is not emotion, but the political abandonment of emotion. The task is not to suppress suffering, but to understand what suffering knows.

    Therefore the task is not to escape nihilism by returning to false absolutes, nor to survive capitalism by perfecting inner detachment. It is to pass through nihilism without allowing capitalism to domesticate it, and to use discipline not as a substitute for transformation, but as preparation for it.

    Nietzsche’s challenge remains: if old values have collapsed, can we create values worthy of life? Marx’s challenge remains: can human beings reclaim their collective powers from alienated social forms? Arendt’s challenge remains: can we recover action, plurality and the courage to begin? Debord’s challenge remains: can we stop watching life and start living it? Fisher’s challenge remains: can we imagine a future beyond the one sold to us as inevitable? And the Stoic challenge, if rescued from capitalist mutilation, remains: can we distinguish false goods from true ones without using that distinction to excuse the world’s brutality?

    A non-capitalist response to nihilism would require more than personal optimism and more than personal resilience. It would require forms of life in which meaning is not constantly subordinated to profit. It would require time not entirely colonised by work. Education not reduced to employability. Art not reduced to content. Politics not reduced to spectacle. Friendship not reduced to networking. The body not reduced to productivity. The self not reduced to a brand. Inner discipline not severed from collective emancipation.

    It would require the recovery of common life.

    The deepest danger of capitalist nihilism is not that people believe in nothing. It is that they continue to live as if nothing could be otherwise. They may feel dissatisfaction, outrage, sadness, even hatred for the system, but this hatred is often absorbed into the system as mood. One can buy the clothes of rebellion, listen to the music of despair, post the language of critique, practise Stoic detachment, laugh at the absurdity of work, and still return on Monday to the same structure. Capitalism does not need to defeat every criticism. It only needs to make criticism compatible with repetition.

    This is why nihilism is useful to capitalism: it weakens the bridge between suffering and transformation. It allows people to know that something is wrong while doubting that anything can be done. It turns intelligence into irony, pain into consumption, rebellion into style, discipline into obedience, and freedom into exhaustion.

    Against this, philosophy must recover its dangerous function. Not consolation, not decoration, not self-help, but interruption. Philosophy asks the question capitalism works tirelessly to suppress: what kind of life is worthy of a human being?

    This question cannot be answered by the market, because the market has already decided that value is exchange value. It cannot be answered by productivity, because productivity does not tell us what deserves to be produced. It cannot be answered by consumption, because consumption transforms lack into an engine. It cannot be answered by cynicism, because cynicism mistakes lucidity for impotence. And it cannot be answered by a mutilated Stoicism, because inner calm alone does not tell us whether the world we calmly inhabit is just.

    To resist capitalist nihilism, then, is not merely to adopt a different opinion. It is to recover the capacity to mean, to act, to bind oneself to others, to imagine, to refuse, to create. It is to insist that life is not exhausted by survival, that desire is not identical with consumption, that freedom is not the same as choice, that discipline is not the same as obedience, and that acceptance is not always wisdom.

    Nihilism begins when inherited meanings collapse. Capitalist control begins when that collapse is made profitable, habitual and politically harmless. A capitalist Stoicism begins when endurance is praised more than justice, when composure is valued more than revolt, when the individual is trained to survive conditions that should not be tolerated.

    The task is not to pretend that the old certainties can simply be restored. They cannot. The task is harder: to create meanings that cannot be bought, to build solidarities that cannot be reduced to networks, to defend forms of attention that cannot be monetised, to practise forms of discipline that serve freedom rather than submission, and to imagine futures that cannot yet be sold.

    Only then does nihilism cease to be a cage and become what Nietzsche, at his most radical, believed it might be: not the end of value, but the terrible opening through which value must be created again. And only then can Stoicism cease to be a language of adaptation and recover its more demanding possibility: not the art of enduring the world as it is, but the courage to refuse false goods, false necessities and false forms of peace.

  • La mancanza come fedeltà all’impossibile

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    La mancanza non è soltanto nostalgia. La nostalgia guarda indietro, verso un tempo perduto, verso un luogo che la memoria tende a rendere più compatto di quanto fosse, verso una stagione dell’esistenza che appare, proprio perché conclusa, dotata di un’unità forse mai realmente posseduta. La mancanza, invece, è più instabile. Non riguarda solo ciò che è stato, ma anche ciò che avrebbe potuto essere. Non è semplice memoria: è memoria attraversata dal desiderio. Non è soltanto dolore per l’assenza: è una forma di presenza dell’assenza, un modo in cui ciò che non c’è continua a vivere nel corpo, nelle abitudini, nella lingua, nella disposizione stessa dello sguardo.

    In questo senso, la mancanza è uno dei sentimenti più filosofici che esistano, perché mette in crisi la linearità del tempo. Chi sente la mancanza di qualcuno non vive semplicemente nel presente ricordando il passato; vive in un tempo obliquo, in cui passato, presente e futuro si sovrappongono. Il passato non passa del tutto. Il presente non basta. Il futuro resta aperto come una ferita che non sa ancora se diventerà cicatrice o porta.

    Sant’Agostino, nelle Confessioni, comprese che il tempo non è soltanto una successione esterna di istanti, ma un’esperienza dell’anima. Il passato vive come memoria, il futuro come attesa, il presente come attenzione. La mancanza nasce precisamente dall’intreccio doloroso di queste tre dimensioni: ricordiamo ciò che è stato, attendiamo ciò che forse non verrà, e nel presente restiamo sospesi tra fedeltà e impotenza. Essa non appartiene a un solo tempo, ma alla coscienza che non riesce a consegnarsi interamente a nessuno di essi.

    Per questo la mancanza non è mai un sentimento semplice. È una forma di conoscenza. Ci rivela che nulla di ciò che amiamo scompare davvero nel momento in cui si allontana. Una persona può uscire dalla nostra vita, ma non necessariamente dalla nostra struttura interiore. Può smettere di scrivere, di chiamare, di attraversare le nostre giornate; e tuttavia continuare a determinare il modo in cui ascoltiamo una canzone, entriamo in una stanza, scegliamo una strada, interpretiamo il silenzio del telefono. L’assenza diventa architettura.

    Roland Barthes, nei Frammenti di un discorso amoroso, mostra che l’amore non termina quando termina il contatto. L’amato assente continua a parlare attraverso segni minimi: un’attesa, un ricordo involontario, una coincidenza, una frase non detta. L’altro non è più davanti a noi, ma continua a occupare il linguaggio. Ed è forse questa la crudeltà più sottile della mancanza: essa non conserva soltanto la persona perduta, ma anche la versione di noi stessi che esisteva accanto a quella persona.

    Quando sentiamo la mancanza di qualcuno, spesso non rimpiangiamo soltanto l’altro. Rimpiangiamo il nostro modo di essere con l’altro. La leggerezza che avevamo. La fiducia che ci autorizzava a parlare senza difesa. Il futuro che sembrava implicito. La parte di noi che non aveva ancora imparato la prudenza. Ogni perdita affettiva porta con sé una perdita identitaria. Non se ne va soltanto una presenza: se ne va anche una forma del mondo.

    È qui che la mancanza sfiora il lutto per qualcuno che è ancora vivo. Esiste un dolore particolare, quasi privo di riconoscimento sociale, che nasce quando una persona non è morta, ma è comunque perduta. La morte ha una brutalità definitiva, ma possiede un rito, un nome, una grammatica. La perdita di chi continua a vivere è più instabile. Non c’è sepoltura, non c’è data conclusiva, non c’è consenso pubblico intorno al dolore. L’altro esiste ancora, e proprio per questo la perdita non si chiude. La possibilità rimane come una piccola luce crudele.

    Questo tipo di lutto è abitato da una contraddizione: bisogna elaborare la perdita di qualcuno che, in teoria, potrebbe tornare. Il corpo sa che quella persona è lontana; l’immaginazione sa che non è impossibile incontrarla di nuovo. Si crea così una forma di sospensione: non si può piangere come si piangono i morti, ma non si può vivere come se nulla fosse accaduto. Il mondo continua, ma con una porta socchiusa dentro la coscienza.

    Freud, in Lutto e melanconia, distingue il lutto come lavoro doloroso di distacco dalla melanconia come incorporazione oscura dell’oggetto perduto. Ma nel caso di qualcuno ancora vivo, questa distinzione si complica. Come distaccarsi da chi non è definitivamente irraggiungibile? Come ritirare l’investimento affettivo da una presenza che continua a esistere nel mondo comune? Come rinunciare senza sentire che si sta tradendo qualcosa che forse avrebbe potuto essere salvato?

    La mancanza, allora, diventa anche il nome di una fedeltà inquieta. Non sempre una fedeltà all’altro; talvolta una fedeltà alla possibilità. Ciò che resta non è soltanto “mi manca”, ma “avremmo potuto”. Questa frase è una delle più pesanti della vita interiore. Essa non indica un fatto, ma una biforcazione. Non parla di ciò che è avvenuto, bensì di ciò che il reale ha lasciato cadere. In essa vive una forma particolare di dolore: il lutto delle vite non vissute.

    Kierkegaard comprese meglio di molti altri la vertigine del possibile. Per lui, l’esistenza non è un concetto astratto, ma una scelta attraversata dall’angoscia. Ogni scelta apre una vita e ne chiude altre. Quando decidiamo di allontanarci da qualcuno — per orgoglio, paura, difesa, stanchezza, dignità o incapacità di restare — spesso non comprendiamo subito l’intero prezzo della decisione. Solo dopo, quando la distanza diventa reale, scopriamo che ogni scelta possiede una coda temporale. Non scegliamo mai una volta sola: continuiamo a vivere dentro le conseguenze della scelta.

    Il rimpianto nasce in questa posteriorità. È una conoscenza tardiva. Non è semplicemente il desiderio di correggere il passato; è la scoperta che, nel momento decisivo, non eravamo pienamente consapevoli di ciò che stavamo perdendo. Scegliere di allontanarsi può sembrare, in un certo istante, un gesto di libertà. Ma più tardi quella libertà può apparire come cecità. Non perché fosse necessariamente sbagliata, ma perché ogni decisione presa nel dolore è sempre parziale: protegge qualcosa e sacrifica qualcos’altro.

    Sartre direbbe che non possiamo sottrarci alla responsabilità della scelta. Anche il silenzio è un atto. Anche non rispondere è un atto. Anche sparire, attendere, rimandare, fingere indifferenza sono modi di scegliere. Ma la filosofia sartriana, se letta con severità e compassione, non deve trasformarsi in una condanna morale. Essere responsabili non significa essere onniscienti. Siamo liberi, ma siamo liberi dentro l’opacità. Scegliamo senza possedere tutte le conseguenze delle nostre scelte. E talvolta comprendiamo il valore di una presenza solo dopo aver costruito la distanza che la rende irraggiungibile.

    È qui che la mancanza diventa matura: quando smette di essere puro sentimentalismo e si trasforma in pensiero sulla nostra complicità con la perdita. Non ogni assenza ci è semplicemente accaduta. Alcune le abbiamo aiutate a nascere. Alcune distanze sono state create dalle nostre mani, anche quando quelle mani tremavano. Ci sono addii pronunciati per paura di essere abbandonati. Ci sono silenzi scelti come forma di difesa. Ci sono allontanamenti che, nel momento in cui accadono, sembrano necessari, e solo dopo rivelano la loro parte di irreparabile.

    Ma il rimpianto, se non diventa autodistruzione, può essere una forma di lucidità. Esso ci costringe a riconoscere che non siamo sempre stati fedeli a ciò che desideravamo davvero. A volte abbiamo scelto contro il nostro desiderio per paura della vulnerabilità. A volte abbiamo preferito la sicurezza sterile della distanza al rischio di essere visti. A volte abbiamo chiamato dignità ciò che era orgoglio, e lucidità ciò che era soltanto terrore.

    Simone de Beauvoir ci aiuta a evitare una lettura astratta di questa esperienza. La libertà non è mai pura. È sempre situata. Le persone non si allontanano soltanto perché “scelgono”; si allontanano perché sono attraversate da storie, ferite, ruoli, dipendenze, aspettative, condizioni materiali, educazioni affettive. Una decisione amorosa raramente appartiene a un soggetto sovrano e trasparente. Più spesso nasce da un campo confuso di desiderio e paura, autonomia e bisogno, orgoglio e vulnerabilità.

    Per questo la nostalgia di una presenza perduta non deve essere trattata come debolezza. Essa può essere la prova che qualcosa è rimasto vivo nella coscienza, qualcosa che il puro funzionamento quotidiano non è riuscito a cancellare. In un mondo che ci spinge a sostituire rapidamente persone, luoghi, esperienze e persino identità, sentire la mancanza può essere un atto di resistenza contro l’oblio imposto. Non tutto deve essere superato con efficienza. Non ogni assenza deve essere convertita in produttività emotiva. Alcune assenze meritano una permanenza meditativa.

    Tuttavia, c’è un pericolo. La mancanza può diventare una casa, ma può diventare anche una prigione. Può custodire il senso di ciò che è stato, ma può anche impedire l’incontro con ciò che è ancora possibile. Vladimir Jankélévitch, riflettendo sull’irreversibile, mostra che il passato possiede una qualità crudele: non può essere rifatto. Possiamo interpretarlo, rimpiangerlo, comprenderlo, narrarlo; ma non possiamo entrarvi di nuovo con la stessa innocenza. La mancanza deve allora imparare una disciplina difficile: amare ciò che è stato senza chiedergli di tornare identico.

    Eppure, nel caso di qualcuno ancora vivo, resta la speranza.

    La speranza è un sentimento filosoficamente sospetto, perché può facilmente diventare autoinganno. Può servire a evitare la realtà, a prolungare una dipendenza, a trasformare il futuro in un teatro di riparazioni immaginarie. Ma non tutta la speranza è fuga. Ernst Bloch, ne Il principio speranza, vede nell’attesa del non-ancora una dimensione fondamentale dell’umano. Sperare non significa necessariamente negare il presente; può significare riconoscere che il reale non è completamente chiuso. L’essere umano vive anche di ciò che non è ancora accaduto.

    La speranza di ristabilire un giorno un contatto con qualcuno perduto appartiene a questa ambiguità. Può essere una trappola, se paralizza la vita. Ma può essere anche una forma sobria di apertura, se non pretende di comandare il futuro. Sperare non deve significare sospendere tutto fino al ritorno dell’altro. Può significare conservare, dentro di sé, la disponibilità a una parola futura, senza trasformare questa parola nel centro assoluto dell’esistenza.

    Forse la forma più matura della speranza è quella che non esige. Una speranza che non invade, non supplica, non costruisce scenari ossessivi, non riduce l’altro a funzione della nostra riparazione. Una speranza che sa dire: se un giorno ci sarà spazio, parleremo; se un giorno la vita lo permetterà, forse ci riconosceremo di nuovo; se un giorno il silenzio si aprirà, vorrei essere capace di parlare senza colpa e ascoltare senza possesso. Questa speranza non è debolezza. È una forma di delicatezza nei confronti del tempo.

    Heidegger ricorderebbe che esistere significa essere gettati nel tempo, e che non possediamo il tempo come un oggetto. Siamo tempo. Viviamo come esseri finiti, sempre in ritardo rispetto a qualcosa, sempre davanti a possibilità che non controlliamo pienamente. La nostalgia nasce anche da questa finitudine: dal sapere che ogni incontro è fragile, che ogni presenza può diventare memoria, che ogni parola non detta può pesare più di ciò che è stato pronunciato.

    Per questo dovremmo forse temere meno la mancanza e ascoltarla di più. Essa domanda: che cosa, in quella persona, in quel tempo, in quella relazione, era così essenziale da continuare a mancare? Non sempre la risposta sarà “l’altro”. Talvolta sarà una forma di noi stessi. Talvolta sarà la possibilità di essere meno difesi. Talvolta sarà il desiderio di una riconciliazione con la propria storia. La mancanza è un sintomo, ma anche una rivelazione: mostra dove la vita continua sensibile.

    Il quotidiano tende a cancellare questa profondità. Le giornate organizzate, le conversazioni pratiche, il lavoro, le notifiche, le piccole urgenze producono una specie di anestesia. Continuiamo a funzionare, e il funzionamento sembra prova di guarigione. Ma spesso non siamo guariti; siamo soltanto occupati. La mancanza ritorna negli intervalli: quando una strada appare all’improvviso con una luce sbagliata, quando una musica riapre una scena, quando una frase qualsiasi attraversa il corpo prima della ragione. Essa ritorna perché il quotidiano non è capace di abolire ciò che è stato vissuto con intensità.

    In questo senso, la mancanza denuncia anche l’alienazione. Mostra che la vita non può essere ridotta a prestazione, consumo e amministrazione. Se sentiamo la mancanza, è perché qualcosa in noi resiste a diventare macchina. Marx parlava dell’alienazione come separazione dell’uomo da se stesso, dagli altri, dal proprio gesto. La mancanza, paradossalmente, può essere un momento di riconnessione: dolorosa, sì, ma reale. Essa interrompe l’automatismo e ci ricorda che siamo stati toccati, modificati, aperti.

    Naturalmente, non basta sentire. C’è un’etica della mancanza. Bisogna distinguere tra ricordare e invadere, tra sperare e pretendere, tra amare e trasformare l’altro in riparazione narcisistica. Il fatto che qualcuno ci manchi non ci dà diritto su quella persona. Il rimpianto non cancella le ragioni della distanza. La speranza non deve diventare pressione. La maturità consiste nel riconoscere simultaneamente due verità: il sentimento è legittimo; l’altro è libero.

    Questa è forse la parte più difficile. Sentire la mancanza senza possedere. Rimpiangere senza idealizzare. Sperare senza manipolare il futuro. Desiderare il contatto senza negare il diritto dell’altro al silenzio. Ammettere il proprio errore senza pretendere che il riconoscimento dell’errore obblighi il mondo a restituirci ciò che abbiamo perduto.

    Derrida scrisse, in diversi modi, che ogni relazione è abitata dall’assenza, dalla traccia, dal rinvio. Ciò che amiamo non è mai presente in modo pieno e definitivo; porta sempre in sé la possibilità della perdita. La mancanza, allora, non è un accidente della vita amorosa, ma una delle sue verità più profonde. Amare significa esporsi alla traccia. Significa accettare che l’altro possa continuare dentro di noi in forme che non controlliamo.

    E tuttavia, questa permanenza non deve essere soltanto dolore. Può diventare cura della memoria. Può diventare responsabilità verso ciò che abbiamo compreso troppo tardi. Può insegnarci, non in modo moralistico, ma attraverso una ferita concreta, a non confondere distanza con salvezza, orgoglio con dignità, silenzio con forza, fuga con libertà. Può renderci più attenti, se non ci lasciamo indurire.

    Forse la mancanza più profonda non dice “torna”, ma “io finalmente comprendo”. Comprendo ciò che non ho visto. Comprendo ciò che la paura ha deformato. Comprendo la delicatezza che non ho saputo proteggere. Comprendo che alcune presenze non chiedevano perfezione, ma presenza. Comprendo che allontanarsi può essere necessario, ma può anche essere una forma di ferire il proprio desiderio. Comprendo che il tempo non restituisce sempre, ma talvolta illumina.

    Questa comprensione non garantisce il ricongiungimento. La filosofia non deve mentire. Non sempre ci sarà una seconda occasione. Non sempre il contatto sarà ristabilito. Non sempre l’altro vorrà ascoltare ciò che finalmente siamo pronti a dire. La speranza matura deve convivere con questa possibilità. Deve sapere che il futuro può restare chiuso. Ma sapere questo non significa consegnarsi al cinismo. Esiste una maniera dignitosa di sperare: vivere in modo tale che, se un giorno la parola diventerà possibile, non saremo più prigionieri della stessa paura che ci fece tacere.

    La mancanza, dunque, non è soltanto assenza. È una scuola severa del tempo. Ci insegna che alcune persone continuano a esistere in noi come domande. Che il passato non è morto solo perché non può essere cambiato. Che il rimpianto può distruggere, ma può anche raffinare la coscienza. Che la speranza può accecare, ma può anche mantenerci aperti. Che il lutto per qualcuno vivo è forse una delle forme più dolorose dell’amore, perché obbliga a piangere senza sepoltura e a vivere senza conclusione.

    Alla fine, forse, sentire la mancanza significa rimanere fedeli non necessariamente a una persona, ma alla verità che quella presenza ha rivelato. Significa riconoscere che siamo stati trasformati. Che qualcosa è passato attraverso di noi e non è più possibile fingere il contrario. Che il tempo, anche quando separa, non cancella interamente. Che ciò che manca può continuare a chiederci non immobilità, ma maggiore verità.

    E se un giorno il contatto dovesse tornare, che non sia per ripetere il passato. Che sia, piuttosto, per incontrarsi dentro una forma meno cieca. Per parlare non a partire dalla fame, ma dalla lucidità. Non dal possesso, ma dal riconoscimento. Non dalla fantasia di cancellare la distanza, ma dalla capacità di dire: so che qualcosa si è perduto; so anche che qualcosa è rimasto. E forse, se c’è ancora tempo, possiamo finalmente conversare non con ciò che siamo stati, ma con ciò che la mancanza ci ha obbligati a comprendere.

  • La libertà come condanna: lutto, assenza e alienazione nel quotidiano

    ,

    It’s been a long time since I’ve written or read in Italian, so here’s an attempt to reflect on philosophy in that language. I apologise in advance for any — and likely — mistakes.

    Dire che l’essere umano è libero non significa necessariamente celebrarlo. Nella filosofia di Jean-Paul Sartre, la libertà non appare come un privilegio luminoso, ma come una struttura inevitabile dell’esistenza. L’uomo non è libero perché può fare tutto ciò che desidera; è libero perché, anche quando non sceglie, sta comunque scegliendo. Anche l’immobilità è una forma di decisione. Anche la fuga è un atto. Anche restare dentro una vita che non ci assomiglia più implica una responsabilità.

    È in questo senso che Sartre formula una delle affermazioni più dure del pensiero moderno: l’uomo è condannato a essere libero.

    La condanna non consiste nella possibilità astratta di decidere, ma nell’impossibilità di sottrarsi al peso della decisione. Non esiste un’essenza già data che ci giustifichi. Non esiste una natura umana definitiva alla quale appellarsi per dire: “non potevo fare altrimenti”. L’esistenza precede l’essenza: prima siamo gettati nel mondo, poi, attraverso gli atti, diventiamo qualcosa. Questa formula, spesso ripetuta come slogan dell’esistenzialismo, contiene in realtà una ferita: nessuno può salvarci dall’obbligo di essere autori della nostra forma.

    La libertà, allora, non è leggerezza. È vertigine. È quella sensazione che Kierkegaard chiamava angoscia: non semplice paura di qualcosa, ma turbamento davanti al possibile. La paura ha un oggetto; l’angoscia ha un orizzonte. Si teme un animale, una malattia, una perdita concreta. Ma si prova angoscia davanti alla molteplicità delle vite che potremmo vivere e che, scegliendone una, siamo costretti a sacrificare. Ogni scelta è anche una rinuncia. Ogni fedeltà è anche un’esclusione. Ogni amore accolto lascia morire altri amori possibili; ogni amore perduto lascia sopravvivere una versione di noi che non trova più luogo nel presente.

    Qui la libertà incontra il lutto.

    Non soltanto il lutto per i morti, ma quello più ambiguo e socialmente più invisibile: il lutto per qualcuno che è ancora vivo. La morte, pur nella sua brutalità, possiede una forma. Introduce un confine. Costringe il mondo a riconoscere la perdita. C’è un rito, una data, un corpo assente in modo definitivo. La morte interrompe la possibilità e, proprio per questo, impone alla memoria una disciplina dolorosa.

    Ma perdere qualcuno che continua a esistere — in un’altra casa, in un’altra città, in un’altra routine, forse nello stesso universo digitale in cui appare ancora raggiungibile — significa abitare una forma di perdita priva di rito. È un dolore filosofico particolarissimo: la presenza si ritira senza scomparire. L’altro non muore, e tuttavia cessa di essere accessibile. Continua a respirare, a lavorare, a rispondere ad altre persone, a comprare caffè, a dimenticare dettagli che per noi restano incandescenti. Il mondo non si ferma, perché nessuno è morto. E proprio questa continuità ordinaria del mondo rende la perdita quasi indecente.

    Come spiegare un lutto quando l’oggetto del lutto è ancora vivo? Come piangere qualcuno che potrebbe, in teoria, telefonare? Come accettare una fine quando la fine non ha il carattere solenne dell’irreversibile, ma la crudeltà intermittente del possibile negato?

    In questa esperienza, Sartre diventa particolarmente necessario. Perché il dolore per una presenza perduta non è soltanto dolore affettivo: è anche crisi ontologica. L’altro non era semplicemente qualcuno che amavamo; era uno dei modi attraverso cui il mondo si organizzava. La sua presenza dava contorno alle ore, direzione ai gesti, densità agli oggetti. Una tazza, una strada, una canzone, una battuta privata: tutto ciò che prima apparteneva alla vita condivisa diventa improvvisamente resto archeologico di una civiltà scomparsa. Ma quella civiltà non è davvero scomparsa: sopravvive in chi ricorda. È questo che lacera.

    Roland Barthes, nelle sue riflessioni sul discorso amoroso e sull’assenza, mostra come la mancanza dell’amato produca una lingua ossessiva. L’assente diventa più presente proprio perché manca. Non occupa più una sedia, ma occupa l’immaginazione. Non risponde, ma costringe a formulare mentalmente risposte. Non appare, ma organizza l’attesa. L’assenza, allora, non è vuoto puro: è una presenza negativa, una forma che insiste.

    Si vive accanto a ciò che non c’è più e che tuttavia continua a comandare la percezione.

    Questa è forse una delle forme più radicali della condanna alla libertà: essere costretti a scegliere che cosa fare della propria fedeltà a chi non ritorna. Nessuno può decidere per noi quando smettere di aspettare. Nessuna legge morale stabilisce il giorno esatto in cui una speranza diventa autoinganno. Nessuna filosofia consola davvero chi deve riconoscere che continuare ad amare può essere, simultaneamente, fedeltà e prigione. Sartre direbbe che, anche in questo, siamo responsabili. Non responsabili per aver sofferto, non colpevoli per essere stati feriti, ma responsabili della forma che daremo alla ferita.

    È qui che compare il concetto sartriano di malafede. La malafede non è semplicemente mentire agli altri; è mentire a se stessi per sfuggire alla libertà. È fingere di essere una cosa, un destino, una vittima assoluta, un ruolo immobile. Nel dolore amoroso, la malafede può assumere forme sottili. Possiamo dire: “non posso vivere senza questa persona”, quando forse il pensiero più preciso sarebbe: “non so ancora come vivere senza la versione di me che esisteva accanto a questa persona”. Possiamo trasformare l’altro in destino per non affrontare il compito di reinventare il mondo. Possiamo chiamare amore ciò che è anche paura del vuoto, paura dell’autonomia, paura di scoprire che la libertà continua perfino dopo la perdita.

    Ma sarebbe ingiusto ridurre il lutto per qualcuno che vive ancora a una semplice illusione. La ferita è reale. La perdita di una presenza senza morte spezza una continuità esistenziale. Heidegger parlava dell’essere-nel-mondo non come di una coscienza isolata che osserva oggetti, ma come di un’esistenza già coinvolta, situata, gettata fra cose, usi, affetti e relazioni. Perdere qualcuno significa perdere un modo di essere-nel-mondo. Non perdiamo solo “una persona”; perdiamo il modo in cui la mattina cominciava, l’attesa di raccontare qualcosa, la fiducia silenziosa che il giorno possedesse un testimone.

    Per questo il dolore non è soltanto psicologico. È metafisico nel senso più concreto: altera la struttura del reale. Il mondo continua uguale, ma senza la chiave che lo rendeva abitabile. La stessa strada cessa di essere la stessa strada. La stessa stanza acquista un’ostilità discreta. La routine, prima sostegno della vita, diventa prova dell’assenza. E tuttavia il quotidiano esige obbedienza. Le bollette arrivano, gli impegni restano, i semafori cambiano colore, il supermercato apre, i messaggi banali entrano nel telefono. È in questo contrasto fra devastazione interiore e continuità esteriore che nasce una delle forme più moderne di alienazione.

    L’alienazione, in Marx, è legata alla separazione del lavoratore dal prodotto del proprio lavoro, dal processo produttivo, dagli altri e da se stesso. Ma il concetto oltrepassa la fabbrica. Nel quotidiano contemporaneo, l’alienazione si manifesta come una vita eseguita senza presenza. Facciamo ciò che deve essere fatto senza abitare davvero ciò che facciamo. Rispondiamo alle e-mail, compriamo cibo, attraversiamo calendari, sorridiamo in modo funzionale. La vita diventa prestazione. Il soggetto non vive: si amministra.

    Quando questo stato coincide con il lutto per qualcuno che è ancora vivo, l’alienazione si approfondisce. La persona in lutto resta socialmente obbligata alla normalità, ma interiormente vive una sospensione. Partecipa al mondo come chi interpreta un ruolo provato male. Lavora, conversa, organizza oggetti, ma sente che il centro dell’esperienza si è spostato verso una scena assente. Il quotidiano diventa teatro. L’individuo si guarda da fuori, come se la propria vita appartenesse a qualcun altro. E, in questo estraniamento, la libertà riappare — non come promessa, ma come peso. Perché anche alienato, anche ferito, anche ridotto ad automatismi, il soggetto continua a dover scegliere.

    Albert Camus comprese profondamente questa tensione tra l’esigenza umana di senso e il silenzio del mondo. L’assurdo nasce quando la coscienza cerca una risposta definitiva e incontra soltanto l’indifferenza del reale. Nel lutto per qualcuno che non è morto, l’assurdo assume una tonalità intima: come può qualcosa finire senza essere biologicamente terminato? Come può una persona continuare a esistere e, nello stesso tempo, non esistere più per noi? Come può il mondo essere tanto indifferente al crollo di una presenza?

    La risposta di Camus non è consolazione, ma rivolta. Non si tratta di trovare un senso segreto che giustifichi il dolore, bensì di continuare senza falsificare l’esperienza. La maturità filosofica forse comincia quando smettiamo di pretendere che la sofferenza ci renda automaticamente migliori. Esistono dolori che non elevano, non purificano, non insegnano in modo nobile. Alcuni dolori si limitano a disorganizzare. La dignità non sta nel trasformare ogni perdita in lezione, ma nel rifiutare la menzogna secondo cui ciò che ci ha distrutti fosse necessario per renderci più profondi.

    Simone de Beauvoir, dialogando con Sartre ma anche correggendolo in molti punti, ricorda che la libertà non esiste mai nel vuoto. Siamo liberi dentro situazioni concrete, segnate dal corpo, dalla classe, dal genere, dalla dipendenza, dalla storia e dal riconoscimento. Questo è essenziale per non trasformare la filosofia della libertà in crudeltà morale. Dire che qualcuno è libero non significa dire che il suo dolore sia una scelta semplice, né che basti decidere per liberarsi. La libertà è sempre situata. Ci sono perdite che restringono il campo del possibile. Ci sono affetti che colonizzano il futuro. Ci sono assenze che rendono opaca la volontà stessa.

    E tuttavia, qualche grado di libertà persiste — ed è proprio questo a far male. Sarebbe più facile poter dire: “non c’è nulla da fare”. Sarebbe più facile trasformare la perdita in destino assoluto. La condanna sartriana consiste nel percepire che perfino la sofferenza esige una postura. Possiamo fare dell’assenza un altare, una prigione, un’opera, una spiegazione, un’identità, un vizio, un attraversamento. Nessuna di queste scelte è pura. Tutte portano con sé ambiguità. Ma non scegliere sarà comunque scegliere una forma di permanenza.

    Il lutto per qualcuno che vive ancora è crudele perché mantiene aperta la possibilità immaginaria. La morte, almeno, chiude l’ipotesi dell’incontro sul piano reale. L’assenza di chi vive conserva invece il fantasma del caso: un messaggio che potrebbe arrivare, una strada in cui i percorsi potrebbero incrociarsi, un ripensamento, una riconciliazione, una frase finalmente pronunciata. Questa possibilità minima impedisce alla ferita di chiudersi. Il futuro non si purifica. Resta contaminato dal forse.

    E il forse è una delle grandi macchine della sofferenza umana.

    La libertà, a questo punto, esige una decisione quasi impossibile: rinunciare non necessariamente all’amore, ma alla tirannia della possibilità. Non si tratta di cancellare la persona, né di fingere indifferenza. Si tratta di togliere all’altro il potere di organizzare interamente il futuro. Si tratta di riconoscere che l’amore può continuare a esistere come memoria, segno, linguaggio interiore, senza continuare a governare la vita come attesa. Questa distinzione è difficile, perché la cultura spesso confonde intensità e permanenza, fedeltà e immobilità. Ma una libertà matura forse consiste precisamente nell’imparare che smettere di aspettare non significa negare l’importanza di ciò che è esistito.

    C’è anche una dimensione etica in questa ricostruzione. Per Sartre, quando scegliamo, scegliamo un’immagine dell’umano. Le nostre decisioni non sono soltanto private; esse affermano valori. Quando qualcuno attraversa un lutto senza morte e decide di non distruggersi in nome dell’assenza, c’è in questo una dichiarazione silenziosa: nessuna presenza, per quanto amata, deve trasformarsi nell’unico fondamento dell’esistenza. L’altro può essere stato mondo, ma non può essere il mondo intero per sempre. Altrimenti, l’amore cessa di essere incontro e diventa idolatria della perdita.

    L’alienazione quotidiana tenta di impedire questa lucidità. Offre distrazioni, produttività, consumo, piccole anestesie. Dice: continua a funzionare. Non pensare troppo. Non sentire troppo. Trasforma il dolore in agenda, in corpo disciplinato, in notifiche risposte. Ma la filosofia, quando è viva, interrompe questa macchina. Domanda: chi sta vivendo questa vita? Chi ha scelto questo ritmo? Quale parte di me lavora, sorride, compra e risponde soltanto per non entrare in contatto con ciò che ha perduto?

    La domanda filosofica matura non è “come smettere di soffrire?”, ma “quale verità la sofferenza ha rivelato sul mio rapporto con la libertà?”. Forse rivela che non vogliamo soltanto essere amati; vogliamo essere dispensati dal compito di fondarci. Vogliamo che la presenza dell’altro ci dia un’essenza, una narrazione, una conferma. Vogliamo poter dire: sono colui che è amato da questa persona; sono colei che torna in questa casa; sono qualcuno la cui vita ha un testimone. Quando quella presenza si ritira, non perdiamo soltanto l’altro: perdiamo la scusa per non affrontare l’indeterminatezza di noi stessi.

    Per questo la libertà è condanna. Perché, dopo la perdita, essa rimane. Dopo l’abbandono, rimane. Dopo il silenzio, rimane. Dopo l’alienazione dei giorni uguali, rimane. Non come eroismo, ma come compito minimo e incessante: rispondere del prossimo gesto.

    E forse è proprio lì che il dolore trova una forma di sobrietà. Non una redenzione. Non una guarigione spettacolare. Soltanto la percezione che continuare non significa superare nel senso volgare della parola. Continuare può voler dire, semplicemente, recuperare poco a poco la paternità dei propri movimenti. Preparare un caffè senza trasformarlo in un memoriale. Camminare lungo una strada senza offrirla al fantasma. Ascoltare una musica nuova senza chiedere il permesso alla vita precedente. Lavorare senza scomparire completamente dentro il lavoro. Amare senza chiedere all’amore di assolverci dalla libertà.

    In fondo, Sartre non ci offre consolazione; ci offre responsabilità. Camus non ci offre senso; ci offre rivolta. Beauvoir non ci offre astrazione; ci offre situazione. Heidegger non ci offre fuga; ci offre la coscienza di essere esseri gettati nel tempo. Freud, pensando il lutto e la melanconia, mostra che perdere qualcuno significa anche negoziare con le parti di noi rimaste legate all’oggetto perduto. Barthes rivela il linguaggio intimo dell’assenza. Marx denuncia la vita svuotata dagli automatismi del mondo sociale.

    Tutti, in modi diversi, circondano la stessa verità: l’essere umano soffre perché desidera senso, legame e permanenza, ma vive in un mondo di contingenza, separazione e scelta.

    La libertà come condanna non è dunque soltanto una tesi esistenzialista. È la condizione di chi deve vivere dopo che una presenza si è ritirata senza morire. È la condizione di chi continua a svegliarsi in un mondo che non conferma più la sua antica identità. È la condizione di chi, alienato dal quotidiano, sente ancora in qualche punto profondo che la vita non può essere soltanto funzionamento.

    Siamo condannati alla libertà perché nulla — né l’amore, né la perdita, né il lavoro, né la routine, né persino il dolore — può scegliere definitivamente al posto nostro. E forse la maturità comincia quando accettiamo questa condanna senza romanticizzarla. Quando comprendiamo che la libertà non ci salva dalla sofferenza, ma ci impedisce di consegnare alla sofferenza la piena autorità sulla nostra esistenza.

  • An Anti-Anti-Communist FAQ: A Literary-Philosophical Rebuttal to the Right’s Most Persistent Arguments

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    Anti-communism rarely begins as an economic theory. More often, it begins as a scene of fear: the home invaded, the church closed, the small shop confiscated, the child indoctrinated, the nation betrayed, the family dissolved. In the classic Cold War manuals of anti-communist propaganda, communism is not merely presented as a political doctrine; it is staged as an existential contamination. The 1949 pamphlet 100 Things You Should Know About Communism, prepared by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, described communism as “a system by which one small group seeks to rule the world” and claimed that its basic methods were conspiracy abroad and “iron force” where it governed. J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit similarly framed communism as a threat to “home”, “children”, “freedom”, religion and Western civilisation itself.

    This FAQ does not deny that historical communist states committed grave crimes, nor does it pretend that every criticism of communism is propaganda. A serious communist argument must face bureaucracy, censorship, famine, police power and the deformation of socialist ideals into state domination. Rosa Luxemburg’s warning remains indispensable: socialism without democracy becomes not liberation, but a new form of rule. Yet the right-wing case against communism usually does something less honest. It takes the worst authoritarian experiences of the twentieth century, treats them as the eternal essence of communism, and then hides the everyday violence of capitalism behind words such as “freedom”, “merit” and “order”.

    Gramsci would have recognised the mechanism immediately. Hegemony works when a ruling class does not merely dominate institutions, but teaches society to experience its domination as common sense. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a process of “intellectual and moral leadership” through which a ruling class embeds itself across society. Anti-communism, in this sense, is not only an argument; it is a cultural grammar.

    What follows is a set of replies to the most common arguments of the right against communism.

    1. “Communism abolishes freedom.”

    The first question is: freedom for whom, and freedom to do what?

    Right-wing propaganda usually defines freedom as private property, market choice and minimal state interference. Hoover’s Masters of Deceit claimed that communism would steal “your rights, liberties, and property”, while HUAC’s pamphlet imagined a life in which one could not choose one’s job, school, church, home or movement.

    The communist reply begins by refusing this narrow definition. Marx and Engels do not deny freedom; they ask why capitalist freedom is so unevenly distributed. In The Communist Manifesto, they argue that bourgeois private property already does not exist for the majority: its existence for the few depends on its non-existence for the many. Their point is not that ordinary people should lose personal possessions, but that no class should possess the means by which it can command the labour, time and life chances of others.

    The liberal says: freedom is the right to sell your labour.
    The communist asks: what kind of freedom is it when survival forces the sale?

    This is where Marx meets Amartya Sen. Sen’s theory of capabilities defines freedom not merely as non-interference, but as the real capacity to live, learn, eat, move, think and participate in society. A starving person is not free because the state has left him alone. A child without education is not free because the market offers private schools she cannot afford. A sick worker is not free because a hospital exists somewhere behind a paywall.

    Communism therefore does not abolish freedom; at its best, it radicalises the question of freedom. It asks that freedom be measured materially, not rhetorically.

    2. “Communism means dictatorship.”

    The right-wing argument usually commits a philosophical error: it confuses historical degeneration with theoretical essence. Based on rhetoric and propaganda, it concludes that communism must contain dictatorship as its inevitable truth. This is not dialectics; it is reduction. A dialectical reading, from Hegel to Marx and later Lukács, asks us to distinguish between an idea, its historical conditions of realisation, its contradictions, and the forms into which it may be distorted under pressure. The Soviet Union did not emerge in the abstract realm of political theory; it emerged from imperial collapse, world war, civil war, foreign intervention, economic backwardness, famine, isolation and military encirclement.

    Rosa Luxemburg had already warned that socialism without democracy would become a contradiction against itself. Trotsky later described the Soviet bureaucracy not as the fulfilment of communism, but as a degeneration of the revolution under conditions of scarcity, isolation and political repression. In this sense, authoritarian socialism should be read not as the transparent essence of communism, but as one possible historical deformation of it — a deformation produced when a revolution that promises the self-rule of workers becomes administered by a party-state standing above them.

    The same standard, however, must then be applied to capitalism. If the authoritarian degeneration of the Soviet Union proves the dictatorial essence of communism, then the historical alliance between capitalism and fascism would prove the fascist essence of capitalism. Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere protected private property, crushed trade unions, persecuted communists and socialists, militarised labour, collaborated with industrial and financial elites, and transformed national crisis into authoritarian class discipline. Historians such as Robert O. Paxton and Karl Polanyi show that fascism was not merely irrational barbarism descending from nowhere; it was also a political answer to capitalist crisis, mass democracy, socialist threat and the fear of class revolution. Max Horkheimer’s famous warning — that one cannot speak honestly of fascism while remaining silent about capitalism — captures precisely this relation.

    Yet the liberal right rarely accepts the conclusion that capitalism is therefore inherently fascist. It calls fascism an aberration, an excess, a crisis-form, a pathological response, a betrayal of liberal principles.

    This is where dialectical thought becomes necessary. Historical association is not essence. A phenomenon must be understood in the totality of relations that produced it: class struggle, war, imperial pressure, scarcity, institutional form, ideology, state power and material development. Communism contains within itself a tension between emancipation and centralisation, between collective ownership and bureaucratic command, between the abolition of class domination and the danger of a state claiming to speak permanently in the name of the class. Capitalism contains its own tension between formal liberty and material domination, between parliamentary rights and economic coercion, between market freedom and imperial violence. To analyse one system by its worst historical manifestation while analysing the other by its most idealised self-description is not philosophy. It is propaganda.

    A serious communist argument should therefore concede the tragic truth: twentieth-century socialism often produced authoritarian forms that betrayed its emancipatory promise. But a serious anti-capitalist argument must add the corresponding truth: capitalism has repeatedly produced colonialism, slavery, fascism, imperial war, racial hierarchy, ecological destruction and economic dictatorship while continuing to describe itself as freedom. The task is not to protect communism from history, but to protect historical thinking from ideological simplification. The question is not whether communist states have committed crimes. They have. The question is why the crimes of communist states are treated as revelations of essence, while the crimes of capitalist states are treated as deviations, accidents or unfortunate necessities.

    The dialectical answer is that both systems must be judged not by their slogans, but by the social relations they create and the contradictions they generate. A democratic communism for the twenty-first century must therefore learn from the failure of bureaucratic socialism without surrendering to the myth of capitalist innocence. It must reject the party-state monopoly of truth as firmly as it rejects the capitalist monopoly of property. It must say: no dictatorship of the bureaucracy, no dictatorship of capital, no imperial dictatorship disguised as democracy, and no reduction of historical tragedy into anti-communist common sense.

    3. “Communism will take your house, your savings and your toothbrush.”

    This is perhaps the oldest trick in anti-communist rhetoric: confuse personal property with capitalist property.

    HUAC’s 1949 pamphlet told readers that under communism all real estate would belong to the government and that even bank accounts would be confiscated above a small sum. Hoover’s version intensified the fear, claiming that homes, businesses, deposits and personal possessions would be taken in a total communisation of life.

    Marx’s distinction is crucial. Communism is not primarily about abolishing personal belongings. It is about abolishing bourgeois private property: the ownership of productive assets that allows one class to live from the labour of another. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly distinguish personal appropriation for human life from property that becomes capital, rent and command over others.

    Your home is not the same thing as a real-estate empire.
    Your savings are not the same thing as a private bank.
    Your small workshop is not the same thing as a monopoly.
    Your personal belongings are not the same thing as ownership of land, infrastructure, credit, media and logistics.

    The right deliberately collapses these distinctions because fear is politically more efficient than analysis.

    4. “Communism destroys the economy.”

    The first answer is that capitalism also destroys economies — repeatedly, structurally and globally. Marx’s theory of crisis, later developed by David Harvey, begins from capitalism’s instability: overproduction, speculation, debt, unemployment, asset bubbles, enclosure, financial collapse and the constant search for new areas of extraction.

    The second answer is that capitalist economies are already massively planned. Central banks plan interest rates. States plan infrastructure. Corporations plan supply chains. Platforms plan behaviour. Supermarkets plan logistics. Military procurement is planned. Agribusiness is planned. The question is not planning versus no planning. The question is: planning by whom, and for whose benefit?

    Karl Polanyi argued that the idea of a self-regulating market was historically destructive because it turned labour, land and money into commodities, even though human beings and nature were never produced for sale. Nancy Fraser extends this critique: capitalism depends on care work, ecology and public institutions, yet systematically devalues and exhausts them.

    The economic case for communism is not that a central committee should decide the colour of every shoe. It is that strategic sectors — health, housing, transport, energy, education, land, water, digital infrastructure, banking and ecological transition — are too important to be governed by profit alone.

    The empirical problem is also severe. The World Inequality Report 2026 states that the global bottom 50% owns only 2% of wealth, while the top 10% owns 75% of total personal wealth and captures 53% of income. This is not efficient civilisation; it is organised asymmetry.

    5. “Without profit, no one will work.”

    This argument assumes that human beings are animated only by greed. It is sociologically false and philosophically miserable.

    People work for income, yes, but also for dignity, recognition, obligation, skill, care, curiosity, vocation, loyalty, public duty and meaning. Nurses, teachers, firefighters, researchers, parents, artists, volunteers and public servants do not fit neatly into the fantasy of the purely self-interested market actor. Even capitalism relies constantly on non-capitalist motivations.

    Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser are decisive here. They show that capitalism rests on enormous amounts of unpaid or underpaid reproductive labour: cooking, cleaning, raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining emotional life, repairing bodies and households. If people truly worked only for profit, society would collapse by breakfast.

    Communism does not deny incentives. It asks why incentives must be organised through fear, unemployment, humiliation and artificial scarcity. A socialist economy could still reward skill, responsibility, effort and difficulty. What it would reject is the right of one person to become fantastically rich merely by owning what others need in order to live.

    6. “Communism is against merit.”

    Capitalism does not reward merit in any pure sense. It rewards ownership, inheritance, networks, credentials, race, gender, geography, family wealth and proximity to power. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital explains why privilege disguises itself as talent. The elite child inherits not only money, but accent, confidence, taste, institutional familiarity and the ability to move through the world as if it were built for them.

    Brasil is a particularly clear example. IBGE reported that Brazil’s Gini index for per capita household income was 0.504 in 2024, and would have risen to 0.542 without social programme benefits. This means that public redistribution already prevents Brazilian inequality from becoming even more brutal.

    A communist critique of meritocracy does not say that effort does not matter. It says that effort begins from unequal ground. The child who studies hungry and the child who studies with tutors are not running the same race. The right calls the result merit because it refuses to look at the starting line.

    A communist society would seek to make merit more real by reducing inherited advantage.

    7. “Capitalism lifted billions out of poverty.”

    This argument contains a truth, but it is never the whole truth.

    Capitalist development did increase productivity, urbanisation, medicine, communication and industrial capacity. Marx himself cited capitalism’s revolutionary energy. He never described capitalism as merely stagnant or primitive; he saw it as historically dynamic and historically destructive.

    But several questions remain.

    Who produced the wealth?
    Who captured it?
    At what ecological cost?
    How much poverty was reduced by markets alone, and how much by land reform, public health, labour rights, industrial policy, state planning, anti-colonial struggle, trade unions and social programmes?

    The OECD has found that high inequality harms long-term growth, particularly by damaging educational opportunities and human capital among poorer groups. Even from a mainstream economic perspective, inequality is not just morally ugly; it is economically irrational.

    The communist answer is not to deny capitalism’s productive achievements. It is to argue that humanity now possesses the technical capacity to move beyond a system that distributes abundance through domination.

    8. “Communism always causes famine.”

    Amartya Sen famously argued that famines are not caused simply by lack of food, but by failures of entitlement, distribution, democracy and public accountability. Famines have occurred under colonial capitalism, market economies and authoritarian socialist states alike. The Bengal famine of 1943, under British imperial rule, is one of the most devastating examples of famine within a capitalist-imperial order.

    The correct lesson is not “markets feed and communism starves”. The correct lesson is: any system that combines concentrated power, weak accountability, restricted information and disregard for human life can produce catastrophe.

    A democratic socialism must therefore protect free information, local accountability, agricultural diversity, ecological planning, food sovereignty and strong rights for rural workers and small farmers. The issue is not only ownership, but democratic control over the conditions of life.

    9. “Communism destroys religion and the family.”

    This is one of the most culturally effective anti-communist claims. HUAC’s pamphlet on communism and religion declared that one could not be both communist and believe in God, and claimed communism would attack religion, family, moral codes and education. The American Legion’s anti-communist material similarly fused patriotism, suspicion and moral alarm, urging citizens to identify supposed communist influence in schools, churches, unions and cultural life.

    The reply requires precision. Marx criticised religion as ideology, but he also understood it as the “heart of a heartless world” — a response to suffering, not merely stupidity. Liberation theology in Latin America, Christian socialism, Catholic social teaching, Black church radicalism, Islamic anti-colonial socialism and many religious labour movements prove that religious life and anti-capitalist politics are not inherently incompatible.

    The right’s deeper fear is not that communism destroys the family. It is that communism politicises the family. It asks why domestic labour is feminised and unpaid; why children inherit class destiny; why women are economically trapped in marriage; why care is treated as private burden rather than social responsibility.

    Marx and Engels’ critique of the bourgeois family was not a demand to abolish love. It was a critique of a family form structured by property, inheritance, patriarchy and economic dependence.

    A democratic communist politics should defend religious freedom and family pluralism. What it should abolish is not faith or affection, but the economic coercion hidden inside them.

    10. “Communism is foreign infiltration.”

    This was central to Cold War propaganda. HUAC presented communism as conspiracy; Hoover described the Communist Party as a “state within a state” and a transmission belt for Soviet mentality. The American Legion pamphlet encouraged citizens to detect “fronts” and boycott suspected sympathisers in cultural and civic life.

    The Gramscian reply is that anti-communism often functions by making domestic suffering appear foreign. Low wages are not foreign. Hunger is not foreign. Evictions are not foreign. Police violence is not foreign. Racial hierarchy is not foreign. The exhaustion of teachers and nurses is not foreign. These are internal contradictions of the national order.

    In Brasil, anti-communism has long served as a way to criminalise demands for land, labour rights, racial justice, public education and democratic reform. Scholarship on Brazilian historical denialism notes that defences of the 1964 coup often relied on the claim that it was a counterrevolution against an alleged communist threat.

    The foreignness accusation is powerful because it makes capitalism appear native, natural and patriotic, even when Brazilian capitalism has always been entangled with colonial extraction, foreign debt, multinational corporations, IMF pressure, commodity dependence and global financial hierarchy.

    Communism, in a Brazilian key, need not be imported. It can emerge from quilombos, Indigenous land defence, peasant movements, urban peripheries, public health workers, teachers, domestic workers, trade unions and the memory of people who have always known that survival is collective.

    11. “Communism means crime, disorder and social collapse.”

    The right usually treats crime as moral decay. Communism treats it as a social fact.

    This does not mean excusing violence. It means asking what kind of society produces zones where legal life becomes structurally unavailable. Loïc Wacquant’s work on urban marginality shows how neoliberal states often withdraw welfare and then expand punishment. The state disappears as school, clinic, housing and employment, then returns as police and prison.

    A communist response to crime would not be naive abolition of all security. It would combine public safety with the elimination of the conditions that feed crime: unemployment, school failure, housing precarity, untreated addiction, family stress, racialised policing, prison recruitment by organised crime and territorial abandonment.

    The right asks: how do we punish after collapse?
    The communist asks: why do we organise society so that collapse becomes routine?

    12. “Communism is anti-national.”

    Marx and Engels wrote that workers have no country in the bourgeois sense: not because they hate their homeland, but because the nation-state often asks them to die for an order in which they possess very little. Yet they also write that the proletariat must first become the leading class of the nation.

    Communism is not hatred of the nation. It is hatred of the capture of the nation by property.

    A Brazilian communist patriot would ask: what does it mean to love Brasil? Does it mean loving agribusiness more than forests? Banks more than schools? Arms more than sanitation? The flag more than the hungry? The anthem more than the people who clean, build, cook, teach, drive, nurse and bury?

    The right confuses nation with hierarchy. Communism can reclaim nation as shared life.

    13. “Look at Venezuela, Cuba, the USSR.”

    One should look. But one should look historically, not theatrically.

    The USSR cannot be reduced either to gulags or to industrialisation. Cuba cannot be reduced either to healthcare achievements or to political repression. Venezuela cannot be explained only by socialism while ignoring oil dependency, sanctions, currency crisis, state mismanagement, corruption and global commodity shocks.

    The right’s method is selective comparison. Every failure of a socialist experiment is attributed to socialism. Every failure of capitalism is attributed to corruption, bad government, lack of capitalism, or individual irresponsibility.

    A serious answer must be symmetrical. If famine, censorship and bureaucracy count against socialism, then colonialism, slavery, fascist alliances, imperial wars, coups, sweatshops, climate breakdown, homelessness and medical bankruptcy must count against capitalism.

    SIPRI reported that world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth. If communism must answer for the violence committed in its name, capitalism must answer for the global military and imperial order through which it has repeatedly defended markets, resources and strategic dominance.

    14. “Communism failed; capitalism won.”

    This is not an argument. It is a survivor’s boast.

    Feudalism once looked eternal. Monarchy once looked natural. Slavery was defended as economic necessity. Patriarchy was described as divine order. Every dominant system mistakes its temporary victory for permanent truth.

    Gramsci‘s lesson is that no order survives by force alone. It must occupy language, religion, school, entertainment, law, journalism and everyday morality. Anti-communism became powerful because it taught people to fear equality more than exploitation; to fear redistribution more than hunger; to fear public ownership more than private monopoly; to fear “ideology” in teachers while ignoring ideology in advertising, television, churches, banks, police and family inheritance.

    The right did not defeat communism only by argument. It built a common sense in which capitalism became reality itself.

    The communist task is therefore not merely to answer objections. It is to create another common sense: one in which housing is not a commodity, healthcare is not a privilege, education is not inheritance, work is not humiliation, and democracy does not end at the factory gate.

    Conclusion: The Real Question

    The right asks whether communism is dangerous.

    The communist reply should be: compared with what?

    Compared with a world where the bottom half owns 2% of wealth?
    Compared with cities where empty apartments coexist with homelessness?
    Compared with economies that depend on unpaid care while mocking dependency?
    Compared with trillion-dollar military systems and collapsing ecosystems?
    Compared with democracies in which money speaks louder than citizens?

    Communism is not defensible when it becomes censorship, bureaucracy, militarised party rule or contempt for individual life. But capitalism is not defensible merely because its violence is familiar, privatised and distributed through contracts rather than decrees.

    The most honest defence of communism today is not that it has all the answers. It is that it asks the questions capitalism is structurally designed to avoid: who owns the world, who works for whom, who benefits from scarcity, why abundance produces misery, and why freedom should belong first to property rather than to human beings.

    A society that cannot ask these questions has not defeated communism. It has only become afraid of thinking beyond its masters.

  • Capitalism at the End of Its Moral Imagination: A Gramscian Essay on Brasil, Communism and the Need for Systemic Transformation

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    The contemporary defence of capitalism often begins with a triumphal sentence: capitalism produces wealth. This may be true, but insufficient. A system must not be judged only by what it produces; it must be judged by what it concentrates, what it destroys, what it normalises, and what kind of human being it asks us to become in order to survive within it. Capitalism has produced abundance, but it has also produced a civilisation in which abundance is structurally separated from need. It has created technological splendour beside hunger, financial sophistication beside precarious labour, private luxury beside public exhaustion.

    The central philosophical question, therefore, is not whether capitalism works. It clearly works for some. The question is whether it can still be morally defended as the organising principle of a society that claims to value dignity, democracy and human flourishing.

    The communist argument begins precisely here: not as a nostalgic return to twentieth-century authoritarianism, but as a critique of the private appropriation of collective life. In Marx, capitalism is not merely an economy; it is a social relation in which labour produces value while capital captures it. In Karl Polanyi, the market society becomes intolerable because it turns land, labour and money into fictitious commodities, treating human beings and nature as if they existed primarily for exchange. In Nancy Fraser, capitalism survives by cannibalising the very spheres it depends on: care, ecology, public institutions and social reproduction. In David Harvey, capitalism is restless accumulation: it must expand, privatise, extract and urbanise, even when human need no longer requires it.

    The result is not accidental inequality, but organised inequality.

    Globally, the World Inequality Report 2026 states that the richest 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half of humanity owns only 2%. The same report notes that the poorest half captures less than 10% of global income. This is not a marginal imperfection; it is the architecture of the system. It means that billions of lives are lived downstream from decisions made by a tiny class whose power is not merely economic, but political, cultural and ecological.

    Capitalism thus produces a paradox: the more productive society becomes, the less socially rational it appears. It is possible to produce enough food, yet tolerate hunger. It is possible to build hospitals, yet deny care. It is possible to educate every child, yet transform education into inherited advantage. It is possible to house people, yet preserve homelessness as a disciplinary spectacle. The communist critique insists that such contradictions are not failures of generosity, but failures of ownership.

    I. Inequality as the Hidden Constitution of Capitalism

    The first defect of contemporary capitalism is the concentration of income and wealth. Liberal theory often treats inequality as a tolerable side effect of freedom. But this is a philosophical deception. Extreme inequality does not merely distribute goods unequally; it distributes life chances, time, health, education, safety and political voice unequally.

    Thomas Piketty’s historical work shows that, when capital accumulation is left largely unchecked, inherited wealth tends to grow faster than wages and productive growth. Pierre Bourdieu helps explain why this inequality reproduces itself beyond money: economic capital becomes cultural capital, educational advantage, confidence, taste, language, networks and legitimacy. The child of the elite does not inherit only property; they inherit the grammar of power.

    Brasil is one of the clearest laboratories of this problem. Even after recent improvements, IBGE data show that Brasil’s Gini index for per capita household income remained at 0.504 in 2024; without social programme benefits, it would have risen to 0.542. In other words, the Brazilian state already prevents inequality from becoming even more obscene. The country is not poor because it lacks wealth; it is socially wounded because wealth is badly organised.

    This is where communism makes philosophical sense. It refuses to treat redistribution as charity. It asks why the productive structure itself allows so much wealth to be privately captured in the first place. A communist horizon does not simply mean taxing the rich after inequality has been produced. It means democratising the institutions that produce wealth: land, credit, housing, infrastructure, technology, natural resources and strategic industries.

    In capitalist society, redistribution is often treated as correction. In communist thought, equality must be built into production itself.

    II. Crime, Violence and the Social Manufacture of Despair

    A second defect of capitalism is its tendency to criminalise the consequences of its own exclusions. Societies that deny stable housing, dignified labour, education and social belonging then express astonishment when abandonment returns as violence. This does not mean every crime has a simple economic explanation. It means that crime is never merely individual. It is also spatial, historical and institutional.

    Loïc Wacquant’s sociology of urban marginality is essential here. He shows how neoliberal states often withdraw social protection from poor territories while expanding penal control over those same territories. The state disappears as school, clinic, housing policy and labour guarantee, then reappears as police, prison and surveillance.

    Brasil’s violence must be read through this lens. Ipea and the Brazilian Forum on Public Security reported 45,747 homicides in Brasil in 2023, a rate of 21.2 per 100,000 inhabitants; although this was the lowest rate in eleven years, the figures remain devastating, and the highest rates are concentrated in the North and Northeast.

    Communism answers this not by romanticising crime, but by attacking its social conditions. A society organised around common welfare would treat violence prevention as housing policy, school policy, employment policy, mental health policy, urban policy and racial justice. The right-wing answer to crime is usually punishment after social collapse. The communist answer is the prevention of collapse itself.

    This is not sentimentalism. The OECD has found that inequality has a negative and statistically significant impact on subsequent economic growth, partly because it damages human capital formation among people from poorer backgrounds. The IMF has also concluded that inequality is a robust determinant of both the pace and durability of growth, and that it is a mistake to “focus on growth and let inequality take care of itself.”

    A society with less inequality is not only fairer. It is more stable, more intelligent, less violent and less wasteful.

    III. Health and Education: The Moral Proof of Socialism Already Existing Inside Brasil

    Brasil already contains, within its own institutions, fragments of a socialist moral order. The SUS is the clearest example. It is founded on the principle that health is not a commodity, but a universal right. According to Agência Brasil, 76% of Brazilians depend directly on the SUS, which conducts around 2.8 billion consultations per year. The Commonwealth Fund also describes Brasil’s SUS as a tax-funded universal system, free at the point of care, covering all residents and visitors.

    This is philosophically decisive. When Brazilians defend the SUS, they are already defending a principle that contradicts pure capitalism. They are saying: life must not depend entirely on purchasing power.

    The same applies to education. The OECD reports that Brazilian adults aged 25–64 with tertiary education earn, on average, 148% more than those with upper secondary education, far above the OECD average premium of 54%. This shows that education in Brasil is not merely a personal good; it is one of the central mechanisms through which class destiny is reproduced.

    A communist perspective does not see education as training for the labour market alone. It sees education as the formation of free human beings capable of participating in collective life. Here Gramsci is fundamental. For him, every class that wishes to govern must produce its own intellectual and moral leadership. Education is not neutral; it is where society teaches people what is possible, what is respectable, what is “natural” and what must never be questioned.

    The struggle for education, therefore, is also the struggle over common sense.

    IV. War, Empire and the Capitalist Organisation of Fear

    Capitalism also has an international form. It does not exist only as private enterprise within nations; it exists as competition between states, corporations, currencies, supply chains and military blocs. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, despite their differences, both understood imperialism as connected to capital’s need for expansion. Immanuel Wallerstein later described capitalism as a world-system divided between core, semi-periphery and periphery, where wealth flows through unequal global structures.

    War cannot be reduced to capitalism alone. Nationalism, religion, territory, ethnicity and state ambition all matter. But capitalism intensifies the material incentives for domination: resources, energy corridors, cheap labour, arms markets, reconstruction contracts, debt dependency and strategic control.

    The scale of militarised irrationality is staggering. SIPRI reported that world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth, with global spending up 41% over the decade from 2016 to 2025.

    From a communist perspective, this is not merely a budgetary fact; it is a civilisational indictment. A world that can mobilise trillions for war but hesitates before universal sanitation, climate adaptation, food security and public health is not poor. It is politically deformed.

    Communism proposes the replacement of competitive accumulation with planned sufficiency: production organised around need rather than profit, international cooperation rather than imperial hierarchy, and public investment rather than permanent militarisation.

    V. How the Right Won the Cultural War in Brasil

    To understand Brasil, however, one must not imagine power only as government. This is the core of Gramsci’s relevance. Gramsci argued that ruling classes do not govern by coercion alone. They govern through hegemony: intellectual and moral leadership that makes a particular social order appear natural, inevitable and commonsensical.

    The Brazilian right did not gain strength merely through elections. It gained strength by occupying the imagination.

    For decades, anti-communism was not presented only as an economic argument, but as a moral instinct. The left was associated with disorder, corruption, atheism, sexual threat, criminal leniency and national decline. Meanwhile, capitalism was translated into the language of family, merit, entrepreneurship, religious virtue, security and individual effort.

    This is Gramsci in practice: the transformation of class interest into common sense.

    Brazilian media concentration helped form this terrain. The Media Ownership Monitor found that five families controlled 26 of the 50 media outlets with the largest audiences in Brasil, with Grupo Globo alone holding nine of them and reaching an audience larger than the second, third, fourth and fifth largest groups combined. Such concentration does not mean every journalist or outlet is ideologically identical, but it does mean that the symbolic infrastructure of public debate has long been narrow, elite-centred and commercially organised.

    Religion also became a decisive field of hegemony. Brasil remains religiously plural, but the 2022 Census data show a major shift: Catholics fell to 56.7%, while Evangelicals rose to 26.9%. This transformation cannot be treated with contempt. Many Evangelical churches provide community, discipline, care, music, language, welfare and belonging in places where the secular state has often arrived late or not at all. But conservative political actors learned to translate economic anxiety into moral panic, and moral panic into electoral discipline.

    More recently, digital networks accelerated this process. Studies on Brasil show that WhatsApp became a key infrastructure for political disinformation, including during the rise of Bolsonarism, and research on the 8 January Brasília attack found attempts to manufacture consensus in public WhatsApp groups around anti-democratic narratives.

    The contemporary Brazilian right, then, did not simply defend capitalism. It disguised capitalism beneath resentment. It converted economic suffering into hatred of teachers, feminists, artists, Black movements, LGBTQIA+ people, environmentalists, public servants and the poor themselves. As recent Gramscian analysis of Bolsonarism argues, cultural conservatism, anti-globalism, nationalism and conspiracy theory have helped preserve a neoliberal economic agenda by shifting attention away from political economy and towards moral threat.

    VI. A Gramscian Route for Brasil

    A Gramscian “turn” for Brasil cannot be imagined as a sudden seizure of the state followed by decrees from above. That would misunderstand both Brasil and Gramsci. In complex modern societies, Gramsci distinguishes between a war of manoeuvre and a war of position. A war of manoeuvre is frontal rupture. A war of position is slower, deeper and cultural: the construction of a new historical bloc capable of leading society before it governs it.

    For a country like Brasil — continental, unequal, religious, racially stratified, institutionally dense and culturally plural — the communist route would need to be democratic, constitutional, pedagogical and material.

    First, it would need to rebuild common sense. The left cannot speak only in administrative language: programmes, budgets, acronyms, ministries. It must produce a moral vocabulary capable of competing with the right’s simplicity. It must say, repeatedly and concretely, that hunger is not fate, rent is not destiny, illness is not a market opportunity, and poverty is not proof of personal failure.

    Second, it must form organic intellectuals. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals are not merely professors or writers; they are organisers of feeling and meaning. In Brasil, they would have to emerge from schools, unions, churches, neighbourhood associations, cultural movements, universities, health workers, delivery workers, domestic workers, public servants, artists, pastors, mães de santo, favela leaders, small farmers and digital creators. The point is not propaganda in the crude sense. The point is democratic pedagogy: helping people name the structures that injure them.

    Third, the left must stop treating culture as decorative. Culture is infrastructure. Music, television, memes, literature, sport, religion, humour, schools and neighbourhood rituals shape political possibility long before manifestos do. A communist project in Brasil would need popular media, community journalism, public digital platforms, cultural funding outside elite circuits, and a language that does not humiliate ordinary conservatism but patiently separates legitimate moral anxiety from authoritarian manipulation.

    Fourth, the economic programme must be concrete enough to touch daily life. It should include progressive taxation of income, wealth, dividends and inheritance; expansion of public housing; universal full-time public education; strengthening of the SUS; public control over strategic infrastructure; green industrial planning; land reform where socially and environmentally justified; incentives for worker cooperatives; public banking for development; and democratic planning mechanisms at municipal, state and federal levels.

    Fifth, crime must be removed from the monopoly of the punitive imagination. A communist-inspired security policy would combine intelligence against organised crime with investment in schools, urban infrastructure, employment, drug policy reform, mental health, prison reform and police accountability. The goal would not be naïve pacifism, but the end of the social production of disposable populations.

    Sixth, the project must defend democracy more seriously than liberalism has defended it. This means plural parties, free elections, independent courts, press freedom, anti-corruption mechanisms, transparency, participatory budgeting, social councils and constitutional guarantees. A Brazilian communism worthy of the twenty-first century cannot be authoritarian; it must be more democratic than capitalism, or it will deserve to fail.

    Seventh, it must construct a new historical bloc. In Brasil, this bloc cannot be only the industrial working class in the classical European sense. It must include informal workers, app drivers, care workers, teachers, nurses, Black and Indigenous movements, women, favela residents, progressive religious communities, small entrepreneurs crushed by monopolies, family farmers, environmentalists and the precarious middle class. Its unifying principle would be simple: no one should have to live permanently afraid in order for others to accumulate without limit.

    Conclusion: Communism as the Name of an Unfinished Moral Demand

    The case for communism today is not that history has given us a perfect model. It has not. The twentieth century offers warnings as well as hopes. Any serious communist argument must recognise the dangers of bureaucracy, repression, party absolutism and state idolatry.

    But the failures committed in the name of communism do not absolve capitalism of its present violence.

    Capitalism continues to ask society to accept hunger amid abundance, loneliness amid connectivity, ecological breakdown amid technological brilliance, and obscene wealth amid preventable misery. It tells us that there is no alternative, which is always the sentence spoken by systems that fear being imagined beyond.

    Gramsci teaches that political transformation begins before government. It begins when a society stops mistaking domination for common sense. Brasil’s future will not be changed only by winning elections. It will be changed by rebuilding the moral imagination of the country: by making solidarity appear practical, equality appear intelligent, public goods appear sacred, and exploitation appear as archaic as monarchy.

    Communism, at its strongest, is not merely a doctrine of the state. It is the insistence that human beings are not born to be managed as costs, ranked as competitors and abandoned as failures. It is the claim that the wealth of a society belongs, in the deepest sense, to those who produce and sustain it.

    And in a country like Brasil — so vast, so wounded, so inventive, so accustomed to surviving what should have been politically unacceptable — that claim is not an abstraction. It is perhaps the beginning of a new common sense.