An Intellectual Mass-Transformism: Restoration and Postmodern Passive Revolution in the Neoliberal Cycle

In the 1970s, the historical-political cycle that had long characterized Western social conflict was reversed, and the rise of the lower classes was followed by a massive counteroffensive by the ruling classes. It was then that modern democracy began to end, just as a neo-Bonapartistic and media-oriented regime took hold that today constantly forms and restructures Western public opinion. If the rise of the lower classes was made possible through their conscious unification, a necessary precondition for the weakest parts of society to be able to act effectively in the conflict, the deconstruction of modern democracy, on the contrary, has since then inevitably involved the disarticulation of the antagonist subject and even the very concept of identity. It was a process that took place mainly in the production domain and in the capitalistic factories, of course. But it was also a process that would not have been possible without a radical parallel transformation of forms of consciousness, a transformation that calls into question the ideological sphere and its philosophy. Created and developed primarily within the intellectual left, the same set of positions that we can link to the cultural shift towards postmodernism should therefore be understood, in this perspective, as the prevailing ideological feature of an enormous historical shift. It is a transition in which restoration is intertwined with passive revolution (defined as a process in which elements of a new order become predominant in an old order without any evident rupture), resulting in a process that could be defined as a sort of intellectual transformism on a mass scale.