Claudia von Werlhof’s keynote presented at the International Congress of the Free Left in Vienna has now been published in full in DEP – Deportate, Esuli, Profughe (Issue 55/2025).
Under the title “The Utopia of Capitalism as a Fathers’ World – the Void is Near!”, von Werlhof explores the convergence of patriarchal civilization and capitalist machinery into what she calls the Megamachine—a techno-patriarchal system striving to replace life with its artificial counterpart.
Here are two key passages:
„There are analysts who are interpreting these changes all together as the end of capitalism, as a ’new feudalism‘, or as the road to ’socialism‘ and communism. I think, however, there is something quite different happening. We are, instead, approaching the full realization of a civilization which I call ‚patriarchy‘ and its utopia, the Megamachine (Werlhof 2011).“
„Without patriarchy capitalism would have stopped with mercantilism and would not have invented the machine as a form of capital that realizes the patriarchal utopia more than other capital forms, like commodities in general, and money, the “Queen of commodities” (Marx), itself. Finally, capitalism would perhaps not have destroyed the living world by applying alchemy as the method of “creation out of destruction” (Werlhof 2013), using the proletariate to do so. This, however, we do not know as there was never a capi
talism without patriarchy and no modern patriarchy without capitalism (including socialism). „
The full article is available here: DEP_Werlhof, Utopia, 2025
