Unfinished Modernity

On Gramsci and our Future

Morning Comrades.

For context, it is Sunday and after a lovely morning of bike rides, coffees, some cake even a few conversations about Jack Halberstam’s concept of time, and I’ll get into that once I have learned enough about it, it’s fascinating I went home for the weekly ritual of housework that we all love and enjoy to manage our week ahead. Whilst cleaning I found my old BA paper on Gramsci’s point of modernity, juvenile and terrible as it was I thought it would be a good time to revisit it all, not for some exercise in theory, on the contrary, but for the sake of reassurance, realignment if you like, something I do quite regularly on here to not only offer some sort of point of motivation for you, but focus for me. Most people are vaguely familiar with the quote form Gramsci, thanks for nonsensical IG “awaken the masses” slideshows, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” - which, and allow me to be a pedantic dick about it, is a dramatisation by Žižek and the best English translation of what Gramsci actually said is somewhere akin to “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” A little besides the point but I wanted to get that out of the way.

The line I wanted to revisit today, however, is:

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.”

and rather than doing a half-arsed “analysis” of the later part as I did for my Ba 25 years ago, and for the sake of our shared experience in this timeline I wanted to focus on modernity, the point of it, what it means and why “modernity” is something so entirely central to the liberation from capitalism. Before you reject the below purely on the basis of online brain rot, refusing to engage with just another white, western marxist’s euro-centric version of “what it is to be done”, I urge you to consider the impact Gramsci did have on Mariátegui, the Andean philosophy (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador), one of the earliest proponents of “Land Back” and so much more. If that name is unfamiliar to you, no fret, I will get something done on his work at some point this week, I hope.

The word modernity has, over the last 30 years since the end of the Soviet experiment, become a politically contested and ideologically distorted concept of our time. It is often reduced to technological advancement, economic growth, liberal democracy or the endless acceleration of innovation, as though modernity were simply the condition of living after a certain historical moment rather than a profound transformation in humanity’s relationship with itself, nature and history. Yet the real significance of modernity lies not in the machines we build or the speed at which information travels, but in the historical possibility that humanity might finally become capable of consciously organising its own collective existence rather than submitting to inherited structures of necessity, hierarchy and domination. This is why the idea often attributed to Gramsci remains so powerful, because before we consider the question of disillusionment, we must first understand the meaning of modernity itself. Modernity is not simply an era; it is the emergence of a historical consciousness in which society recognises itself as something created by human beings and therefore something that can be transformed by human beings.

From this perspective, capitalism must be understood not as the fulfilment of modernity but as its great contradiction. Capitalism created unprecedented productive capacities, revolutionised science and technology, dissolved traditional social structures and expanded humanity’s ability to transform the natural world, for some. Yet it also and simultaneously subordinated these achievements to the logic of capital accumulation, ensuring that the very forces that could liberate humanity became instruments for reproducing inequality, exploitation and domination. The reality of capitalism is therefore not that it has failed to produce abundance, knowledge or technological possibility, but that it has prevented these achievements from becoming collective human realities as it is ints inherent truth. It has developed the means through which humanity could consciously shape its future while maintaining social relations that prevent humanity from doing so.

This contradiction is central to understanding the modern world. Liberal ideology presents capitalism itself as synonymous with modernity, suggesting that markets, private ownership and competition represent the natural culmination of historical development. Within this framework, any challenge to capitalism appears as a rejection of progress itself, as though opposition to exploitation were opposition to science, technology or freedom. This is a powerful ideological achievements of bourgeois society: the transformation of a historically specific economic system into a seemingly permanent condition of human existence. Capitalism is presented not as one possible organisation of society but as reality itself.

Yet this identification is historically false and modernity does not belong to capitalism. Rather, capitalism is one particular historical formation that emerged alongside modernity and has profoundly shaped its development while simultaneously and vastly restricting its possibilities. The question modernity poses is not whether humanity can produce wealth, and more poignantly, how we collectively define “wealth”, but whether humanity can consciously determine the purpose of that wealth. It is not whether we can create technological systems of extraordinary complexity, but whether those systems serve human liberation or reinforce existing structures of power. It is not whether we possess the capacity to solve collective problems, but whether our social relations allow us to use that capacity.

The seeming irrationality of contemporary capitalism becomes clear precisely because humanity now possesses the material ability to overcome many of the problems that continue to define social life. Global agriculture produces enough food to sustain the world’s population, yet hunger persists because food remains organised as a commodity rather than as a human necessity. Technological automation has created the possibility of reducing labour time and expanding freedom, yet workers remain trapped within increasingly precarious forms of employment because production is organised around profitability rather than social need. Scientific knowledge allows humanity to understand ecological destruction with extraordinary precision, yet environmental collapse accelerates because economic growth remains dependent upon endless extraction and accumulation. These contradictions reveal that the central obstacles facing humanity are no longer simply material limitations but social relations that prevent existing capacities from being used rationally.

This is where the Marxist understanding of modernity becomes indispensable. It recognises that capitalism represents both a historical reality and a severe historical limitation. Capitalist social relations have not created humanity’s productive capacities but have organised, concentrated and accelerated them through the coercive organisation of labour, the extraction of surplus value and the relentless pressure placed upon workers to increase production for private accumulation. The wealth and technological capabilities of modern society are not the gifts of capital but the accumulated achievements of human labour, scientific knowledge and collective ingenuity, developed under conditions in which the majority have been compelled to produce for the interests of a minority who control the means of production. Capitalism has therefore simultaneously expanded the productive powers available to humanity while enclosing those powers within institutions of private ownership and class domination that prevent them from being democratically directed towards collective human needs. The task is not to thank capitalism for creating the possibility of liberation, but to recognise that capitalism has transformed humanity’s own productive achievements into instruments of accumulation and domination, and that emancipation requires reclaiming those achievements from the social relations that currently control them.

This distinction is particularly important in the present moment because both liberalism and reactionary politics have abandoned the emancipatory potential of modernity. Liberalism increasingly reduces modernity to consumer choice, technological novelty and economic competition, while ignoring the social consequences produced by these systems. The far right, meanwhile, responds to the failures of capitalist modernity by rejecting modernity altogether, offering myths of national restoration, cultural purity and imagined historical greatness. Both responses ultimately deny human agency and as we can all agree on, are dogshite. One submits to the market; the other submits to mythological tradition and identity to then sell out to capitalist realities. Neither accepts the genuinely modern idea that humanity can consciously transform its social conditions.

The struggle for liberation from capitalism therefore requires reclaiming modernity itself. This means rejecting the idea that history is something that happens to us rather than something we collectively create resulting in the separation of people from their own historical agency. Contemporary society produces individuals who are constantly exposed to political crises, economic instability, ecological threats and technological disruption, yet who increasingly experience themselves as powerless spectators rather than participants capable of shaping events. Politics becomes something consumed rather than something practised, a continuous stream of information and outrage that rarely becomes organised collective power.

Obviously, this condition is not accidental and capitalism depends not only upon controlling production but upon shaping consciousness, because every system of domination requires people to accept its basic assumptions. The belief that there is no alternative, that markets are beyond democratic control, that inequality is unavoidable and that political change is inherently unrealistic are not neutral observations; they are ideological constructions that preserve existing relations of power. The most effective form of domination is not always direct coercion but the creation of a world in which alternatives become difficult to imagine.

To recover modernity is therefore to recover imagination, but not imagination as fantasy or escapism. It means recovering the ability to recognise possibilities already contained within existing reality. Revolutionary consciousness does not emerge from dreaming of a completely different world disconnected from current conditions; it emerges from understanding the contradictions within the present world and recognising the possibilities those contradictions create. The point is not to believe that history automatically moves towards liberation, but to understand that liberation remains possible because history remains open.

This is why the distinction between optimism and hope matters. Optimism assumes that progress will occur naturally, that technological development or economic growth will eventually resolve social contradictions. Hope, by contrast, is a political practice grounded in the recognition that possibilities must be actively realised through collective struggle. Hope does not deny difficulty; far from it but at its core and removed from the Disney-brained understanding of it, rejects paralysis. It understands that no social order has ever existed forever, that every system of domination has presented itself as permanent until historical forces challenged its foundations.

Modernity, therefore, demands historical responsibility. It requires abandoning both the illusion that capitalism can peacefully resolve its own contradictions and the despairing belief that nothing can change. The revolutionary perspective begins from the understanding that social conditions are neither natural nor eternal and that they are produced through human activity and can therefore be transformed through human activity. This is the essence of historical materialism: the recognition that people make history, but they do so within conditions inherited from the past.

The greatest challenge facing liberation movements today is therefore not simply overcoming capitalist power but also overcoming the psychological and ideological effects of capitalist realism. A population such as ours that is constantly told that alternatives are impossible can begin to mistake resignation for realism. Yet genuine realism requires confronting the full reality of our historical situation, including the fact that capitalism is no longer willing to lie about it inability of resolving all of the contradictions it produces.

The struggle for and through socialism should therefore not be understood as an attempt to reject modernity ( shout out to the cosplaying larpers out there, love you, but come on ) but as an attempt to finally realise its unfinished promise. The democratic organisation of production, the liberation of technology from the demands of profit, the creation of social systems based upon human need rather than market value and the rebuilding of collective solidarity are not nostalgic dreams or anti-modern fantasies. They are the logical consequences of humanity possessing the knowledge and capacity to consciously shape its own future.

The true measure of modernity has never been the sophistication of our machines, the speed of our communication or the scale of our economies. It is whether humanity has become capable of governing its own collective existence according to conscious social purposes rather than blind economic forces. The task of liberation is therefore not to escape modernity but to complete it. To become genuinely modern is to recognise that history belongs neither to markets, corporations nor empires, but to human beings themselves. Modernity remains unfinished because humanity remains unfinished, and the struggle against capitalism is ultimately the struggle to reclaim the future as something we create rather than something that happens to us.

Yours, warmly,

V.