The disappearance of the class struggle tells us a great deal about the crisis facing the left and the hidden power of global populism

It is said that the globalist left has turned its back on the people, forgotten the rules of class struggle, and buried the old ideologies of state and party by embracing extreme forms of liberalism and individualism, and that this is why it is losing its traditional support. This is repeated every day; it is a mantra, a consolatory nursery rhyme. All we need to do, it is believed, is to return to the old socialist canon – perhaps blending it with new theories and practices concerning individual and social rights – and then housing in Spain, education in France, healthcare in Italy, and the tax system in the United States (‘tax the rich’) will all fall back into the normal order of the battle against inequality and practices of social domination.

The new model is the communitarianism of the American socialists: a willingness to wage major battles for socialisation against the wealthy minority and against fetishes such as technological dehumanisation, the new poverty of and within work, and social injustice in the distribution of essential services. Perhaps. One might even think, particularly when observing the malignant trend shaping the fortunes of the Left in the contemporary world, that precisely the opposite is true. It is the working classes who have experienced and rejected the experiment in statism and party representation, and who are seeking the key to their social agency elsewhere and in other ways; they have changed the tone of their voice, their model and the scale of their criteria for judgement.

If so-called populist or sovereigntist voters vote for Trump or Vance in Detroit and Pennsylvania, or even the Bolsonaro family in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Le Pen in the industrial and mining north, the ‘Keynes decapitator’ Milei with his chainsaw, Farage in the Midlands with his improbable anti-establishment stance, Abascal with his myth of identity, Alice Weidel and Ulrich Siegmund as champions of the ‘völkisch’ movement, but also, in different contexts and periods, a Grillo or a Meloni, just as people began voting for Berlusconi in Mirafiori some thirty-two years ago, and before that had embraced Mrs Thatcher’s models of popular capitalism and Reagan’s strong anti-communist rhetoric, it is because class struggle, with all its political and trade-union apparatus, is part of an ‘end of history’ cycle that is now decidedly exhausted. This, at a rough guess, is the secret force behind global populism.

Those who yearn for a left that is strong in its demand for equality yet unwilling to disregard the values and needs of the ‘forgotten men’ – those left behind by capitalist development – are probably wasting their efforts, indulging in fruitless political nostalgia. It is the working classes of yesteryear who have restructured themselves in line with the social development of hyper-technology and new cultural profiles, new jobs, the new structure of incomes and consumption, and new forms of communication; it is society that has forgotten the left of yesteryear, and in some respects even the customs and norms of the old political democracy of bourgeois origin and character. The distress of democracies and the upheaval that makes it so difficult to stem populist pressures of the most varied kinds – which find expression in movements and proceed through successive waves of radicalisation – do not, therefore, stem from the culpable globalist distraction that has distanced the once-prophetic and generously ideological left from the class struggle. It is not a betrayal of the proletariat; it is the disappearance of a great social myth of our age.