When the political history of 2016 is written there will be one trend that explains so much of the seeming madness that has seen the return of Hanson and the rise of Trump, the Brexit and beyond. Class has become the new black.

While the west’s cold war victory sparked Fukyama’s The End of History, his 1989 treatise about the irreversible triumph of free markets, 2016 has invited us to look through the Marxist lens afresh.

Yes, the world has changed beyond recognition in the 150 years since Marx published Das Kapital, but his recognition of a self-perpetuating ruling class in conflict with the masses remains sharp.

The shattering of the elite consensus through the ballot box smacks of a modern day uprising of the proletariat, rejecting both the bourgeoise niceties of identity politics and the de-humanising machinery of market fundamentalism.

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While there is little that is communist about putting faith in a blowhard celebrity property developer, his claims the “system is rigged” and it was time to “drain the swamp” are, in their way, revolutionary calls to arms.

They strike a chord with the industrial working classes who have seen their wages falling in real terms and their job security undermined by international trade and automation no matter which political machine is in power.

The British referendum can be read as a similar expression of class antagonism, a wilful rejection of an elite consensus, drawing in the same cohort of disenfranchised working class voters that swing the rust-belt states in the US.

This week’s Essential Report suggests that class consciousness is also at play in the realignment of Australian politics that has seen the resurgence of One Nation and a disruptive column of outsider sole traders.

Australians accept class as part of their society, rejecting both the romanticism of our egalitarian folklore and the reductionism of the Tory’s “politics of envy”.



Coalition voters are marginally less likely to embrace a class analysis, but even here the numbers are overwhelming. These figures are not new, we have been polling the question for more than three years and the public is consistent on the point.

But our idea of class is more sophisticated than a stark capital versus labour divide: while one third of us identify as working class, a bare majority see ourselves as part of the middle class.

Meanwhile just 3% of Australians identify as upper class, while fewer than 10% say they live outside a class identity.

Of course, in Marx’s time the middle class were a fairly insignificant rump, the petit bourgeoisie who oversaw and profited from the work of the masses, without holding the levers of power of the upper classes.

To him the middle class was a problem to be solved (for Stalin they were fast-tracked to the gulag). Today they are the dominant bloc of voters and – like the working class – they don’t see their lives getting better under the current model of capitalism.

So Australia’s Marxist self-narrative has the upper class moving forward, the middle class not moving forward and the working class experiencing falling living standards.



It’s here where things get really interesting. In a series of questions we asked voters which class each political party mainly represented. The responses can be read in full here but they are summarised below.

While Labor is still recognised as the principle custodian of the working class, One Nation is seen to be challenging it with its old Labor agenda of protectionism and support of the White Australia policy.



The Liberal party is seen to be the advocate of the upper class, consistent with its modern day business mantras, if at odds with its roots as the party of the middle class, while the Greens are conceived as the post-class political force.

But what’s most glaring here is that while most of us see ourselves as being of the middle class, no one sees a party dedicated to their interests.

Just to restate the implication of these findings: we believe class exists, the majority of us see ourselves as middle class, but we don’t see anyone representing us.

If that’s not a recipe for political disruption I don’t know what is.

Extrapolated, this would also help explain the higher than expected vote for Trump amongst higher income Americans, a point some have used to deny the class analysis.

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These numbers suggest we should be paying more attention to class when attempting to understand everything from health policy, to education to immigration and budget deficits.

Class is also a useful frame for the simple reason that without it, the analysis of our current politics is frankly is too depressing to bear.

Without class, the Trump presidency leads us to conclude that Americans are racist and misogynist, ditto the Brexit voters while One Nation is really about making Australia white again.

The problem with these analyses is they give us nowhere to go, other than to reject our fellow citizens as deplorable and feed new cycles of manipulative hate and dislocation hatched for cynical political gain.

This is not to excuse the fermenting of racism by politicians or the acts they inspire, rather it is to accept that it is not a useful theory for taking a society forward.

A class-frame gives us something more positive to work with – an analysis of power that demands job security and a greater share for the working class coupled with a desperate need for advocates of the middle classes.

In a time when we may feel lost in the political wilderness, maybe Marx can provide us with a road map back.