>>2749726some scattered thoughts:
because higher education enrollment has increased over time in almost every first world country, this whole thing is engaged in an unspoken compositional fallacy. the "middle class" people referred to as involved in the DSA (or, one suspects, the British Greens or similar) are in fact working class people who've attained "middle class" coded traits like university education or not working in heavy industry as a result of other societal changes. (We will leave aside that "middle class" is a joke category split between proletarians and petit-bourgeoise, or, indeed, that many petit-bourgoise are "working class coded")
the idea that identity politics repels "workers" has also proven fallacious. on the contrary, people love identity politics. those put off by identity politics of the liberal left generally find themselves comfortable with the identity politics of the right. those incensed that you're proud to be black are usually themselves proud to be white, or at least, wish to be told that they should be proud to be white. what such an outlook really shows is that the left is alienated from "workers" for a different reason: because it imagines a certain fixed image of a worker, in his hard hat, at his factory. a starbucks barista on minimum wage? she's not a worker, she's just some middle class woman. what's she going to do? anyway, we should find positions that repel her and attract the bloke in the hard hat.
(this comes up in the thing itself. a "middle class graduate forced to work in a grocery store"
is a grocery store worker, you don't get magic not-real-working-class points for resenting it, or for thinking that a university degree would've got you something better! marx didn't have a cutout for you to be bourgeoise if you regard yourself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire!)
the article's view on why Corbyn lost is also flawed. Corbyn didn't lose the working poor, he lost the old. Every age group under 40 voted more strongly for Labour than for the Conservatives. (Chart 1) The article talks about how he alienated the working poor by promising free shit (no?), but doesn't touch on the central thing that blew up their campaign: Brexit. (Which, incidentally, was
also not driven by the working poor as such. It was driven by the best-off people in the worst-off communities. e.g. old buy-to-let retirees, etc.) That is to say, the class element is overhyped.
incidentally: chart related. in the UK, in the 18-34 age range, those in "routine" occupations record the highest levels of green (e.g. lib-left) support. that is to say, if you're a 30 year old office manager, you are
less likely to vote green than if you're a 30 year old cleaner.
(we might also add: Labour in power under Keir Starmer tried precisely this kind of socially conservative, anti-immigration, workerist tilt, based on the theory they needed to win back all the hard-hat wearing manual workers they supposedly lost in 2019… the result is that the Labour party is now polling in the death zone because they've bled their actually-existing young, educated support base without picking up any of the 50 year olds who actually vote Reform.)
>The 2020’s will be the decade where more of these figures – people like Sahra Wagenknecht and all the other good socialists who have been vilified and discarded by the liberal left – will return to haunt our political stage once again, and it will be the decade where the left discovers that its own class base is just too weak and small to achieve political power in the face of the angry working class it now fears and despises. aged like milk since BSW deservedly ate shit at the last election, and ultimately flawed on its own terms: even if we accept the argument that there's some big evil PMC left of downwardly mobile graduates,
that group is growing over time while the "traditional" working class is shrinking. every time the daughter of a coal miner goes to university and comes back disappointed she's still got to work in Tesco Grimton she's transmuted under this scheme from lovable worker ('s wife) to a PMC rogue!
anyway, here's my take: people vote based on their dispositions and political parties are an identity-commodity like any other. this is of limited relevance to revolutionary marxists
(as marxists anyway - you can quickly see when someone's policy positions are really a matter of disposition. e.g. i don't care about immigration, but i am anti-anti immigration…), except that it lets you see opinion polls as the personality-polls that they are. when you see a lib-left person, instead of thinking "middle class graduates" (wrong) you can think "high openness, high agreeableness, high neuroticism, dislikes social gradation / aesthetically egalitarian", when you see right-wing voters, you can similarly go: low openness, low agreeableness, possibly low neuroticism, and enjoys social gradation. universities are one of many environments that produce this kind of dispositional shift, and with it, shifting voting behaviors. other changing dynamics explain changes on the right, with the old, etc.
for example: the internet allows a free market in nonsense content. the old narrative says that fox news mislead people, which is why they vote republican. i put to you that instead, certain people are drawn to misleading content based on their general disposition - they wish, for example, to read about migrant crimes - and while in the old days fox news was restrained to merely misleading or sensationalistic reporting, today the free market allows people in the market for such stories to read ones that were made up whole cloth by an enterprising indian. that same disposition leads them to vote republican. (and, perhaps, leads them to not read. more liberals read fox news's website than republicans - republicans watch TV and listen to podcasts! or perhaps reading is a PMC affectation, and real proles are illiterate?)
this also explains why many right wing "nationalist" parties are really the local Trump fan club: because they're selecting for the disposition of the kind of person drawn to Trump and the revulsion he causes respectable people, rather than a meaningful ideological or class-based program. The Tories in Britain are currently making the same "ideological" mistake as Labour, alienating their actually-existing wealthy professional supporters by churning out low-rent Trumpslop to win back the voters who left them for Reform. in fairness, it worked for them in 2017 and 2019 back when Corbyn was there to spook the rich, but now all it does is put up a big banner that says the Tories are not a party for respectable bourgeois people (their traditional self image.), they're a party for yankified louts, or upper-class wankers cosplaying as yankified louts while eying a Reform defection if polls don't turn around soon.
most "PMC" aren't PMC, you just don't like young people. insofar as there is a PMC it is merely insufferable while "populists" against them are driven by man's most base instincts towards cruelty and spite and are - at the risk of sounding hysterical - against the very concept of civilization itself. show me a reform voter and i will show you either an imbecile or a bastard.