#WorkingClass #YanisVaroufakis
"Why the working class matters.
The left needs to show that the true enemy of the working person is not the immigrant, but the rentier, the technofeudal lord, the monopsonist employer, and the financier who treats their future as a derivative to be speculated on.
A spectre is haunting the West – the spectre of a working class whose political home has been foreclosed. For decades, seduced by the 'third way siren songs of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder, centre-left forces jettisoned the language of class struggle.
But in their rush to become respectable and prove themselves more efficient and fairer managers of capitalism, they ceased to speak of exploitation and chose to ignore the inherent antagonism – even violence – of the capital-labour relation.
(. . .)
Movements and leaders that centrists clumsily labelled 'populist did not create this yearning – they merely exploited it with the cynicism of a seasoned monopolist spotting an untapped market.
From the working-class areas of south Piraeus, a stone’s throw from where I am writing this, to the formerly 'red' suburbs of Paris or Marseille, we can see voting blocs shift from communist and social-democratic parties to those created by the political heirs of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.
Like their forebears, these political chameleons pose as the standard-bearers for a disenfranchised working class. Meanwhile, in the US, white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, technofeudal lords, and fed-up former Democratic voters vibrate together passionately in a coalition that has won the White House twice.
The comparison, which many are making, with the interwar period can lead us astray if we are not careful, but it is pertinent. And while the left’s tendency to call all conservative or centrist opponents fascists is inexcusable, the fact remains that fascism is now in the air. How could it be otherwise?
When working-class people were abandoned all over the West, it was easy to restore their hope with the promise of a national rebirth built upon a fictional Golden Age.
Once the bait was taken, the next step was to divert their wrath from the socioeconomic forces that had driven them to poverty to some nebulous cabal – 'globalists,' the 'deep state,' or some George Soros-directed plot to 'replace' them in their own land."
https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2025/10/11/why-the-working-class-matters
