The worst economic recession since the post-war period marked the ideological crash of neoliberalism, but did not bring forth a new social model. The major powers resemble a heart attack patient who has just been discharged from intensive care and the first thing he does is light a cigarette: while real unemployment in the US reaches 17.5%, the bonuses of the golden boys reach astronomical limits.

Regardless of the current fluctuations of the economy, as Petros Papakonstantinou argues, the biggest upheavals are ahead of us. Like an apprentice magician, global capitalism fails to control the enormous forces of the third technological revolution - information technology, automation, biotechnology - that it has unleashed. At the geopolitical level, the crisis heralds not only the rupture of globalization, but also the end of two centuries of white man's planetary dominance, as symbolically signaled by the deep bows of the first black president of America to the emperor of Japan and the leader of "communist" China.

Starting from the Left's inability to politically benefit from the favorable conjuncture, the author seeks a direct response to the crisis, a narrow path between a Left that is a donor body of Social Democracy and a Left that is a political hermit. At the same time, he returns to the major strategic questions raised by the collapse of 1989-1990, arguing that communism cannot be understood as a regime, but as the line of the horizon, which the closer we approach it, the further it recedes, yet remains necessary in order for one to maintain their orientation, especially in times of turmoil.

The publication attempts a coherent consideration of the great transformation initiated by international capitalism in the last thirty years, after the shock of May '68 and the economic crisis of the 1970s, which put an end to the Keynesian compromise of the "welfare state".