Let us be honest: The Left has failed the world
And the world suffers.
There is no hope left.
No grand vision. No plan. No path forward.
This is the inconvenient truth.
We were supposed to be the revolution. We were supposed to be the architects of a better future. And yet, here we are—disorganized, defeated, a collection of ghosts haunting the ruins of our own failure. The world churns on, capitalism metastasizes, evolves, incorporates; fascism grins from the sidelines, ready to storm the pitch; the so-called "Left" is too busy fighting itself, or worse, wallowing in its own insignificance.
I am part of that insignificance. A wandering specter, an anarchist without anarchy, an enemy of capitalism working a capitalist job to survive. (Hey, have you become a paid subscriber yet!?) A contradiction. A failure. We are fragments of what should have been a movement but is instead a tragic collection of dissatisfied, disillusioned, neurodivergent misfits with no real power, no real plan, and no real future. Perhaps I shouldn’t generalize, but it feels true. I think it is true. Look at the world.
We have failed.
Experiments
Once, for a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed possible. The early days of the Soviet Union burned bright with the promise of something new—industrialization, mass literacy, the lifting of millions out of poverty, decreasing inequality, the hard-fought victory over Nazism.
And then? Then it rotted from within. Totalitarianism. Paranoia. Oppression. A system built to challenge capitalism became a different kind of machine, another engine of control, another failure. Defeated by capitalism, in the end. Closer to home: Yugoslavia. The grand project. Brotherhood and unity. My parents lived it, and then they fled a bloody war. Another failure.
And now? Now modern communists cling desperately to China, a surveillance-state nightmare that has embraced capitalism with a red flag draped over it. Better than the US in some things, worse in others. Is this what we wanted? Is this what generations of revolutionaries fought for? Nah.
Anarchism fares no better. If communism at least had a moment of power, a moment where it shaped history, anarchism has been a perpetual ghost. Always against. Always tearing down (which can feel good, I admit). Never building. Never creating. No vision, no roadmap, just the endless chant of “No gods, no masters,” as if that alone is enough to bring about a new world. It isn’t. It never was. I believed it was. I still want to believe, but there’s a reason it’s a fringe ideology.
There were brief moments—Catalonia, the Zapatistas, fleeting uprisings that flickered and died. We have no lasting victories. No real-world success stories. The dream of anarchism is beautiful, but it is just that—a dream. Dreams aren’t real. They don’t change the material world. The material world crushes them.
Even the great uprisings of the 20th century, like the May 1968 movement in France, proved fleeting. It was a moment of radical hope, a brief spark where students and workers united against the system. And what happened? It fizzled out. The old order absorbed it, co-opted its language, and carried on as if nothing had happened. The slogans of revolt became branding tools for corporations. What was once a call to arms—"Sous les pavés, la plage!"—is now just another romanticized slogan, drained of its radical potential. I have the tattoo to prove it:
The system does not break easily. And when it does, it has the terrifying ability to rebuild itself, stronger and more resilient than before. It crushes everything: dreams, visions, hope. It all fades.
Funeral march
And now, what do we have? A fractured, incoherent mess. The modern Left is nothing more than a contrarian force, defined not by what it stands for, but by what it stands against. We are not the revolution anymore. We are the opposition. The peanut gallery. The grumbling undercurrent of discontent that capitalism can easily ignore, mock, or, when necessary, crush.
We have become a refuge for the alienated. The broken. The outcasts. That includes me. That includes many of us. The neurodivergent, the depressed (how could this world not depress you?), the lost souls who cannot find meaning in a system that grinds people into dust. But what does that mean? That we attract those who have already been chewed up and spit out, while the world continues without us? That we are powerless by design?
The right builds institutions. It builds networks of power, mechanisms of influence. It controls the media. It controls the state. And we? We make zines. We make memes. We have no real power. We whisper among ourselves while they shout from the pulpits, from the newsrooms, from the political chambers that they control absolutely.
Look around. In the US, the “left” is synonymous with the Democrats—a center-right party that exists to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, the right is organizing, building, preparing. Fascism is on the rise, and what do we have to stop it? Reading groups. Internet debates. Anarchist bookstores where we sell anti-capitalist literature printed on capitalist presses, funded by capitalist currency.
It’s a joke. We are a joke. Brutal honesty, this is.
Even when we try, even when we gather, when we march, when we chant, when we protest—what happens? Liberals co-opt it. The system absorbs it. Black Lives Matter became a marketing campaign. Rainbow capitalism turned queer liberation into an aesthetic. The revolution gets repackaged and sold back to us at a markup. And we let it happen because we don’t know how to stop it. Mark Fisher wrote a great book about this.
Artificial paradox
The most depressing part, in some ways, comes now.
Here’s the truly bitter pill to swallow: The thing that might actually kill capitalism—the thing that might finally drive a stake through its bloated, festering heart—isn’t anarchist organization or communist revolution. It’s artificial intelligence. A deeply, deeply capitalistic endeavor. An oligarch’s dream. A tool created by the same system we despise.
If AI continues its trajectory, if automation accelerates, if mass unemployment becomes unavoidable, then what? Then capitalism either collapses under its own weight or mutates to become unrecognizable. It should be on us, the Left, to ensure the former—UBI becomes a necessity, not a radical demand. The labor market dies. The very foundation of wage slavery erodes. The little power we had vanishes—we should use it while we wield it. The possibility of post-scarcity creeps into reality—not through revolutionary struggle, but through the ruthless efficiency of machines replacing humans.
How fucking ironic. How fucking sad. That the end of capitalism, if it comes, may not be from us, from our movements, from our ideologies, but from the very system itself—eating its own tail like an ouroboros of profit-driven suicide.
The capitalists, the oligarchs have no plan for this. They cannot stop it. The status quo is untenable.
And what do we do? We deny. We mock. We cannot imagine what might be in five years, ten years, twenty years. We’re arguing amongst ourselves over fringe theory while the world changes without us. Instead of co-opting this shit, like the liberals do with everything, instead of ensuring that it benefits the people and not just the oligarchs (which is the far more likely outcome), we bury our heads in the sand. No vision. No goals. No imagination. No fight left.
A truly revolutionary Left would hack, sabotage, open-source everything. We complain on internet forums and urge people to ignore it all, still believing that it’s all a bubble, a passing fad—like the computer was.
Do I truly believe that AI of all things might create a better world? Not really. But how sad is it that right now this seems to be our best bet?
Ghosts in the stereo
And so we drift. Like ghosts. Like Disco Elysium’s pathetic communist circle-jerks, where we read and read and read and never do. I was active in the Austrian Communist Party for a while. I left because there was nothing there but empty platitudes and naive hopes of some distant revolution or, worse, incremental social-democratic change. A circle-jerk. An echo chamber where everyone agreed how useful the things we were doing were. A pastime to meet like-minded disillusioned outsiders and shoot the shit. A peaceful protest or two because it’s fun and makes you feel hardcore. It doesn’t work. I was there:
Once, we thought we could change the world. Now? Now we sit in dark rooms, scrolling through doom-laden feeds, raging into the void. We have no plan. We have no power. We are relics. Fossils of failed hopes, watching as capitalism rages on, as fascism grows stronger, as the world burns and we whisper to ourselves: "One day for sure! Any moment now! The revolution is inevitable."
What am I doing? Writing on internet forums, making cringe videos, and circle-jerking while working a marketing job. I am the perfect example. At least be self-aware.
I do not write all this out of some sort of hatred or depressed state. I write this because it’s the reality and we must acknowledge it to move forward. Maybe I’m also just projecting, who knows?
But basically, I’m just waiting while doing nothing. (Buy my books!!)
Antonio
Video version:
You’ve written a eulogy for a revolution that never really tried to fight. You’ve diagnosed the disease, mapped every malignant cell of the rot, and then sat down in the waiting room to let it run its course. We have failed, you say. We are ghosts, you say. And yet, here you are, still writing, still thinking, still feeling that ember of rage in your chest. That’s not failure, that’s an opportunity.
The so-called "Left" is not dead; it’s just been convinced that playing fair is the only way to win. It has been pacified, self-neutered, and trapped in an endless cycle of moral hand-wringing while the right builds its empire brick by brick. And instead of organizing, strategizing, and imposing consequences on power, we get... this. A beautifully written, poetic surrender note.
But here’s the thing: power does not care about your resignation. It only fears your action.
You talk about how capitalism eats everything. How it adapts. How it morphs. That is true. Capitalism is the Borg, it assimilates, repackages, and sells revolution back to you with a 30% markup. But if capitalism can adapt, so can we. If the right can build institutions, so can we. If fascists can carve out spaces of power through relentless, strategic, unapologetic force, we can do the same.
The problem isn’t that revolution is impossible. The problem is that we stopped fighting like we meant it.
You say anarchism has no vision? Then write one and make people believe in it.
You say we don’t build? Then build something worth defending.
You say we’ve been co-opted? Then stop waiting to be invited to the table, flip the fucking thing over.
You lament how the system absorbs every act of rebellion and turns it into a commodity. So what? The answer is to create acts that it can’t absorb. Acts that impose real costs. Acts that don’t fit neatly into a marketing campaign. You want to fight capitalism? Then you have to make it feel pain.
History is not kind to people who wait. Every gain that workers, women, people of color, and marginalized communities have ever won has been taken by force. We forget that. We forget that the weekend, the vote, civil rights, bodily autonomy, none of it was handed down from above. It was ripped from the system’s grip by people who refused to sit around and pontificate about their own insignificance.
Yes, the right builds institutions. Yes, it organizes. Yes, it deploys its forces with surgical precision while we sit around making memes. But that is not an excuse to lie down and die. That is a blueprint.
What you call failure, I call dormancy. And dormancy only lasts until the right spark ignites it.
So I ask you: Are you ready to fight? Are we prepared to stop getting mired by the weight of imperfect ideas, and start crafting the plan for Project 2026?
I don't disagree with a lot of this, but I think it falls into black and white thinking at times that is simply inaccurate.
For example you speak of anarchists as "never building, never creating" and say that we act as though the slogan is enough to bring about change - but that completely ignores the reality of over a century of small, local, decentralized ACTION in the form of mutual aid. Just because anarchists haven't taken power and formed an actual state (which would be rather a contradiction in terms) doesn't mean we haven't done countless things and impacted countless lives.
I think your realism has slid into a form of self-flagellation that is actually disconnected from reality. Not that your assessment of our future prospects isn't correct, but your conclusion of how we got here is (not correct).