A surprising transformation has swept the political culture of the rich world over the past decade and a half. In the fallout from the financial crisis, the rise of the Tea Party, the Indignados, the new social democratic lefts, Orban, Brexit, Trump and the surging popularity of the RN in France, the AfD in Germany and the FdI in Italy all seemed to suggest that the working class had suddenly re-emerged from its post-1989 slumber to reject the neoliberal consensus, sometimes from the right, sometimes from the left. But it was reborn in a paradoxical way. No longer agent of world revolution and social basis for the reconstruction of society, it now appeared as the defender of the nation state against global markets and cosmopolitan elites. In short, it would seem that the working class, for reasons that are at once ‘cultural’ and ‘material’, has been reborn as the great conservative – in the literal sense – force of the contemporary world.

Accordingly, the left’s theoretical framing of working-class politics has also shifted: no longer Marx (let alone Lenin or Trotsky) but Polanyi is the theorist of its agency. The working class acts in ‘countermovements’ to global capitalism. It ‘re-embeds’ and conserves, defending its ‘fictitious commodity’ from the marketplace. The nostalgic quasi-Burkean mood that has overtaken much of the left intelligentsia, whose slogan is perhaps best encapsulated in the title of Wolfgang Streeck’s most recent book, Taking Back Control?, finds its inspiration in the enigmatic thought of a figure who, while sympathetic to Stalin, denounced the early Bolsheviks, and Trotsky in particular, as unrealistic dreamers.

The left in this situation faces a grave dilemma. It can either follow the working class along the nationalist-chauvinist road or insist on its internationalist principles at the cost of severing any remaining connection with its indispensable social agent. The morbid signs of this problem are everywhere. Social democrats toughen up border enforcement and embrace right-wing talking points against the scourge of wokeism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, elements of the right increasingly employ a marxoid language and mode of analysis, the target a deadening technocracy in control of a deep state that must be smashed to revivify the nation.

This is a struggle that the right will always win because it can speak in forthrightly nativistic terms on immigration and is unconstrained by any residual commitments to redressing past historical injustices in its critique of political correctness. The left’s attempt to shift in a chauvinist direction, meanwhile, has produced only a weak and unclear version of the original. Paradigmatically, who would want to support the Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht when the Alternative für Deutschland is on offer?

Is there a way out of this trap, or have the historical tides shifted so profoundly that left politics is stranded gasping on the shore: a fish out of water? A starting point might be a conceptual purification: a return to first principles. For much of the discourse about class has been ‘culturalized’; it counterposes an educated elite to a working class defined as those without a degree. But of course the possession of an education does not exempt one from the imperative of wage labour. This might at least help to pose the problem, which is not so much that workers as a whole are turning to the right as that the class is fundamentally fractured by the material interests deriving from the market position of its component parts as Weber noted long ago. Framed in this way, the necessary strategy would seem to be not to accommodate the rightward drift to little avail, but to find a basis on which to suture that divide, one that speaks both to highly specific, culturally inflected market interests as well as class-wide interests rooted in the common experience of wage labour.

This politics must start from the observation that the economic interests of wage earners under capitalism are highly differentiated and can point in different, even contradictory political directions. Class interests and economic interests are by no means identical. It is not a matter of appealing to ‘economic’ interests over ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ interests (misleadingly termed ‘identity’ politics). Rather, it is a matter of developing a materialist politics that is at once specific and general, and which addresses workers’ lives in the experientially accessible realm of market relations, and their potential in the experientially distant structure of ownership.

Read on: Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Farewell to the Classic Labour Movement?’, NLR I/173.