Time of Monsters
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist and philosopher. As history has shown, Marxists failed to predict the future course of society, but they were remarkably good at exposing the flaws of their own era. After all, they fought real fascists — the genuine, vicious kind, not just anyone who happens to disagree, as is fashionable to label them today. And so I find myself noticing that Gramsci is being quoted quite a lot these days — and for good reason. He wrote about the “time of monsters” in his “Prison Notebooks,” penned during his imprisonment in a fascist jail in the 1930s.
His famous phrase goes like this: “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.” which translates as: “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 phenomena appear.”
I actually like it even better when paraphrased: “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born — now is the time of monsters.”
And this, of course, applies fully to our own time. The old order — the postwar New Deal — is dying, above all, decaying from within, contrary to the beliefs of many propagandists and ideologues of the Global South. That’s the real root: the old world’s inability to prioritize first principles. The strength of all the dictators of our day lies in the weaknesses of the so-called “developed” world. The monsters are those who exploit the chaos between orders, but they are not the new order. Who the new will be, we don’t know, but it certainly won’t be the party autocrats.
