Donald Parkinson takes issue with the calls for a “socially conservative leftism” that have increased in popularity since Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the UK election.

Socially conservative, economically leftist

The recent UK election has been a test of faith for many. Seeing countless working-class people vote for a gang of pedophiles, who want to cut the NHS in the name of nationalism, is a dark sign for Marxists who are invested in class politics as the pathway to an emancipated world. Regardless of how one feels about social-democracy or bourgeois elections, this was a defeat for the left. Nationalism triumphed over classical working-class politics attempting a return to the national stage.

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn by Brexit has been seen as validation for an ideology that can be described in short as “socially conservative, economically leftist.” The argument goes as follows: given the choice between economic redistribution and nationalism, the working class has chosen nationalism. Therefore the left needs to embrace nationalism along with all the other parochial “forces of habit” found in the working class if they want to win. A recent example is the advocacy group Blue Labour, which at least gives an honest argument for these politics without obfuscation.

Blue Labour argues that the politics of social conservatism aligned with economic leftism has a new majority, a silent majority if you will. It calls for a politics that is “Internationalist and European” but “not globalist, nor universalist nor cosmopolitan.” It calls for embracing the parochial against the universalist in the name of resisting the commodification of labor, not unlike the “Reactionary Socialism” maligned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Yet instead of arguing for a return to feudalism, Blue Labour wants to return to a Fordist economy where the family and nation are stabilized by a protectionist social order.

This argument is given theoretical justification in a paper by Steve Hall and Simon Winlow. Hall and Winlow paint a historical picture of the British Left as a sort of battle waged by middle-class reformers trying to enforce a cosmopolitan morality on a socially conservative working class. According to Hall and Winlow, these reformers were first found in organizations like the Reform League and Fabians, entering the Labour Party to force their middle-class ideals on the workers’ movement. Fair enough, but Hall and Winlow accuse Engels of wanting to destroy working-class life to open the space for socialism, and claim the Soviet Union was inspirational to the Fabians because it was “yet another system imposed upon the working class by a middle-class vanguard.”

Then the article ventures into the territory of rightist conspiracy theories about “Cultural Marxism”, claiming that the Frankfurt School and the post-structuralist academics were merely a continuation of these middle-class reformers. Here we find a narrative best expounded by Christopher Lasch in his seminal Revolt of the Elites, in which middle-class technocrats try to impose social engineering on a wholesome “common people”, people with a healthy instinct of revulsion towards top-down social engineering. This is a worldview where anyone who strives to fight for socially progressive ideas amongst the working class is inherently a “middle-class outsider” trying to force their ways upon the righteous common folk.

This is also a worldview that has been bubbling under the surface since Marxist theorists like Michel Clouscard and Christopher Lasch critiqued what they saw as a narcissistic and libertine superstructure that reinforced and served modern capitalism, particularly after 1968. Today figures like Angela Nagle and Aimee Terese repeat similar critiques to an online audience. A common target is open borders and LGBTQ politics, and appeals are made for the left to make peace with the social-conservatism that (supposedly) dominates the working class. At the same time, Tucker Carlson calls attention to a potential electoral majority that is “culturally conservative and economically populist”, which can challenge a “state religion of woke politics” and the “elite left”. In the journal American Affairs, formerly pro-Trump, a more intellectual case is more for this kind of politics. A general political trend seems to be emerging in both the left and the right, basing itself on the premise that organizing the working class and challenging liberal capitalism means turning to social conservatism and even embracing traditional values. To quote a tweet from the leftist podcaster Sean P. McCarthy:

Seems to me like religion, family, and the nation state are all things that give people a sense of community and duty counter to the alienation and loneliness of late stage capitalism and the left should probably shut up about abolishing them and let people enjoy things.

In this, we see three of the main categories that the left is supposed to make peace with. Religion, family, and nation-state have long been critiqued by the left as an ideological fetishism and forms of oppression and alienation. This is not some deviation of a “postmodern cultural turn”, as some like to claim in an attempt to appeal to an earlier form of leftism where class issues were at the forefront. The Bolsheviks included figures like Alexandra Kollontai, who sought to overcome the bourgeois family while her comrades called for a radical internationalism that aimed to make no compromise with national chauvinism. These positions are a continuation of the radical enlightenment convictions baked into Marxism that critiques all oppressive superstitions that limit human potential. Yet with the left losing harder than ever, many think that it’s time to give up on these convictions. They think it is time to make peace with and even start appealing to what is essentially reactionary tradition in the name of building a movement that will effectively challenge neoliberal capitalism, both economically and culturally.

We can call this tendency “traditionalist leftism”, or “trad leftism” for short. It is a form of populism that sees the working classes as inherently morally correct no matter how organized or politically conscious. To even see social backwardness as a phenomenon among the working class to be challenged is to capitulate to a petty-bourgeois moralism more concerned with abstract universalism than the direct needs of workers. The working class is scared of migrants, alienated by trans people, and annoyed by the feminists who seek to guilt them for desiring a stable family life, the argument goes. To oppose these attitudes is to play the role of the middle-class reformer who seeks to impose progressive values on the workers against their will. As a result, the trad leftists implicitly call for a program of strong borders and strong families along with a paternalistic welfare state, sometimes flirting with an embrace of religion. After all, wasn’t Stalin himself opposed to homosexuality, making concessions to the Orthodox Church?

In a previous article, I argued against similar logic, albeit one that was less outright in favor of chauvinism, by arguing that a politics of economism that focuses purely on the bread-and-butter is anti-Marxist rather than authentically Marxist. Yet to simply appeal to “true Marxism” to show why the trad leftists are wrong helps us little when most people don’t consider themselves Marxists in the first place. Moralizing or calling people Strasserites won’t help us either. Instead, we need strong political arguments as to why an economist “leftism” that appeals to nation, family, and church is not the answer to the problems facing us today, especially for when we engage with working-class communities that themselves hold conservative sentiments.

Nation

Let us begin with the issue of the nation. Blue Labour argues that a politics that “opposes borders and the idea of the nation… cannot develop an alternative story of democratic nationhood, nor one about belonging, nor about international relations.” The underlying premise here is that it is only through nationalism and the nation-state that a democratic polity can be constructed, and since a democratic polity is necessary for leftist politics leftists must embrace the nation. This entails embracing border control to limit migration and putting “our own workers first.” It is a political logic that aims to affirm the nation-state as a protective shield against the power of the global market, with neoliberal capitalism a contradiction between national sovereignty and globalization. Outright Marxists like Wolfgang Streck have made these sorts of claims, arguing for a distinction between “people of the state” and “people of the market” to assert that without a strong national community there is no possibility of opposing capitalism.

Following this logic, various leftists like Angela Nagle and Paul Cockshott have argued that leftists should welcome rather than oppose immigration controls. Ultimately this argument follows an unspoken premise that right-wing nationalists have been repeating since the dawn of the nation-state, which is that social programs rely on an ethnically homogenous community. Therefore, if leftists want to rebuild a welfare state ravaged by neo-liberalism they have no choice but to become advocates of a strong nation-state to preserve the homogeneity of the nation in the face of immigration. And the longer they wait to do this, the longer they will lose like Jeremy Corbyn.

Blue Labour argue that rejecting the national can only mean embracing an “abstract universalism” as opposed to a concrete and actually existing national community. From this abstract universalism, one can only fail to actually form a working-class polity. Yet what the argument seems to forget is that nation-states themselves at one point were merely abstract universalism. The French Revolution developed the modern nation through a notion of universal citizenship that sought to ensure the rights of man, and to form the nation-state a disparate collection of agrarian communities had to be mobilized in the name of these rights. Through a process of political mobilization and organization, the abstract nation was made into a concrete political reality, centralizing different communities under a representative government with rights, duties, and a common language.

If it was possible to do this for the original nation-state then it is also possible to take an abstract internationalism and turn it into a concrete polity. The Second International began such a project, building a working-class culture that oriented itself around a “demonstration culture”, which sought to build a sense of international community among a federation of national parties. By organizing the working class around principles of solidarity with workers of all nations and forming transnational institutions, it is possible to build a democratic community that is not rooted in a particular nation. This isn’t going to be easy; the Second International ultimately succumbed to nationalism. Yet to say that only the nation provides a basis for building a democratic community is to surrender to the path of least resistance and ignore the possibilities contained in history.

If we aim to build this international community of proletarians, we must oppose immigration controls. As Donna Gabaccia shows in her work Militants and Migrants, the process of migration has been key in the formation of transnational working-class communities. To say that immigration controls are necessary because the nation is the only way workers can form a political community is to impose conditions that make transnational working-class communities more difficult to form.

Another issue with embracing the nation-state is that we are entering a global crisis of climate change that simply cannot be addressed on the national level. Developing the kind of response needed to the potential catastrophe on the horizon is going to require cooperation beyond the national level and working towards a global planned economy. The alternative is that nations compete to have the least disastrous downfall, protecting their respective populations from the worst while shutting out those suffering like a sinking lifeboat. It is imperative that humanity moves beyond the nation-state if it is going to survive.

Family

“Abolition of the family” has long been a controversial position amongst communists, prompting Marx and Engels to have to address it in the Communist Manifesto when defending themselves from right-wing attacks. The response of Marx and Engels was to point out that the family was already withering away in the face of capitalism for much of the proletariat, an observation that is made today by the trad leftists to argue that an embrace of family values is the logical conclusion of anti-capitalist politics.

I will concede to the trad leftists that “abolish the family” is not exactly a winning slogan. This is not because it scares workers but because it doesn’t effectively communicate what we are aiming for. We should be more precise in our language, and set our sights more specifically on patriarchy. It is the dependence of women on husbands and of children on their parents that we wish to do away with, not the cohabitation of kinship and the emotional support that comes with it. Of course, there are some leftists like Sophie Lewis who see a future beyond the family based on universal surrogacy, a vision that seems more designed to troll the trad leftists than as a genuine political program. Such visions are genuinely alienating, yet their existence does not require an equally contrarian response that affirms the traditional family.

According to Christopher Lasch, the family is a “haven in a heartless world”. If social life is reduced to pure economic competition between atomized individuals, then the family, for those lucky enough to still have one, is one of the few forms of community they have. There is no doubt that the destruction of the family by capitalism with nothing to replace it is quite grim and psychically horrifying. Yet it is mistaken to idealize the family as an escape from the impersonal alienation of the market, when for many people the family is itself a form of personal and direct alienation. Not everyone lives in a world where their family is their friend; in many cases, one’s family can be their worst enemy. We can do better than valorizing one form of alienation in response to another.

Rather than returning to the family in the face of its destruction under capitalism, we should seek to create a world where the haven of the family is not necessary. Rather than a society full of broken families, we need a society where someone without a family can thrive as well as someone with family intact. This is what “abolishing the family” truly means: to end the economic relations of dependence of wives and children on the patriarch so that kinship is based on voluntary relationships of genuine love and community. This would entail not ending the ability of parents to raise their children, but instead giving children the option to leave their families if they are abusive, while retaining support networks beyond the misery of foster care. It would mean ending the unpaid domestic labor of women that reproduces the nuclear family, by socializing this work and removing its gendered connotations.

This is not to mention that a reassertion of family values could only be done through a turn towards a vile culture of patriarchy. We must understand that patriarchy is not simply an attitude of men, but a historically derived mode of production with institutional forms according to which the wife and children are the property of the father and perform what is essentially slave labor to reproduce the household as an economic unit. To turn back to the traditional family would require empowering this economic unit by reinforcing the conditions under which women are essentially the property of their husbands. Until the trad left is willing to own up to this and describe the measures they will take to accomplish this, their gloating about family values is merely subcultural posturing.

Religion

The issue of religion is hardly cut and dry. Religious belief has been an ideological force for mobilizing the vilest of reactionary movements, such as the Iron Guard in Romania or the current rightist coup in Bolivia. Yet at the same time, religious sentiment has been used to mobilize those on the side of socialism and decolonization, such as Catholic Liberation Theology or Muslim National Communism. It could be argued that a policy of secularism rather than militant atheism is preferable, with militant atheism having done more harm than good for the Communist project by alienating potential sympathizers.

Yet for the trad left the question of religion goes beyond the question of whether someone can hold religious beliefs while also being a good communist militant. For much of the trad left an embrace of religion is coupled with a turn towards social-conservatism. It is obvious why; embracing a social-conservative viewpoint is impossible without distorting Marxism. Within religious doctrines, one can find an ethical appeal to justify taking up the reactionary viewpoints they see in the working class. There is also a communitarian and collectivist element to religion that, like the family, can serve as a “haven in a heartless world” which can be counterposed to atomizing liberal individualism. Another factor is the lack of an (at least explicit) ethical framework in Marxism, a belief system that exists as counterposed to utopian socialists who aimed to build socialism on the foundation of ethical ideals.

Examples of socialists turning to Catholicism or other religious tendencies are primarily niche phenomena on Twitter, but there are some more famous examples, like Catholic Elizabeth Bruenig, known for her anti-abortion stance. An attempt to articulate such a politics programmatically can be found in the “Tradinista Manifesto”, written by “a small party of young Christian socialists committed to traditional orthodoxy, to a politics of virtue and the common good, and to the destruction of capitalism, and its replacement by a truly social political economy.”

The Tradinista Manifesto is essentially an internet shitpost with no historical importance. I only turn to it as a good example of the contradictory nature of the social-conservative left and problems with turning to religious values as a counter to liberal capitalism. It begins by asserting that Christ is king and that the polity should, therefore, promote the teachings of the Church, “autonomous but not fully separate from the Church”. What we have here seems to be a sort of light theocracy, albeit a theocracy that is supposed to promote economic justice. The vision of economic justice here is a sort of Proudhonism, not dissimilar to Catholic distributism. Class society is to be eradicated while property rights are also asserted. The solution is the promotion of worker cooperatives, everyone becoming a property owner. How this vision is supposed to be feasible given the development of modern productive forces is left to the imagination.

Even more contradictory is the simultaneous rejection and promotion of sexual conservatism. Our Catholic authors claim to be against “Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and similar forms of oppression” yet at the same time claim that “Marriage and family life should be specially supported by the polity to promote the common good” while also taking a “pro-life” stance against abortion. This is a stance that may make sense to the religious idealist, but to a Marxist it is nonsensical. According to Engels, the wife was the first form of private property and the institution of the family is the economic basis upon which the oppression of women rests. Such a position is like calling for the abolition of obesity while supporting the fast-food industry.

This contradiction captures the very bind that the trad socialists find themselves in. In calling for left-wing economics and social conservative cultural values, they fail to recognize that social conservative values only have purchase because of the division of society into classes and the various forms of oppression that accompany them. People turn to various traditional structures like the family and religion partly because they serve as shelters from the worst aspects of capitalist society. There is, of course, the force of habit that these attitudes have instilled in people which often dies hard. Yet it is unbelievable that a strengthening of the family would be a feature of a world where economic equality was the norm, unless women were systematically excluded from this norm in order to avoid granting them economic independence. Authentically ending class society therefore entails ending patriarchy.

We also find here a problem with trying to base politics on religion in general, as a religious ethics tends to be based on a priori claims that are not subject to further questioning and therefore must be held to. Alexander Bogdanov referred to this as “authoritarian causality,” a type of thinking that holds causality to be rooted in a greater power that exists before all other causes. Religious traditions see the work of god or gods as this final cause and therefore hold ethics to stem from these gods, making them unquestionable. This means that a collective and democratic understanding of what defines the “good life” is out of the question, since this answer is already taken as an item of faith. So when the Tradinsitas attempt to construct a left-wing politics for the modern world, they are forced to adhere to the Catholic Church’s dogma of being against abortion while simultaneously claming to be against misogyny, resulting in an incoherent politics.

Despite these contradictions, the desire for an ethical grounding beyond the scientific analysis of history provided by Marxism is real. It is my opinion that for us communists, ethical nihilism is not a tenable position. A basic ethical worldview is needed. Perhaps we can find this in the ethics of classical republicanism, a discourse that was implicit in the entire early socialist movement that Marx and Engels were embedded in. Or, maybe Lunacharksy’s “god-building” is the solution, wherein the wake of the old religions’ destruction humanity must build a new religious system devoid of superstition, which can provide a moral grounding for humanity. Such a moral grounding must be universalist and based in reason, not in a traditional creed that isn’t subject to further questioning. Regardless of how one feels about these ideas, turning to the old religious dogmas is not a solution to the problem, even on pragmatic grounds. One’s religious sentiments are very much rooted in their own upbringing and personal experiences, and cannot unify the masses of wage workers around a common human task of overcoming class society. A pluralistic approach that allows for the participation of religious socialists in a greater movement, unified around a truly universalist radicalism, is preferable.

Is liberal capitalism inherently socially progressive?

It is a common talking point of the trad left that capitalism destroys all the patriarchal and traditional bonds of the old communities, creating an atomized liberal individual who can be exploited by capital. Julius Evola, the ultimate philosopher of traditionalism, famously said that capitalism is just as subversive as communism. With this there can be no real disagreement. Yet this premise is taken a step further with the argument that to truly be opposed to capital means to affirm these traditional forms and protect them from erosion by capitalism. To be socially progressive, they say, is only to do the work of capitalism for the capitalists, and the left is nothing more than a vanguard of liberalism as long as it maintains an opposition to social conservatism.

The idea that capitalism is inherently socially progressive and antagonistic to social conservatism should be held up to closer scrutiny. This brings us to the theories of Karl Polanyi and his notion of the “Double movement.” According to Polanyi, capitalism is unique because of its tendency to subsume all elements of social life to the nexus of market exchange, alienating all that was once inalienable. Focusing on 19th Century England, Polanyi discussed the transformation of “natural” communities, in which land and labor had an inherent worth that was mediated through relations of personal duty and obligation, where now these are objects of abstract exchange. Where labor was once mediated by tradition and custom it now carries a price tag, subject to the whims of market anarchy. As Karl Marx would say, “all that is solid melts into air.”

In Polanyi’s vision this movement of capital to subsume all that exists outside of it inevitably triggers a countermovement to protect social order from this corrosion, as the market will eventually destroy the foundations upon which it functions. This countermovement can take many forms, from national protectionism to communitarianism to the welfare state. Against the atomization of humanity into sellable commodities there is an assertion of social solidarities that aim to restore what was destroyed. The countermovement is seen as external to the logic of the market, yet at the same time necessary for its functioning if society is not to fall into a war of all against all.

Polanyi would make an excellent theorist for the trad left, as using his framework one could call for a reassertion of the family, nation and church as social solidarities to provide the foundation of a countermovement against neoliberal capitalism. Yet by identifying capitalism solely with the logic of the market and social disintegration, Polanyi overestimates how much these countermovements are actually outside of capital. He sets up a situation where any reaction to capitalism will be inherently conservative, defending and reasserting the traditional ways of life that are disrupted by capitalism. Yet what if the movement of capital and the countermovement against it, the double movement, are internal to capitalism, rather than the latter being external to it?

Melinda Cooper, in her work Family Values, develops exactly this critique by looking at the role of the family in the history of neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Cooper argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism both need to be understood as a greater dialectic within capitalism. To do this, she focuses on the role of family in policy and discourse from both neoliberals and neoconservatives, showing how both political tendencies were invested in the maintenance of the family as the basis of a society based on market contracts. Neoliberals like Gary S. Becker and Milton Friedman used concern over the disruption of the family by welfare as a reason to promote the welfare reform, not simply as a matter of cost-cutting, but as a way to promote the equilibrium of the family as a sound basis for the equilibrium of the market. This throws into question the understanding of neoliberalism as having an inherently socially progressive superstructure of hedonistic sexual liberation from the family. Milton and Rose Friedman would write in their book Tyranny of the Status Quo that

If we are right that the tide is turning, that public opinion is shifting away from a belief in big government and away from the doctrine of social responsibility, then that change…will tend to restore a belief in individual responsibility by strengthening the family and reestablishing its traditional role.

For the neoliberals, the family was a spontaneous order that would develop when set free from the distortions of welfare and provide a basis upon which the market could flourish. Neoliberal welfare reforms aimed to make the family rather than the state absorb the cost of externalities, which meant that welfare reforms aimed for more than just budget trimming, but also for enforcing family morality. For neoconservatives, the family was something to be actively protected that required intervention from the state. When the family didn’t develop as a spontaneous order due to neoliberal reforms, neoconservatism as a political force was necessary to reassert the family as a countermovement. Cooper summarizes the relationship of the two ideologies to the family as follows:

If neoliberals were adamant that the economic obligations of family should be enforced even when the legal and affective bonds of kinship had broken down, social conservatives were intent on actively rekindling the family as a moral institution based on the unpaid labor of love. Both agreed, however, that the private family (rather than the state) should serve as the primary source of economic security.



Neoliberalism and neoconservatism can be seen as an example of how Polanyi’s double movement is a dialectic internal to capitalism itself, with countermovements that aim to reassert what is destroyed by market forces acting to facilitate the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. As a result, countermovements that assert the family or nation as protective shields against the worst aspects of capitalism do not offer a way out of capitalism; they instead act to stabilize it. Furthermore, market liberalism does not necessarily entail a social progressive superstructure. The capitalist zealots most intent on subsuming all life to the market have seen an important role for family life, even if they leave its promotion to other political forces. Seeing the rise of alternative lifestyles and sexualities as simply a superstructural expression of neoliberalism is ultimately too simplistic and ignores how social conservatism synchronizes with neoliberalism.

What is necessary is an emancipatory alternative to class society itself that can transcend the dialectic of market liberalism and social conservatism, rather than assert one side of it against the other. The destruction of village and family life in capitalism nonetheless creates a community of the proletariat which is engaged in collective labor in the workplace and community, fostering the potential for a new community that is not rooted in parochial ways of life. The formation of this community through transnational alliances as a political collectivity allows for a way forward, beyond the atomization of the market and patriarchal nationalism alike.

Is the working-class naturally conservative?

Many of those who would make arguments similar to Blue Labour may not themselves have much attachment to the traditional family or nationalism, but think that the left simply needs to abandon social progressivism out of a pragmatic need to appeal to the working class. This notion is based on the premise that the working class is “naturally socially conservative” and that mobilizing them for the purpose of economic redistribution should take precedence over struggles for the ‘recognition’ of marginalized peoples.

This notion can be found in a recent overview of the most recent work of Thomas Piketty by Jan Rovny. According to Rovny, the pattern of voting in which lower-income brackets voted for the left while upper brackets voted for the “Merchant right” has been disrupted by the process of neoliberal deindustrialization. While the wealthiest still vote for the right wing, the constituency of the left parties is no longer the working class but middle-class professionals, often referred to as the PMC (professional-managerial class). Now what remains of the working class is picked up by right-wing populist parties, in a reversal of the political realignment of the early 20th century when political parties with a working-class base had socially progressive agendas.

The explanation as to why the socially progressive left was able to win over the working class is that the old equivalent of the Brahmin left (examples given are Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum) were able to push against the inherent social conservatism of the working class. These middle class intellectuals “translated working class authoritarian tendencies into a fight for universalistic social progress” and “replaced nationalistic tendencies of the working classes with socialist internationalism”. Rovny takes issue with Piketty’s optimism that this can happen again for two reasons: for one, the left cannot square the economic interests of the working class with progressive middle-class intellectuals, and furthermore right-wing populists are able to meet the economic interests of the working class without the added baggage of social progressivism.

The problem with this argument is that it naturalizes both the social conservatism of the working class and the social progressivism of the middle-class professionals. Working-class social conservatism is not a “natural” result of their spontaneous life experiences but a product of the institutions that dominate their lives. Right-wing demagogues in the media and other institutions such as churches actively fight to win ideological domination over the working class and channel economic grievances into chauvinistic attitudes. Working-class conservatism is not a natural inherent quality of the working class, but something they are socialized into by political actors who actively struggle for domination over everyday life. It is something historically and institutionally determined, not “natural”.

Social progressivism among the professional stratum is a similar phenomenon, also something historically and institutionally determined. This social progressivism is related to the fact that this stratum serves the role of ideologically justifying the rule of the capitalist class. The “woke” ideology of this stratum is a product of the role they play as HR managers for a capitalist order that aims to nakedly exploit the global proletariat and manage the imperialist order, while still presenting itself as progressive by offering economic opportunity for marginalized people. Their social progressivism is designed to leave as much room as possible for capitalism to function while ensuring that it preserves opportunities for those who were previously left out. If capitalism loses the need for a socially progressive mask then we can expect to see this stratum embrace a nakedly reactionary chauvinism.

This understanding of the petty-bourgeois professional as inherently socially progressive with the working class as inherently socially conservative puts us in a position where any attempt to fight for genuine communist politics can only be understood as middle-class wankers trying to beat an alien ideology into the working class. It is also just as condescending to the working class as the middle-class liberals that the trad left rightfully condemn because it assumes the working class is too narrow-minded to embrace a universalist and progressive worldview. The truth is that the working class has no institutions of its own in much of the world right now, and therefore cannot be said to have an ideology of its own. As a result, it is a plaything of socially reactionary and socially progressive sections of the ruling class.

The lesson here is that we need to struggle against both social conservative demagogues who preach to the working class as well as the woke professional stratum and expose their hypocrisy. If the right can dominate the social life of the working class through its institutions and win them to its own platform, then the left can as well. It has been done before, and there is no need to square their economic interests with those of salaried professionals. This struggle has to take place in the realm of politics as well as the terrain of everyday life. It will certainly be an uphill battle, given the domination of our enemies and the unwillingness of the left to actually build a working-class base. We cannot put faith in the working class to spontaneously take up an emancipatory communist politics, nor can we surrender emancipatory communist politics to win easy support by playing to people’s prejudices. There will be many defeats on the way, like the one we saw in the UK. But to give in is not an option; we have to fight for the truth and not sacrifice our principles because of demoralization and a desire for easy victories.