Last year’s elections saw a resurgence for Germany’s socialist party Die Linke. In an interview, coleader Ines Schwerdtner explains how the party is seeking to expand beyond current left-wing voters to reach broader parts of the working class.
Dogmatism is why anarchists and tankies are (luckily) only small groups in Germany. People constantly engaged in book clubs, circlejerks and detachment from the plight of actual working class people is why certain left groups are not winning people over.
Die Linke actually did a decent job recently in regards to pragmatism and I wish them and the Greens further growth.
The honest answer is that they never had them. “The Left” is the remnants of the former East German Communist party and the left wing of the social democrat SPD, who left the party due to them becoming more neoliberal in the early 2000s.
Other then that the main issue is that the traditional working class is gone in developed countries. Low skilled manufacturing jobs were outsourced to third world countries decades ago. So what remains is a highly skilled work force, which thanks to the unions earns decent money, making them clearly middle class. The lower class is mainly made up of service workers in rich countries like Germany. At the same time a lot of the left is made up of the massively grown academic middle class. In Germany the biggest group of that kind are the Greens, but other parties have a lot of those members as well.
So you end up with a working class, which cares less about progressive issues, while left is made up of a bunch of academics and the actual lower class ends up without much of a voice.
the traditional working class is gone in developed countries
I understand that, but there is a kind of modern-day proletariat. Super market cashiers are working class in that sense.
At the same time a lot of the left is made up of the massively grown academic middle class.
I was about to reach to that. The contradiction now might be more about being “educated professional class” versus “non-educated workforce, specialized laborers etc” (let alone gender). And not other distinctions that might have been meaningful in the past, since you mentioned already that people don’t work in factories as much as they did before.
These are more meaningful for explaining politics, but the truth is the vast majority of people wants living wages, social welfare and public healthcare. Americans are heavily brainwashed against these ideas, and perhaps some neoliberal Europeans as well.
The main difference in class, is that factory workers and also miners built up strong unions. Most service jobs, be they educated or not, do not have those. Hence it is much harder to base a party around them.
These are more meaningful for explaining politics, but the truth is the vast majority of people wants living wages, social welfare and public healthcare. Americans are heavily brainwashed against these ideas, and perhaps some neoliberal Europeans as well.
This article is about Germany and there are no parties, which fundamentally oppose social welfare and public healthcare. They want less of them, but not completely destroy them. There are more discussions about the minimum wage being higher, but even that is at 13.90€($16 right now).
Being for them makes you mostly a centrists. The more left leaning parties go for stuff like universal basic income, massive government built housing projects and so forth.
Modern academic leftism happened. Turns out the working class doesn’t give a shit about the things some spoiled rich people’s kids dream up as pressing societal problems while cosplaying proletariat in cloud cuckoo land, because they do have enough actual problems in real life.
I consider this an anti-intellectualist take. I don’t agree this is the root cause.
There is professionalization of the sciences in the context of capitalism, and other forces driving academic endeavours. Including military funding for example. But being educated means also understand the principles of constitutional democracy. This is the main reason anti-intellectualism is the breeding ground for authoritarianism, the very reason this thread exists.
Oh yes, this patronising talk is a big part of why the Left is so popular. Big talk from the high ivory tower, dismissing the life reality of the majority of the working class, and calling them stupid, or anti-intellectual because of a lower formal education.
You know what the working class already does have all day every day, even without that kind of self proclaimed working class movement? Being talked to, and about, condescendingly, and being told what’s best for them by some (quite often actually rather stupid) posh piece of shit claiming to be more intelligent because of some piece of paper, who lives in a different world, and doesn’t give a shit about their life reality.
The funniest part of the oh so intellectual academic left’s fight for the working class is, that with all their deep philosophical understanding of all matters working class, they always keep missing how their talk and pamphlets tend to be in a language the working class struggles to understand. If you need a dictionary to understand a relatively simple political message because it’s full of words only known to the denizens of a social sciences faculty at an institution of higher learning, and, on top of that, have to wrap your head around whatever craziness the current fashion (that changes every other week) of “inclusive” language is sprouting, to even understand anything at all, there is no surprise that the oh so important message doesn’t reach the masses.
WTF happened for “The Left” to have to “win back” the working class? Are post-post-modern enough already?
Bring back anarchosyndicalism ASAP.
Dogmatism is why anarchists and tankies are (luckily) only small groups in Germany. People constantly engaged in book clubs, circlejerks and detachment from the plight of actual working class people is why certain left groups are not winning people over.
Die Linke actually did a decent job recently in regards to pragmatism and I wish them and the Greens further growth.
The honest answer is that they never had them. “The Left” is the remnants of the former East German Communist party and the left wing of the social democrat SPD, who left the party due to them becoming more neoliberal in the early 2000s.
Other then that the main issue is that the traditional working class is gone in developed countries. Low skilled manufacturing jobs were outsourced to third world countries decades ago. So what remains is a highly skilled work force, which thanks to the unions earns decent money, making them clearly middle class. The lower class is mainly made up of service workers in rich countries like Germany. At the same time a lot of the left is made up of the massively grown academic middle class. In Germany the biggest group of that kind are the Greens, but other parties have a lot of those members as well.
So you end up with a working class, which cares less about progressive issues, while left is made up of a bunch of academics and the actual lower class ends up without much of a voice.
I understand that, but there is a kind of modern-day proletariat. Super market cashiers are working class in that sense.
I was about to reach to that. The contradiction now might be more about being “educated professional class” versus “non-educated workforce, specialized laborers etc” (let alone gender). And not other distinctions that might have been meaningful in the past, since you mentioned already that people don’t work in factories as much as they did before.
These are more meaningful for explaining politics, but the truth is the vast majority of people wants living wages, social welfare and public healthcare. Americans are heavily brainwashed against these ideas, and perhaps some neoliberal Europeans as well.
The main difference in class, is that factory workers and also miners built up strong unions. Most service jobs, be they educated or not, do not have those. Hence it is much harder to base a party around them.
This article is about Germany and there are no parties, which fundamentally oppose social welfare and public healthcare. They want less of them, but not completely destroy them. There are more discussions about the minimum wage being higher, but even that is at 13.90€($16 right now).
Being for them makes you mostly a centrists. The more left leaning parties go for stuff like universal basic income, massive government built housing projects and so forth.
Modern academic leftism happened. Turns out the working class doesn’t give a shit about the things some spoiled rich people’s kids dream up as pressing societal problems while cosplaying proletariat in cloud cuckoo land, because they do have enough actual problems in real life.
I consider this an anti-intellectualist take. I don’t agree this is the root cause.
There is professionalization of the sciences in the context of capitalism, and other forces driving academic endeavours. Including military funding for example. But being educated means also understand the principles of constitutional democracy. This is the main reason anti-intellectualism is the breeding ground for authoritarianism, the very reason this thread exists.
Oh yes, this patronising talk is a big part of why the Left is so popular. Big talk from the high ivory tower, dismissing the life reality of the majority of the working class, and calling them stupid, or anti-intellectual because of a lower formal education.
You know what the working class already does have all day every day, even without that kind of self proclaimed working class movement? Being talked to, and about, condescendingly, and being told what’s best for them by some (quite often actually rather stupid) posh piece of shit claiming to be more intelligent because of some piece of paper, who lives in a different world, and doesn’t give a shit about their life reality.
The funniest part of the oh so intellectual academic left’s fight for the working class is, that with all their deep philosophical understanding of all matters working class, they always keep missing how their talk and pamphlets tend to be in a language the working class struggles to understand. If you need a dictionary to understand a relatively simple political message because it’s full of words only known to the denizens of a social sciences faculty at an institution of higher learning, and, on top of that, have to wrap your head around whatever craziness the current fashion (that changes every other week) of “inclusive” language is sprouting, to even understand anything at all, there is no surprise that the oh so important message doesn’t reach the masses.