1. The evaporation of social democracy. Bad reason when things are not called by their name. And certainly social democracy, which had played a key role in the balance of European democracies, has been fading, dragged down by the conservative radicalization of liberal democracies. Lea Ipy (Tirana, 1979), professor at the London School of Economics, has long warned of this mutation of European socialist parties and the left in general. In her opinion, it was in the late 1970s that "the traditional social democratic parties moved away from representing citizens from the perspective of class and economic vulnerabilities." And yet, it was by this route that the Spanish socialists came to power (1982), combining ideological mutation with the democratic legitimacy that the Spanish right, partly emerging from Franco's regime, was barely seeking.
Now, Lea Ypi (Class boundaries, Anagrama, 2025) takes this reflection to a European scale, at a time when the evolution of the economic and communication system aggravates the vulnerability of large sectors of the working classes, causing the debate to shift towards issues such as immigration by a radicalized right that seeks ways to point the finger at false culprits in order to mobilize votes in its favor. And here immigrants, in their defenselessness, are easy prey. This is what the PP is doing, dragged along by Vox, but also the majority of the European right, as we see clamorously in France, where the dream of macronia has vanished and no one wants to know what happened.
2. Market control. Ypi's "Eleven Theses on Citizenship in the Capitalist State" have the virtue of pointing out what one doesn't want to see in order to face the problems head-on. Let's review them. Citizenship as a commodity: "Transforming citizenship into a static good," reducing it to "an individual title," even susceptible to "being purchased by those with the means and ability to contribute to the host community," or imposing restrictive conditions on the most vulnerable, confirms that a capitalist state is exclusive and exclusionary. In other words, citizenship policies "reinforce the class character of the state" and "discriminate against those who receive it without resources or sponsors."
When citizenship is not conceived as "a vehicle for political emancipation" but as an instrument of exclusion, coexistence is restricted, many people are sidelined, and those who are blamed for the misfortunes of others are blamed. And so the oligarchic drift accelerates, the control by a wealthy minority that influences political power. Thus, in the words of Lea Ypi, the result is that the market controls the state and not the other way around. And citizens become a commodity. A reality that takes us back to ancient times when "property requirements determined who had the right to universal suffrage."
3. The immigrant. The figure of the immigrant, who on the one hand is called upon (because we all know they are needed) and on the other, bears the brunt of the resentment and discontent of certain sectors. In an environment marked by particularistic and exclusionary patriotic ideals that cast them as social scapegoats, immigrants are subjected to constant finger-pointing by the right and far right, who deliberately contribute to hindering their integration. In other words, by fueling divisions based on class, gender, and ethnicity, the finger-pointing against whom the far right unleashes the campaigns of patriotic radicalization on which they thrive is entrenched. And the left, according to Lea Ypi, far removed from the social democratic spirit, is struggling to counter this growing hegemony of rejection of the other and xenophobia that is jeopardizing European democracies, which are clearly in decline. A warning is not a traitor.
