The crisis of neoliberalism is not merely cyclical, but organic in the Gramscian sense: capital cannot offer stability, decent employment, care, or an ecological future

Since the 1980s, global capitalism has consolidated a “historical bloc” under neoliberal hegemony: market globalization, financial deregulation, the weakening of unions...

Despite promises of development and increased wealth, neoliberalism produced several trends that led to its own exhaustion: a crisis of representation among traditional parties, rising inequality, and the precariousness of broad sectors of society.

In this context, the system shifted profits from production to speculation, generating increasingly violent crises.

Thus, neoliberal capitalism not only failed to stabilize but also transferred wealth from workers to rentiers; labor reforms made firing easier, weakened unions, and created a precarious mass of workers.

Transnational corporations divided the world into zones of maximum exploitation. But this phase entered a crisis when financial overaccumulation could no longer be sustained without massive state bailouts (2008).

As Lenin would say: capitalism has exhausted its capacity for geographical expansion; now it is merely devouring itself.The shift of production to China, Mexico, or Southeast Asia multiplied the global supply of labor, but structural unemployment became firmly entrenched as a defining feature.

Neoliberalism intensified the irrational exploitation of nature: the privatization of water, genetically modified agribusiness, open-pit mining, and “free trade” agreements that nullify environmental regulations.

Public services, daycare centers, elder care, and healthcare were cut, while the privatization of water, electricity, railways, and postal services in the 1980s and 1990s led to rate hikes, poor quality, and corruption.

To bail out the financial system in 2008, governments saddled future generations with debt and imposed austerity policies that were paid for not by the banks, but by workers; so-called “peripheral” countries were subjected to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and vulture funds.

These factors show that the crisis of neoliberalism is not conjunctural, but organic in the Gramscian sense. Capital cannot offer stability, decent employment, care, or an ecological future.

Thus, precariousness even reached previously privileged sectors such as technicians and engineers, and part of the working class hit by the situation gravitated toward far-right positions.

As Lenin pointed out, this is not genuine “radicalization,” but a desperate reaction by social strata that are losing their relative privileges without acquiring an internationalist class consciousness.

The shadows of the interregnum

The “old world” dies with every new crisis, but the “new” one has not yet been born, and in that twilight emerge the monsters that channel fear and rage toward regressive solutions. Understanding all the components of the crisis is the prerequisite for forging a socialist way out, for beginning to build the communist future.

Post-Cold War neoliberalism dreamed of a global capitalism under U.S. hegemony; it did not foresee the rise of China as an economic and military power, which challenges technological dominance and the dictatorship of the dollar.

The trade and technology war between the U.S. and China, the sanctions policy, European rearmament, the NATO and Ukraine war against Russia, and the aggression against Iran by the Zionist entity of Israel and the United States are reflections of what Lenin repeatedly emphasized: that the unequal division of the world generates periodic imperialist wars.

For Lenin, these contradictions signal that the system can no longer be managed through consensus: war becomes a routine instrument for reconfiguring domination.

Thus, the illustrious leader of the Bolshevik Revolution analyzed how the bourgeoisie, when its domination is threatened by the class struggle, resorts to openly dictatorial and demagogic methods.

The responses were, are, and will be Bonapartism and fascism—the dissolution of traditional bourgeois-democratic channels—appealing to the petty bourgeoisie and disenfranchised sectors of the working class with anti-elite rhetoric, while imposing anti-popular austerity measures and paving the way for more overt repression against popular movements.

Marx described Bonapartism as an executive power that places itself above the classes in struggle, balancing their forces in the service of capital.

The “leader” presents himself as “the defender of the working people” against the elites, but governs for the wealthiest; he transforms the organic crisis into a scapegoat: the culprits are not capital or the system, but immigrants, Chinese, or the “globalists.” (emphasis added, ed.)

In this way, it shifts the class struggle onto ethnic-nationalist terrain. It is a form of what Gramsci would call “passive revolution”: they incorporate demands, but empty them of anti-capitalist content, redirecting them toward hatred of the other.

The new anti-elite movements draw their support primarily from small business owners and rural landowners—who see their position threatened by large chains and global competition—workers in declining industries—who have lost their union organization and class consciousness—and the impoverished middle class—who fear falling into the proletariat.

To all of them, they offer a “capitalism with a national face,” not questioning private property or exploitation, but putting it at the service of “our own people.”

Unlike Keynesianism or social democracy, Marxism-Leninism maintains that the crisis of neoliberalism is terminal for capitalism as a whole, not just for one variant of it.

Faced with these monsters, the reformist temptation is to call for a “return to normalcy”—and the temptation is strong. Why foment chaos? It is better to wait for the crisis to automatically generate revolutionary consciousness.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie will continue to offer monsters, wars, and barbarism. The task of communists is to transform the tribulations of the masses into revolutionary consciousness, exploiting every crack in the system to advance toward the only alternative: socialism.