No Future: sketches for political action in the “new time of the world”

Abstract

In this new century, a new temporal dynamic seems to arise in the West. In many senses, from this new experimentation of historical time, a self-centered present takes a prominent place at the expense of past experiences and future projects. But what is there to say about the political implications of this temporal setting? This article explores two different alternatives for political action on what would be a "new time of the world," taking into account the possible arrangements between experience and expectation in our days: on the one hand, the “communist hypothesis”; on the other, “post-socialism.” Stimulated by the concept of crisis as an opening of possibilities, this text ends with the formulation of an outline of our own action plan, making a synthesis of the modern impulse for the future and the contemporary—sometimes stagnant—omnipresence of a "presentist regime of historicity", combining the notion of an "urgency regime" with elements from the thoughts of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.