The fracture in the historical bond between capitalism and democracy now seems evident. The connection that had held, albeit ambiguously, throughout the era of industrial capitalism and Fordist growth today appears to be definitively broken due to financial neoliberalism, the offshoring of production, and the crisis of democratic institutions.
One of the strongest symbolic images of the twentieth-century social pact has also collapsed: the tripartite division of time. Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of life for relationships and leisure. This structure was not only the result of a crucial political and labor achievement; it was also a form of material organization of a person’s existence, based on a balance between productivity, rest, and social relations. It was the time-form of social citizenship.
This model has now disintegrated. The breakdown of stable wage labor, the extreme flexibilization of production rhythms, the intermittence of income, and the growing atomization of employment forms have made collective negotiation of time impossible.
The labor trade union—once a central actor in bargaining and representation—has gradually lost its power and legitimation. Not because workers have disappeared, but because the context that made them a unified political subject has vanished. The factory, in the Fordist model, was not only a place of production but also a political territory: a space for gathering, conflict, and collective deliberation. It was there that discursive practices took shape, alliances were formed, and political identities were built.
With offshoring and the fragmentation of production chains, the physical space of labor politics has disappeared. Today, work takes place in call centers, logistics hubs, digital platforms, and domestic environments—often invisible, de-territorialized spaces where relationships between individuals are interrupted or mediated by digital systems. This makes the formation of a shared public discourse, and therefore the emergence of a collective political will, much more difficult.
The historic tension between the state, industrial capital, and collective bargaining—which had made possible, at least in some contexts, a redistributive balance and a relative form of social well-being—has progressively dissolved with the rise of the financialization of the economy. The compromise once founded on the dialectic between production and social conflict no longer holds under the pressure of new global arrangements.
In its place, an unprecedented configuration has emerged: a controversial alliance— undeclared but operative—between political autarchies and financial neoliberalism. In this context, capital no longer needs the social consensus once guaranteed by State or union mediation: it moves through transnational circuits, speculative algorithms, and post-democratic forms of power.
Financialization has not only stripped labor of its negotiating power, it has also separated the accumulation of wealth from material production, making inequality structural and self-replicating. The result is a profound disconnect between economy and society, between political decision-making and collective needs, between populist rhetoric and authoritarian reality.
The result is a structural decoupling: capitalism no longer needs democracy to function, and democracy no longer has the material power to govern capitalism.
The fragmentation of labor has produced a radical transformation in class structure. We can no longer speak of a unified, territorialized “working class,” but, rather, of a dispersed multitude: gig economy workers, precarious youth, women excluded from social protections, migrants without legal status, and individuals forced into informality.
In particular, younger generations are experiencing a profound crisis—not only material but imaginative: access to the very idea of a future has been denied to them with the disappearance of any philosophy of history. Work is no longer a means of construction, but a threshold of survival.
Women, who had conquered time and rights in the latter half of the twentieth century, now find themselves in a position of two-fold vulnerability: precarized in the workplace and pushed back into unpaid caregiving roles.
Time—the key element of every emancipatory project—has once again become privatized, fragmented, absent.
In this context, the “politics of issues” (gender, labor, environment, rights), conceived as a mere sum of sectoral claims, reveals all its limits in the identity-based radicalization that undermines a broader vision. It is therefore necessary to rethink the general framework— the systemic structure of inequalities—in terms of their interconnections.
The question, then, is not how to restore the twentieth-century social pact, but how to rethink democracy in a world without guarantees, without stable territories, without traditional political subjects.
We must rethink the spaces of public deliberation. On the one hand, through a physical presence in new territorial spaces of aggregation (civic centers, schools, cooperatives, mutualist initiatives). On the other, in the digital environment, by building online deliberative arenas that are not merely spaces for individual expression, but for the collective construction of meanings and actions as well.
At the same time, a deep reflection is needed on the role of the welfare state, now eroded both by austerity imposed by neoliberalism and by the crisis of legitimacy of public institutions.
The State cannot simply be “protective”: it must become proactive in redistributing time, income, and power, rethinking welfare in post-industrial, neo-territorial, and transgenerational terms.
Finally, any reflection on democracy in the twenty-first century must confront the new global autocratic disorder: the crisis of international law, the rise of hybrid authoritarianisms, the weakening of multilateral institutions, and the pressure exerted by major non-State actors (multinationals, big tech, finance, platforms).
If democracy is to survive, it cannot remain bound exclusively to the twentieth-century nation-state form. It must articulate itself in transnational forms, capable of acting within and beyond borders, rebuilding social and political alliances that can respond to the new global fractures.
Global capitalism has dissolved its bond with democracy. The historic compromise that for decades ensured a semblance of balance between economic power, political representation, and social demands has now been shattered.
We must not seek to restore a lost order or chase institutional nostalgia. Rather, we must give shape to new political subjectivities, rebuild collective spaces of meaning from the ruins, and imagine a democracy equal to the fracture we are traversing—one capable of mending the relationships within the human and natural worlds.
The autocracies now advancing are not mere returns of the past: they are new forms of domination—hybrid, adaptive, capable of nesting within the hollowed-out structures of emptied out democracy.
It is time to begin thinking about what does not yet exist. We must generate a new legitimacy from the margins, from the ruptures, from the silenced spaces of the present. This means starting from what has been cast aside, to redesign relationships and open our minds and arms to a new beginning.
Cover photo: A food courier takes a break on his phone in downtown Brampton, Ontario, on October 2, 2025 (photo by Mike Campbell / NurPhoto via AFP).
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