Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Introduction: A Tradition That Forgot Itself

I write these essays not as an enemy of the left but as someone who believes it has lost the thread of its own best tradition. That tradition is the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein, who tied the classless society to the ballot rather than the barricade, and of Michael Harrington, whose The Other America forced a prosperous country to look at its own poor.

That tradition began with a sharp diagnosis. Karl Marx argued that capitalism rests on a class relationship in which those who own the means of production extract surplus value from those who own only their labor power. One did not have to accept the inevitability of revolution to accept the centrality of class, and Bernstein did not. He kept the analysis and changed the method, betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy.

That bet defined what the old left stood for. It was not merely taxing the rich and redistributing the proceeds, the liberal project of John Stuart Mill and later John Maynard Keynes, but democratizing economic decision making itself. The New Deal and the Great Society were humane achievements, yet they were state capitalism for the benefit of the many and left the boardroom intact. The democratic socialist asked a harder question: who decides what gets built, where capital flows, and whose work disappears?

Put most simply, the socialist project was about extending democracy into the economy. We accept that the people should govern the state, that no king or boss may rule a polity by private right. The socialist asked why the same principle stops at the factory gate, why the firm that shapes a person’s waking life should remain a little monarchy exempt from the democratic rule we demand everywhere else.

Robert Dahl made exactly this argument in his Preface to Economic Democracy, reasoning that if democracy is justified in governing the state it must be justified in governing economic enterprises. Charles Lindblom, in Politics and Markets, showed why this matters in practice. Business occupies a privileged position in any market democracy, holding a structural veto over public choice because it controls investment and employment, so that governments of every party must bend to its needs. The economy is not a neutral zone outside politics; it is where the decisive power lies, and to leave it undemocratic is to leave democracy itself half finished.

What now passes for left or progressive politics in the United States has quietly abandoned this question. The story runs through two ruptures. The first was the New Left of the 1960s, the world of Students for a Democratic Society, which rightly insisted that race, gender, war, and culture could not be reduced to economics, but which also grew suspicious of unions and of class as such.

The second rupture, theorized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, went further and rejected class as the privileged ground of politics altogether. What I will call the new new left inherited both ruptures and added a sociological twist. It migrated from the working class to the college educated professional, comfortable enough to treat economic security as settled and to make politics a matter of culture and symbol.

These five essays that will following over the next five weeks take up five faults. The first takes up the fault from which the others follow: the abandonment of class as the organizing principle of a serious left, and the unprecedented inequality that has come with it. The second takes up the capture of the movement by a professional and managerial stratum that no longer shares the condition of those it claims to speak for. The third takes up the drift from material politics into symbolic politics, where an agenda of identity and status alienates the very people a majority would need.

The fourth takes up the indifference to whether government actually works, which betrays Robert Dahl’s insight that democracy is judged by its institutions. The fifth takes up the first rule of politics, which is to build coalitions broad enough to win elections and take power, and the vulnerability to a culture war the left’s opponents are happy to wage. Throughout, I hold the present against the standard of Harrington and Bernstein, of Eugene Debs and Dorothy Day. They believed, as I do, that the point of the left is to assert that capitalism does not get to dictate how democracy operates, but the reverse.

The Abandonment of Class

The founding insight of the socialist tradition was that the central conflict of modern society is a relation, not a sentiment, between those who own the means of production and those who own only their labor. That relation, and not any catalog of identities, was the ground on which the left proposed to build a majority and to extend democracy into the economy. This frame, which even the revisionists who broke with Marx on tactics kept intact, the new new left has largely walked away from, and it did so with intellectual help.

The decisive text is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in which Laclau and Mouffe argued that class is not the privileged subject of history and that political identities are constructed through discourse rather than handed up from the economic base. They rejected what they called the essentialism of the Marxist tradition, the assumption that workers form a coherent agent with shared interests. In its place they offered a radical and plural democracy stitched together from many separate struggles, each with its own logic, none foundational.

Here I want to draw a distinction the contemporary left routinely blurs, between class on one side and socioeconomic status and identity on the other. Status is a gradient, a matter of where one sits on a ladder of income, education, and prestige, and it sorts people into higher and lower without naming why the ladder exists. Identity is a category of recognition, a matter of who one is taken to be. Class is neither: it is a relationship to the means of production, a structural position that explains the ladder rather than merely measuring it. To speak of status is to describe inequality; to speak of class is to explain it, and only an explanation can be acted upon.

The deeper failure of status and identity is that they cannot achieve universalism. A politics of identity addresses people as members of particular groups, and however many groups it enumerates it never arrives at the whole. Class alone is universal, because nearly everyone who must work for a living stands in the same basic relationship to those who own.

And here is the point the identitarian left has lost. The great power imbalances it rightly cares about, racism and sexism above all, are not free floating cultural attitudes to be corrected by recognition; they are rooted in and sustained by economic power. Racism was built to justify the extraction of cheap and unfree labor, and the subordination of women was bound up with unpaid domestic work and exclusion from the wage. The discrimination is real and has its own cruel life, but its engine is economic, and a politics that treats it only as attitude and representation will tinker with the symptom while leaving the engine running. A class politics that named the economic root would strike at racism and sexism more deeply than any amount of symbolic recognition.

It is worth asking where the abandonment of class came from, and the honest answer implicates the very people who theorized it. Much of socialism’s twentieth century trouble was its capture by intellectuals, by the proverbial armchair socialist who theorized class away in favor of post-material concerns. It is easy to declare that class no longer organizes politics from the comfort of a tenured chair where one’s own economic security is assured and the daily reality of wage labor is something read about rather than lived.

The worker timed on the warehouse floor does not need a seminar to be told that class is real; he feels it in his body at the end of a shift. The professor who pronounces class obsolete is generalizing from a vantage almost no worker shares. This is not an argument against intellectuals, who built much of the tradition, but against a particular vice: mistaking the preoccupations of the comfortable for the condition of the many, and dressing that mistake in the language of sophistication. The post-material turn was a luxury belief, affordable only to those for whom the material question had already been answered.

Abandoning class also shrinks the kind of demand the left makes. When class is central, the demand is structural: democratize the firm, strengthen the union, put investment under democratic control. When class recedes, the demands shrink to the narrowly redistributive, which leaves ownership untouched, or the purely cultural. Both are easier to grant than the demand for power, which is precisely why the system tolerates them.

The consequences are not abstract; they are written in the distribution of income. Abandoning class is among the chief reasons the gap between rich and poor in the United States has reached levels without precedent in modern American history. The retreat from class politics tracks almost exactly the era in which inequality returned to and then surpassed levels last seen on the eve of the Great Depression, with the pay of the top one percent rising many times faster than the wages of most workers. When no major force in politics fights on class terms, the owners of capital face no organized resistance, and the result is exactly what one would predict: they take more, and the gap widens.

A left fighting on class terms would have made this the central scandal of the age. Instead the party that should have been the working class’s instrument made its peace with the order producing those numbers, embracing from the 1990s a Third Way accommodation with neoliberalism: deregulation, financialization, and trade deals such as NAFTA that treated the dislocation of workers as a price worth paying. Having abandoned the class frame, it had no alternative to offer, only a gentler administration of the same system, and the predictable result was the slow defection of the working class itself.

None of this requires romanticizing the old proletariat or pretending the factory floor of 1910 can be conjured back. The working class has changed; it is more female, more diverse, more likely to serve coffee than to forge steel. But that is an argument for redescribing class, not discarding it. The cleaner, the coder, and the contingent adjunct all stand in a recognizable relationship to those who own and direct, and a left that cannot name that relationship has given up the one thing that made it a left.