"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."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/first-principles

#Politics #Left #LeftWing #Capitalism #ClassWarfare #PoliticalEconomy #WageSlavery #IdentityPolitics