With the decline of petty-bourgeois professional careers, “progressives” increasingly find themselves in the same position as the “excess male” shut-ins who they’ve mocked. They’re being de-classed, and cast adrift in an economy that’s only growing for those who the ruling class has chosen to elevate.
One effect that this shakeup will have is to create an alliance between the social democrats and the far right, which already exists to an extent but will take on a new form as America’s collapse accelerates. So far, what’s mainly brought together these two camps is a shared hatred towards communists; what will define the alliance in the long term, though, is a lumpenized alienation from modernity, one that they’ll react to by embracing the most anti-social beliefs and behaviors.
As the compatible left gets discarded by the system, we’re seeing its ranks go in the same direction as the lumpenized men who gravitated towards Nick Fuentes groyperism. Which fulfills the principle of overlap between leftism and rightism that Haz Al-Din described in 2022:
If there is any model worthy of representing the ‘political spectrum’ (which does not actually represent political difference, but rather the political homogeneity of the modern state), it is precisely that of the swastika, as it cannot tilt right without also moving left. The dead form of modernity cannot be preserved, without also emanating the veneer of change. This shocking fact is already self-evident throughout Europe and Ukraine. To call leftists fascists would be superfluous, for leftism is already far more fascist than fascism could ever possibly have been. All the genocidal intent, violence, terrorism and bestiality of fascism is amplified, with far more viciousness, brutality and efficiency in leftism, a fact which is sure to become evident to all in the years to come.
The leftists were supposed to be the ones who would remain “normies,” and get careers after graduating. Surely they wouldn’t be cast out by the forces of capital; that only happens to the backwards and the uneducated. This was the expectation of the Gen Z progressives who were in a position to go through college during the lockdown era, and to feel like their credentials would give them access to the labor-aristocratic institutions.
Among those within this strata who sought careers inside of activism, this era’s rising mass political radicalization gave them hope that the 2020s would be a uniquely opportune historical moment for them. But these hopes failed to materialize, because the compatible left gets its strength not from the working masses but from billionaire philanthropy. When the funders of the left decided to start pivoting towards a different strategy, the nonprofits and careerist left orgs underwent a crisis, and nothing made sense for the ones who were promised a role in this system.
Now that the ones in this strata have become part of our society’s left-behinds, they’re having to grapple with the same questions that the incels have: what did we do to deserve this, why do the old rules of success no longer apply? The answers can be found by looking at the history of when social orders have been upended by new productive modes, as explained by Engels in Origins of the Family:
The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other. The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups.
However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.
The importance of this analysis to understanding today’s social crises can’t be overstated, because it reveals the impersonal nature of history. It shows that the great disenfranchisement we’re experiencing is a new, more advanced version of the upheavals that humanity has undergone numerous times.
The example of the agrarian revolution that Engels talks about here was only the first phase; since then we’ve seen technological advancements destroy the slave order and the feudal order, with the capitalist order now undergoing the same extinction process. When we can articulate why the tragedy’s origins are in a tension between two historical epochs, in a class conflict that’s come about from the transition to a new productive mode, we gain the tools to combat the lumpenized ideology that’s taking root right now among many sectors of our society.
This is an ideology that interprets every part of today’s crises through the lens of top-down conspiracy, blinding itself to the class conflicts which history is truly defined by. Those in my own political camp aren’t immune to this fallacy of thinking; for instance, many of them have concluded that the rise of Zohran was due to a “DNC psyop,” ignoring the critical role of the petty-bourgeois urbanites who mobilized behind Zohran out of their own distinct class interests. It’s easy to fall into such reductive analysis if one hasn’t fully kept up with fluid history, and the danger is that lumpenization will lead to a rise in this ahistorical, anti-materialist thinking.
Within the petty-bourgeoisie and the lumpen, the most common manifestation of this fallacy is antisemitism; which, as Engels observed, gained traction in the capitalist era due to a “reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers.” The modern parallel to this is found among the petty-bourgeois professionals who treat AI as an insidious bogeyman, corrupting everything and conspiring to destroy humanity itself.
The line from this type of paranoia to the “Jewish question” is easy to see. As more of the metropolitan petty-bourgeoisie get de-classed, they’ll no doubt embrace the Jewish fixation. We already see much anecdotal evidence of this, with many leftists recently coming to use rhetoric like “Zionist Occupied Government” and 4chan-coded slurs.
This growing comfort with using non-polite language comes from a shrinking incentive to please the hegemonic liberal institutions; when you’re no longer worried that HR will come for you, or you’ll be rejected from a job because of what you’ve said online, the old constraints no longer touch you. This applies to people who aspire towards every line of work, not just the high-end careers; the job market as a whole has been historically exclusive for half a decade now, and those who’ve been shut out are increasingly getting the sense that trying isn’t worth it. The individuals who’ve held hopes for entering the labor aristocracy are now being put in the same place as all of the cast-out entry level job seekers. Unemployment is becoming the normal reality for the post-Covid generation.
This will either create an army of anti-social individuals, or create a great new base for revolutionary organizing. It all depends on how well we work to capture the growing popular alienation, and build a dual popular infrastructure that can give the left-behinds a new purpose.
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