Capitalism and its forgotten children.

The 21st century has produced a paradox: the more capitalism advances, the more it erases the memories that limited it. Societies that have won rights, decent work, and social protection seem to have forgotten where they came from. Comfort has turned into amnesia, and the global middle class—heir to heroic struggles—has become hostage to the illusion that merit is enough. There is a civilizational risk in a world that naturalizes precariousness and privilege.

The lost memory of the struggles

Modern societies experience a curious form of forgetting: they remember everything the market produces, but nothing of what the people have achieved. The memory of social struggle, of strikes, of political mobilization, has been erased in the name of efficiency and consumption. It is as if the achievements of civilization arose by spontaneous generation—and not from the blood, sweat, and collective organization of millions of workers.

Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist who formulated the concept of collective memory, reminded us that a society only remembers what serves its present cohesion. Capitalism, by naturalizing individual success, needs to forget the history of the struggles that limited its power. Thus, forgetting is not an accident: it is a project.

Jeffrey Olick, in studying the politics of remembrance and forgetting, showed that contemporary power represses not only through force, but also through the selection of memories. What should be remembered and what should be forgotten is part of the political game. Therefore, weakened democracies become amnesic societies: they no longer know where they came from and, therefore, no longer know where to go.

Comfort as anesthesia

Late capitalism has transformed comfort into anesthesia. The middle classes—once protagonists in the struggle for citizenship—have been taught to confuse well-being with consumption, dignity with credit. The "forgotten child" of capitalism is the one who enjoys social rights but believes they are natural, not the result of a long struggle.

Consumption has become a substitute for politics. The shopping mall has replaced the public square, the cell phone has taken the place of the assembly. The citizen has become a customer; work, an app. The contemporary individual lives surrounded by technology and deprived of meaning: they know how much they earn, but they don't know what they've lost.

Erik Olin Wright, an American Marxist sociologist, described this phenomenon as the reconfiguration of the middle classes: fragmented between job insecurity and the desire for distinction, they have lost collective consciousness. It is the nameless proletariat, the self-employed worker who sees himself as an entrepreneur, even when he barely survives.

A weary Europe and an amnesiac Brazil

In Europe, the Welfare State has become a museum piece. The generations born under the protection of the European social system believed it was eternal. When unemployment and austerity arrived, the instinct was to blame foreigners, not capital.

The "yellow vests" in France, the homeless in England, and the precarious situation of Spanish youth are a portrait of a continent that has forgotten its own solidarity.

Brazil, more dramatically, also suffers from social amnesia. The generation that rose to prominence in the 2000s—which had access to university, credit, and consumption—believed that progress was an individual achievement, not the result of public policy. When the crisis arrived, this same generation began to reject the State that had supported them. It is the perverse effect of forgetfulness: those who forget the history of inclusion do not recognize exclusion.

This collective amnesia—which erases the origin of achievements and reverses responsibilities—also explains the ideological strength of the middle class. It was in this sense that the philosopher Marilena Chaui, in 2013, during a tribute to former president Lula at the Federal University of ABC, declared that she “hated the middle class,” not out of social contempt, but because she saw in it the moral cement of a society that naturalizes inequality. Twelve years later, in 2025, she reaffirmed: “I hate the middle class until the end of my days. The middle class functions by oppressing the dominated and flattering the dominant.”

The philosopher added that this class is the "moral support of authoritarianism" and the "instrument for legitimizing social hatred." Her words, though harsh, express the diagnosis of a phenomenon that spans continents: the depoliticization of the middle classes and their conversion into a symbolic bulwark against solidarity.

Social media has amplified this void of belonging. Politics has been replaced by diffuse indignation, and solidarity by instant judgment. Neoliberalism triumphs when it manages to erase from collective memory the idea that well-being is a right—and not a gift from the market.

Progress that forgot the people.

Forgetting is not only historical, but moral. A society that erases the suffering of the past is incapable of recognizing the pain of the present. Contemporary capitalism has created a kind of "liquid memory": everything dissolves at the speed of novelty. Yesterday's injustices become noise, and inequality, landscape.

The new digital elite—rich in data and poor in humanity—has learned to profit from oblivion. Precariousness is sold as freedom; loneliness, as entrepreneurship. The commodification of life has reached the point where human time itself has begun to be extracted as a natural resource.

The amnesia of the middle classes mirrors the alienation of the rich. Some forget the struggles that elevated them; others pretend they have triumphed without ever depending on anyone. Both become prisoners of an illusion: that civilization can survive without solidarity.

The duty to remember

Memory is the last bastion of resistance. Remembering the struggles that built the modern world is not nostalgia, but a political act. It is what prevents history from beginning again as farce.

Halbwachs said that remembering is always remembering with someone — and perhaps our greatest challenge is to relearn how to remember together. Recovering the memory of strikes, marches, and utopias is also recovering hope.

Capitalism can be many things, but it cannot do without humanity. And humanity, in order to exist, needs remembrance: to remember that freedom was born from struggle, that equality cost lives, that well-being is not a miracle, but an achievement.

Forgetting is not neutral: it is the silent victory of power over memory.