The Digger

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 per...

Published: 25/11/2006 Written by: Tom Bramble Socialist Alternative Socialists argue that the working class needs to make a revolution to bring about a socialist society. But as soon as you say this you encounter an obvious objection: that the working class does not appear to be in a mad hurry to make a revolution. The supposed reasons for the apparent passivity of the working class are many and varied. That the working class in the West is too well-off. That the working class is trapped in a fog of media lies. That, with the decline of the blue-collar workforce, the working class doesn't exist in the way that it did in Marx's day. What often underpins this pessimism is a romanticised idea of the past. People think of the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the stirring struggles of Spanish workers in the 1930s and believe that workers then were constantly itching to fight and that society was in a permanent state of turmoil. This objection is nothing new. In 1907, the ...