Critiques of capitalism, if they are to make any political sense, must have—or find—a social base. From the nineteenth century through to the twentieth, the most salient critique was dubbed ‘the workers’ question’, for its mass base was to be found in the rising industrial working class. It was an issue not merely for the emerging labour organizations and their occasional Liberal sympathizers, but also for conservative opinion; even the fascists, the most violent enemies of the labour movement, modelled their organizations after its example. Industrial workers maintained their centrality up to the 1970s. By then a further social base for anti-capitalist struggle had emerged in the anti-colonial movements, mobilized around the issue of national liberation and against imperialist ‘dependent development’.

Over the past thirty years, however, de-industrialization in the North has halted and reversed the forward march of labour; here, the ‘grand dialectic’—that is: the clash between the increasingly social character of the forces of production and their private ownership—has been suspended. Meanwhile, the successful industrialization of leading countries in the South during the same period has so far largely meant that capitalist development is now seen as possible in Asia, Africa and Latin America, contrary to once influential dependency theories. Are there, then, any rising social forces today that could be functionally equivalent to the organized working classes or the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century? Clearly, there are no mass anti-capitalist layers visible at present—a novel situation for capitalism, in the context of the past 150 years. However, if we look not for anti-capitalist movements but rather for mass formations that are potentially critical of contemporary capitalist development, important social forces are making themselves manifest. We can distinguish four different kinds.

The first potentially critical social force consists of pre-capitalist populations, resisting the intrusions of big business. Indigenous peoples, recently somewhat empowered, are the main subject here. They are politically significant above all in Andean America and in India, but are present across much of the South and have developed international networks. They lack both the numbers and the resources to carry much weight, except locally; but their struggles can be articulated with wider critical movements of resistance. At present they are a force to be reckoned with in Bolivia, as the main component of a fractious governing coalition, and in India, as the core of a large-scale insurgency; in both cases encadrés by organizers from the labour-movement tradition—laid-off socialist miners turned coca growers in Bolivia, and Maoist professional revolutionaries in central India. The latter have taken a severe beating recently, but they have not been defeated or destroyed. In Mexico, the Zapatistas still hold the Lacandona region of Chiapas. Such mobilizations can be contradictory: in Communist-ruled West Bengal, peasants defending their land against industrial development projects blocked a Chinese-style turn and propelled a right-wing regime into power.

The second, largely extra-capitalist, critical force is made up of the hundreds of millions of landless peasants, casual labourers and street vendors who constitute the vast slum populations in many parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. (Their equivalents in the North might be the growing numbers of marginalized youth, both native and immigrant, outside the employment nexus.) Potentially, they constitute a major source of destabilization for capitalism. The pent-up anger and violence of these layers have often proved explosive, sometimes viciously so, in ethnic pogroms or just riotous vandalism. However, these ‘wretched of the earth’ have also been involved in struggles against evictions and for access to water and electricity; they played a significant part in the 2011 Arab revolts and in the anti-austerity, anti-government protests along the northern Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts—Greece, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania.

Under what conditions might these forces connect with any viable socio-economic alternative? It’s clear that any such critical alternative would have to speak directly to their fundamental concerns—their existential collective identity and their means of livelihood. It would need to develop modes of communication reaching deep into these popular strata, generating charismatic leaders with broad relay networks, personal as well as electronic. As the urban population in particular is unlikely to be organized, this potentially critical force will not spring into action without a focal triggering event, the nature of which is impossible to predict.

The everyday dialectic of capitalist wage-work is, of course, still very much with us, even if it has been geographically reconfigured. The residual industrial working class in the North remains too weak to pose any anti-capitalist challenge; but austerity and capitalist offensives are generating short-horizon protests, not least in France, where organized labour threatened to disrupt petrol supplies in 2010 and steelworkers occupied plants in 2012. The new manufacturing workers in China, Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere in the South may be in a better position to raise anti-capitalist demands, but their position is weakened by the vast supply of labour, and they are already being overtaken by more fragmented service-sector employment patterns. Repeated attempts to form labour parties, from Nigeria to Indonesia, have foundered; the only success over the past thirty years has been the Brazilian pt. South Korea and South Africa both possess important, union-based labour movements, but they lack strong political articulations: the South African unions are overshadowed by the nature of anc rule, the Korean ones undermined by petty factionalism, which torpedoed a well-developed project for a united left party in late 2012.

While the class struggles in the South have been successful in winning wage rises and, to some extent, less gruesome working conditions, they seem unlikely to develop into a more systemic challenge. In East Asia, in particular, industrial capitalism is delivering higher levels of consumption, in a way that slower-developing European economies took much longer to achieve. True, Communist Party rule in China and Vietnam means that an anti-capitalist turn is not inconceivable—and would be feasible, if attempted. Yet for this to happen would require both a halt to growth and effective working-class mobilization against the enormous inequality the system has generated, which threatens the ‘harmony’ or social cohesion of Communist capitalism. This is imaginable but highly improbable, at least in the medium term. A more promising scenario may lie in connecting workplace struggles with community ones, over housing, health, education or civil rights.