The Left Did Not Just Lose Its Soul
Perhaps the Western Left did not merely lose its soul. It also lost something far more tangible: a source of material power.
For decades, the Soviet Union represented the great political and ideological reference point — and, through channels documented by numerous investigations and historical accounts, also a financial one — for the international communist movement. The story of so-called “Moscow gold,” explored in a body of investigative literature under the same name, belongs to that controversial history in which politics, ideology, and financial resources became deeply intertwined.
Then that world collapsed.
With the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the Western Left found itself without that reference point and immersed in a profoundly transformed economic system. Globalization was advancing, finance was gaining enormous power, capital was becoming increasingly mobile across borders, and the market was gradually being presented not as something to regulate and restrain, but as the natural environment within which politics had to operate.
This is where we can begin to understand an important part of the Left's transformation.
Not necessarily because someone issued orders from above, nor because every left-wing leader suddenly became an advocate for the interests of major financial lobbies. That would be an oversimplification.
The deeper point is this: when the material conditions in which a political force operates change, so can its sense of what is possible, desirable, and even realistic.
When the Funding Changes, So Does Political Independence
In Italy, during roughly the same period, direct public funding for political parties was also phased out.
Politics, of course, did not stop requiring money. It simply had to find resources through other means and from other sources.
This does not mean that investment funds, multinational corporations, banks, or major companies automatically “buy” political parties. One thing is documented political financing, another is lobbying, and yet another is the convergence of interests. Confusing these categories would turn a serious political question into a conspiracy theory.
But one question remains legitimate: how genuinely antagonistic can a political force be toward an economic system on which, at least to some extent, its own ability to raise money, communicate, and compete depends?
At the same time, the Left was gradually losing its traditional roots among the working class and lower-income communities, while the economic world it had historically viewed with suspicion was becoming increasingly powerful.
A historical paradox was therefore taking shape: a political movement born to limit the power of capital was gradually coming to accept the economic system created by financial globalization as inevitable.
No longer the Left seeking to transform capitalism.
Increasingly, the Left seeking to manage capitalism.
From the Social Question to the Politics of Identity
The transformation was not merely economic. It also changed the political causes through which the Left sought to redefine its identity.
Many of the civil-rights causes that now occupy a significant place on the Left's agenda had, for decades, been the distinctive territory of Italy's Radical Party under Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino: secularism, individual rights, personal autonomy, civil liberties, and opposition to prohibition.
There is nothing inherently illegitimate about a political movement adopting those causes. The problem begins when identity politics comes to occupy the space left vacant by the social question.
Because while the Left was increasingly focused on identity, recognition, and individual rights, the world of work was changing beneath its feet. Precarious employment was becoming structural, wages were losing purchasing power, stable employment was becoming increasingly inaccessible to younger generations, and trade unions were losing part of their ability to represent workers.
The Left was becoming increasingly attentive to differences of identity at precisely the moment when it was becoming less capable of representing economic differences.
The old questions — Who owns? Who works? Who gets paid? Who loses? Who controls wealth? — were gradually giving way to another question: Who am I, and what recognition am I entitled to?
Both sets of questions are legitimate. But they are not the same question.
And one cannot become a way of avoiding the other.
The Forgotten Worker and the Abandoned Peripheries
The paradox became particularly visible in the working-class neighborhoods and urban peripheries.
For decades, the Left had built a substantial part of its identity there: public housing, public schools, factories, unions, social services, community organizations, cooperatives, and local party branches. Its presence was physical before it was electoral.
Then that presence gradually disappeared.
Party offices closed. Factories declined or moved abroad. Work became more fragmented, and precarious employment replaced stable jobs in many cases. At the same time, the Left's political language became increasingly sophisticated when it came to rights and increasingly distant, in the eyes of some working-class voters, from their everyday concerns.
Not because those people had suddenly become hostile to rights.
But because they also had much more immediate problems: insufficient income, insecure employment, housing they could barely afford, and an uncertain future.
The paradox is hard to miss: the Left became more attentive to differences of identity just as it became less capable of representing differences in economic circumstances.
The fundamental questions once were: How much do you earn? How much do you work? What rights do you have on the job? How secure is your contract? How much bargaining power do you have against your employer?
An increasing share of political debate has instead shifted toward recognition, identity, and cultural discrimination.
The issue is not choosing between rights and work.
The issue is that working people need both.
And when someone in a precarious economic situation feels that no one is seriously addressing their material circumstances anymore, they may begin to wonder whether that political force still represents their world.
When the Left and Right Stop Being Alternatives
This is where Diego Fusaro's provocative argument becomes interesting.
According to this interpretation, the distance between today's right and left has become, at least on certain fundamental issues, much narrower than their electoral rivalry suggests. Atlanticism, support for Israel, and acceptance of the neoliberal economic order would, in Fusaro's view, be among the areas where the traditional conflict between left and right has progressively diminished.
One may agree or disagree with that interpretation. But the question it raises deserves to be taken seriously:
How genuinely alternative can a Left be if it no longer challenges the fundamental economic premises of the order that governs the world?
If the differences remain primarily cultural and identity-based while the underlying economic and geopolitical framework is largely shared, voters may eventually come to see political competition as a choice between different ways of administering the same system.
And that may be one of the roots of the crisis.
When You Lose Your People
Perhaps this is where we should look for part of the explanation behind the Left's current crisis.
Not simply in the abandonment of a particular economic ideology. Not simply in the collapse of communism. Not simply in globalization.
But in the growing separation between part of the Left's new political class and the social world it once represented.
The Left has conquered new cultural territory while losing some of its social territory.
It has learned to speak the language of individual rights while partly abandoning the language of redistribution.
It has defended the recognition of differences while struggling to explain how economic inequality can actually be reduced.
And so something seemingly paradoxical has happened: part of the working and lower-middle classes have stopped recognizing themselves in the Left even as the Left continues to regard itself as their natural political representative.
Perhaps the crisis is therefore not that the Left has lost its soul.
Perhaps, more simply, it has changed its constituency.
What If the Final Push Comes From Outside?
There is one final element that makes this transformation even more unsettling: the changing international order.
For decades, the West took for granted that its economic and geopolitical model would remain at the center of the world. Today, that certainty appears considerably less secure.
The rise of the BRICS and, more broadly, the consolidation of economic and political relationships outside the traditional Western axis represent a phenomenon that cannot simply be dismissed as a new Cold War. The countries involved have very different interests, political systems, economies, and strategic objectives.
That is precisely what makes the phenomenon so interesting.
The fundamental question is not whether a new bloc is emerging that will simply replace the West.
It is whether the international economic order built after the Cold War is gradually losing its central position.
And this is where the Western Left may find itself facing a historical paradox.
After abandoning the old world, it may have integrated itself so deeply into the new one that it has become part of the very order now at risk of entering a period of crisis.
This would no longer be merely an electoral crisis.
It would be the crisis of a political force that, after losing its old point of reference, became too deeply identified with the new one.
And so the final question would no longer be which new slogan the Left should invent in order to win again.
It would be much more radical:
Who does it really want to represent?
Because a Left that loses the world of work, the peripheries, and the social question may continue to win cultural battles.
But sooner or later, it may discover that it has stopped representing the very people for whom it was originally created.
