Let me begin by admitting my role in the global spread of Antonio Gramsci’s remark from his Prison Notebooks: “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 [fenomeni morbosi] appear.” Indeed, I am responsible for a slightly shorter, and, dare I say, pithier iteration: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Whether you ask Blue Labour thinkers or lazy journalists or Robert Jenrick, they all agree on one thing – we are living in Gramsci’s interregnum. On 16 November, the phrase “a time of monsters” even made it to the front page of the Daily Mail, in a story about Donald Trump and this year’s Reith lectures.
What is the nature of this interregnum? In social change, capitalism is disintegrating but the new socialist order cannot be born and so we get morbid symptoms (like the hierarchies of techno-feudalism); in the sexual economy, the old patriarchy is disintegrating and the new free sexuality cannot be born, so we are getting morbid symptoms; etc. There is something delusional about this faith that the present is purely a transitional period. The worst delusion is that a direct and smooth passage from the old to the new is possible, and that we just missed it due to our contingent limitations – for example, the idea that Stalinism arose because the first Marxist revolution happened in a wrong place, in “backwards” Russia and not in the developed West. It is therefore clear why Gramsci’s phrase that I propagated became so popular. It allows us to save the basic progressive view of history (say, the passage from capitalism to socialism), and to dismiss the Stalinist monstrosity as a contingent deviation due to historical circumstances, not as something which was inscribed as a possibility in the very basic Marxist view of history. The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said that the future will be socialism or barbarity – but what we learned from Stalinism is that it can well be both at the same time.
In view of the recent worldwide rise in fascism as the reaction to the crisis of global capitalism, the American philosopher Todd McGowan once suggested to me that we should reverse another well-known line, this time from Walter Benjamin, that “behind every fascism there is a failed revolution”. It’s not that every fascism is the result of a failed revolution, but fascism is the natural response that capitalism engenders. Capitalism reacts to a crisis with some form of fascism, and the emancipatory resistance is then a reaction to this fascist threat. In short, there is no radical emancipation without a fascist threat. So what if we turn things on their head? The true “morbid symptom” is our image of the new world that we expected to emerge – and the solution is precisely and only to be sought in the desperate improvisations by which we try to avoid the catastrophe on the horizon. In Russia’s October Revolution of 1917, the true morbidity resided in the communist utopia that sustained the Bolsheviks, and the “proper new” just popped up here and there in the resistance against Stalinism, especially in Trotskyism. In the US today, the proper new appears in the left of the Democratic Party (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani).
Only against this background can we account for the fact that Gramsci is a key point of reference of the new populist right. Donald Trump and his cohorts are the true “cultural Marxists”, directly appropriating (their version of) the struggle for ideological hegemony as it was conceptualised by Gramsci. Struggle for hegemony means that the actual constellation of social forces is not directly reflected in ideological space – the more powerful groups in a society (billionaires, plutocrats) have greater ideological power than the masses. Opposing social forces therefore attempt to appropriate into their ideological project elements of shared popular tradition (national history, religion and morality, etc). The winner is the one who succeeds in presenting their ideological project as universal, as encompassing most of the moments that constitute a social identity of a people. Trumpian populism thus unites in its project several, sometimes conflicting, elements: working-class resistance to big corporate capital, with affirmation of the “creative” spirit of capitalism, and the hatred of foreigners as the disturbing element in the social body. Let’s not forget Gramsci developed his notion of hegemony as a reaction to fascist victory in Italy. Gramsci was fully aware that the emerging Stalinist left was also part of the new morbidity, and his own thought was a “desperate improvisation” against the predominant communist discourse (and practice) of his time.
The next step to be made here is to see how the struggle for hegemony is at its most efficient when it successfully appropriates a particular image or meme and makes it work for its own ideological agenda. Recall the photo of the drowned bodies of Salvadoran migrant Óscar Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, from 2019, which instantly became a symbol of US border control brutality, a case of what Hegel would have called concrete universality: the image of a singular case which evokes a global tragedy and, as such, calls for sympathy and action. It is crucial to bear in mind how it is the context that accounts for the efficiency of this image – one can imagine the same photo as an illustration of the danger migrant families put themselves in when attempting hazardous crossings.
There is, however, a deeper lesson behind the symbolic battle over migrants and refugees which is hard to swallow. Yes, the discourse around these images is currently far from sympathetic, and anti-immigrant populists shamelessly propagate images which show immigrants as brutal thieves who terrorise our population, circulating non-verified stories about rape and other violent crimes in order to give credibility to their claim that immigrants pose a threat to our way of life. However, all too often, multicultural liberals proceed in a similar way. They pass in silence over actual differences in the ways of life between refugees and citizens since mentioning them may be seen to promote Eurocentrism. The most infamous instance of this in the UK comes from the grooming gangs scandal that came to light around a decade ago, in which groups of predominantly South Asian men were found to have been systematically raping thousands of working-class white girls. Evidence of the crimes was ignored or downplayed in order not to trigger Islamophobia, a public scandal that is still hanging over British politics today.
Or recall the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, on a local train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August. The video that was broadcast shows Iryna getting on the train and taking a seat directly in front of Decarlos Brown Jr, the suspect. At first, nothing seems unusual, other than Brown appearing upset in his seat – nothing that could cause a commotion. Four minutes later, Brown stabs Zarutska multiple times. She collapses as Brown calmly walks to the front of the car, takes off his sweater and wraps his bloodied hand in it before exiting the train. Other passengers were alerted to what happened after seeing a trail of blood and Zarutska collapsed – but (for me, at least) the most depressing fact is that, after the act of killing, there is also no commotion. The (mostly black) passengers sitting nearby do nothing, they just stare embarrassed. The murder was, as expected, widely commented on and decried by the new right commentators, from the late Charlie Kirk to Trump himself, who were mostly playing a racial card: a black convicted criminal killed a white girl. And yet, instead of providing a serious interpretation, all the liberal left could do was downplay the event because it didn’t fit the politically correct coordinates.
The lesson here is that the left should accept that politics involves a struggle for hegemony and learn to win it. During Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, a lone figure stole the show by just sitting there, sticking out as an element of discord, disturbing the spectacle: Bernie Sanders. The photograph – now a widespread meme – shows Sanders masked (this was 2021), mittened and overcoated, with his arms and legs crossed. The effect was not that of a person left out at a party but rather of a person who has no interest in joining it. Every philosopher knows how impressed Hegel was when he saw Napoleon riding through Jena – it was for him like seeing the World Spirit (Hegel’s term for the predominant historical tendency) riding a horse. The fact that Sanders stole the show and that the image of him sitting there instantly became an icon means that the true world spirit of our time was there, too. In his lone figure was embodied a global scepticism about the fake normalisation staged in the ceremony: that there is still hope for our cause; people are aware that a more radical change is needed. Lines of separation seemed clearly drawn: the liberal establishment embodied in Biden vs democratic socialists whose most popular representative is Bernie Sanders.
But my point here is not just a political one. It concerns the inherent necessity for a general belief system to cohere around a particular person. This is why one cannot reduce this cohering to a form of fetishism in which a complex web of mediations appears as an immediate presence. Only through such an embodying does this complex web (in our case, all the tendencies and hopes that Sanders personifies) acquire a form of actuality, a positive force that sustains political engagement. If we take away this personification, we don’t get the general spirit of a world in its clean form, without any contingent empirical elements – what we get is a mess with no mobilising force. And it is important to note the difference between this image of Sanders and the photograph of a defiant Trump with blood on his ear and cheek, being rushed offstage by secret service agents, fist raised, with an American flag in the background. While that photo also became instantly iconic, it did not acquire the same mobilising force as the much more modest and less spectacular photograph of Sanders sitting alone.
We should therefore accept that our aspirations and beliefs should be focalised around a single figure, much in the way that Trump has done for the right: the left also need charismatic leading voices like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez or Mamdani. Did something similar not happen after Luigi Mangione was arrested in December 2024 and charged with murder in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson? While people generally condemned the act, something unexpected also happened. Since many in the US dislike UnitedHealthcare due to its pay-out policies, Thompson was perceived as a symbol of big companies ruthlessly profiting from small people. This triggered a large wave of sympathy for Mangione, a wave that crossed the usual party divisions. As in the case of Sanders, Mangione became a symbol of the oppressed in the class struggle – a proof that class struggle is lurking beneath the official political lines of division, unable to express itself adequately within the existing political coordinates and waiting to explode when the opportunity arises.
So what is the link between Gramsci’s notion of the struggle for hegemony and his notion of morbidity that arises between the old and the new? Back to our starting point: the true morbidity resided in the attempt to stage Biden’s inauguration as a return to normality after the unfortunate detour of Trump’s reign. The widespread appeal of the image of Sanders sitting alone was a sign that millions of people were aware of the morbidity of Biden’s inauguration, and that they hoped an authentic, non-morbid, new beginning was possible.
Both Trump and Biden are morbid phenomena, although each in a different way. Trump is an extreme postmodernist historicist, an obscene new master faking fidelity to tradition. Biden’s progressivism was thoroughly conservative – his goal was effectively to change some things so that nothing that really mattered would change.
In other words, engaging in or indeed winning the hegemonic struggle does not mean we can resolve the interregnum. Antonio Gramsci’s quotation of morbidity is in fact a description of political struggle as such, a struggle that is perpetual. Biden’s inauguration ceremony is experienced as morbid only when we are already fixated on the redemptive figure of Sanders sitting alone. A space without struggle for hegemony and without morbid phenomena can only be a space of pure rational technocracy, a space that is actually the most morbid of them all: a post-human space.
Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is “Quantum History” (Bloomsbury)
[See also: The feminisation mystique: who ruined the West?]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand