Is the Working Class Right Wing?

By -

Two articles which grapple with the question and attempt to make some small sense of how and why the left has lost touch with its proletarian constituency.

Is the Working Class Right Wing?

Excerpt: 

An increasing number of the proletariat and the declassed petty bourgeoisie have gone through a process which tends to reduce them to mere “plebs” [2]. It is, as we said above, a fact, confirmed by the advance of fascist electoral formations even in the old "red" strongholds [3] of European cities. However alongside this phenomenon, there is another one, usually much less emphasised by the mainstream media. It is, simply, the growth of abstention from one side of the Atlantic to the other. This is true for America’s Presidential election as well as, just to give a local example, Monfalcone. The municipal elections of early November took place in this town where both "indigenous" and immigrant workers are numerous. The abstention rate here was close to fifty percent, allowing the council to be dominated by the list of right wing parties: it seems likely, in fact, that at least a significant part of the working class electorate, which previously supported the "left", rightly disappointed by their old "representatives", abandoned them, by refusing to participate in the fraudulent electoral game. Examination of the data in the US Presidential election shows roughly the same thing: “popular” abstentionism was mainly on the "left", thus in a large part working class, in order to punish a candidate, Clinton who has always stood unequivocally, and with a certain arrogance, on the side of the infamous "1%"



• • • • •


Excerpt:

No wonder why left wing tendencies and social democratic parties have declined, and the ones that survived, shifted rightwards. For they all aim to convince “likely voters” who tend to be  petit-bourgeosified middle classes whose class interests are aligned with tax cuts and fiscal austerity, in contrast to lower income individuals that do not vote as much, and who would benefit from wealth redistribution programs. 
Instead of aiming for likely voters, leftists should create a genuine socialist party that fights for the working class and the poor.  The key for socialist hegemony is politically activating unlikely voters, e.g. racialized, working class and poor individuals, rather than trying to pull the heart strings of a middle class. This strategy will not yield  easy wins in the ballot box, for the likely voters tend to be conservative. Instead it would require a strategy in the long run where socialist hegemony is created amongst unlikely, low income voters. 

• • • • •


Additionally, a tangentially but equally relevant discussion to left politics in the context of nationalism, internationalism and neoliberal globalism.

Red, White, and Blue Labour at The World Transformed 2018


"Now, up against the normalisation of far-right politics by the British establishment, and the need to reconcile the differences between sections of its electoral coalition who have vastly different attitudes towards immigration, can Labour win power on a platform of progressive economic policy and radical anti-racism?"



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Deforestation Process

By -
Image
  The Deforestation Process Deforestation is too often reduced to what’s most conspicuous. But deforestation is complex and a lot more than raising beef cattle or growing soybeans. To begin with, despite all the biodiversity especially of plant life, rain forest soil isn’t very fertile. Nope, it’s actually very oxalic. Oxalic soils are acidic. Acidic soils are full of iron, bauxite and other minerals.  So not only are trees in the forest chopped down for their precious hardwood, the soils these trees grow in are mined for minerals including aluminum, zinc, copper, manganese, gold and iron. Do you know where the aluminum in your water bottle came from? What’s one of most electricity intensive things to do? Convert bauxite into aluminum. It’s an electrostatic process to remove oxygen from the alumina (Al2O3). This electricity is also one of the largest costs of producing aluminum. So that’s why hydroelectricity is often used to reduce the costs of refining bauxite to alumina to ...
Read more

The Deep State vs The Deep Country

By -
Image
  The Deep State vs The Deep Country I need to begin with the obvious: in spite of all the deep state, propaganda and “deep empire” (transnational) resources being used to declare that “Biden” (i.e. Harris) has won, as of right now nobody knows who got most votes and where. I would even suggest that we will never really find out who won, because who won depends on a large number of local laws and regulations and because it will probably never be possible to separate the fake votes from the legal ones. Finally, neither side will ever gracefully admit to having lost the contest. So now the country will enter a profound crisis. That is the bad news. But there is also very good news. First, it has now become clear to the entire planet that the US “democracy” is anything but: the USA is an  oligarchic plutocracy , plagued with a myriad of antiquated laws and corrupt to the bone. The special “trick” of this US oligarchic plutocracy is that is masquerades as an ochlocracy: there is *...
Read more

The Deep Politics of Jared Leto’s Cult

By -
Image
The Deep Politics of Jared Leto’s Cult Posted on  September 15, 2019 …Pop singer—he’s not so much a person as a puppet, whose strings are pulled for a scheme of total nightmare! …A terrifying and withering exposé of the misuse of power in an age of illusion! — Privilege  theatrical trailer,  1967 For the past year, I’ve been working hard on a book project, which is going to offer insight into a lot of the bigger contemporary political trends. One of the main threads is this: many of the political conflicts we see are the result of internecine struggles between ruling class-power blocs, and many of these are the result of Silicon Valley taking its place among the monopoly industries. In order to illustrate the concept of deep politics, one chapter discusses conclusions we can draw from two of the best on the subject:  Crypto Cuttlefish  and  Dave McGowan . One of the first things to say about the value of their respective research i...
Read more