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I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an

I disagree that the working class is not going to radicalize itself. They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate, like everyone else. For the first time they have the power to publish and think in public uncoupled from professional barrier. Better believe it’s being used, and that they will assert their awareness.

petermcneeley 7y ago
That window might be closing with the current attempts to censor the internet.
larnmar 7y ago
The election of Donald Trump could be seen as the result of the radicalisation of the working class.
- Pigo 7y ago
  I'm sure a lot of people agree with you, but I still see putting a war-hawk like Hillary in the oval office as a radical concept.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  It's not the working class, it's exclusively the white working class.
- aphextim 7y ago
  I think it's more likely due to the echo chamber of the media/pollsters and big cities who didn't count of all the 'fly over' areas actually coming together. I remember working a temp job at a polling call center and although I was just doing grunt work of calling people, it was clearly obvious they were doing polls to hear what they wanted. There was only 1 survey out of maybe 200 that was what I would consider unbiased and didn't have any leading questions or pre-picked answers. You would screen out people in the beginning of the survey that were obviously not interested in whoever candidate you were calling in regards to, and more often than not the survey itself would have leading questions to get the answers they want so they can take the results and be like, "See our Candidate is winning!!!" - yet they only called people and did the survey with those who were already willing to vote for said candidate. Polls are literally circle jerking people who were voting democrat and those regarding republican candidate were always negative. It also could be that the particular call center I was working out of only had contracts with Democratic parties/PACS but from my time there it was clear that polls are a racket.
- kingkawn 7y ago
  I’m not sure why you’re downvoted, this is definitely true at least for the white uneducated working class. Yes, it is a reflection of old ideology that was used to exploit them in the past, so it is tragic that this is where their expression of group assertion is getting its start. Yet I think as the public discourse among this group continues to grow in sophistication it will develop a more nuanced worldview and will assert its power with greater wisdom.
- joeblubaugh 7y ago
  Trump voters are on average wealthier than Clinton voters: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?outputType=amp https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...
  - war1025 7y ago
    I would guess (completely based on personal experience) that most in the service class voted for Clinton, while working class is more centered around manufacturing, which does pay better than the service industry. A big part of the issue is that people have different definitions for all the various social classes, so it's hard to compare things correctly.
_bxg1 7y ago
There's radical energy there, but here's the clincher: it will never turn into anything productive because the Republican propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class into continuing to think that public services are their enemy. They will rant and holler about communism until the billionaires have milked them of their very last dollar, and then blame that on communism too. The very policies that could be turning things around for them are the ones they most passionately disparage as power-grabs by the elites. As someone with many relatives in that camp I cannot express how exhaustingly frustrating this is.
- larnmar 7y ago
  If the working class turns to radicalism what makes you think it will be the kind of radicalism you agree with? It’s more likely to be the kind of radicalism you find terrifying.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    The kind of radicalism that raises my taxes to keep our country from falling apart is the kind I'm fully on-board with. Or, better yet, taxes the massive, useless dragon-hoards of the 0.1%. But I'm a team player; I don't mind if mine go up too.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Yes, but I think a lot of people are worried about the kind of radicalization that blames everything on intellectuals, foreigners, minorities and women.
      - _bxg1 7y ago
        Well right now we have that kind without any of the useful economic kind. So it can't get worse.
        nl 7y ago
        Yeah it absolutely 100% can get worse. The Cambodian killing fields were less than 50 years ago. The Rwandan genocide was only 25 years ago. The Rohingya genocide was less than 3 years ago. "Us vs Them" is a dangerous game.
BuckRogers 7y ago
I think that's evident in the Bernie Sanders movement (and to a lesser extent, Warren). Folks like myself support him even though we're some sort of "upper middle class" or some form of middle-merchant class. Not owners, not truly capitalist/investment class, but solidly aligned with everyone else who also has to show up at 9AM daily to get their checks. This more affluent middle class of information workers are leading the rest of the folks who punch a clock for a living to a better life. It's not everyone though, there's older folks who are fully committed to a dog eat dog existence, because it worked out easily and well for anyone willing to even try their hand in the post-WW2 era. It's understandable that they don't see the connection between relatively easy prosperity, and destroying all of your industrial competitors. Some of the younger conservatives don't have the life experience of being exploited and tossed out to form well-informed views on labor, and are often afraid of challenging their tribe's view, with their fathers often being the aforementioned Boomer. Then you lose another chunk from those who are not very capable, but inherited wealth. Insecurity that they couldn't duplicate their position in life from scratch leads to extremely anti-social behaviors that we see from the capitalist class. Claiming some defectors from each of those groups, add in the blue collars who know the score, and add in the "Bernie Sanders" educated folk and I definitely am seeing more support for the movement in American society today than I do for any other grassroots movement. Judging from the strength of support of someone like Sanders, the only competent base of support that rivals it is Trump's. It may not be tomorrow or next year when it succeeds, but we're definitely seeing what you're describing and I suspect it'll continue to build until big money can't stop it any longer.
- blfr 7y ago
  Folks like myself support him even though we're some sort of "upper middle class" or some form of middle-merchant class. Why do you say "even though"? Sanders and Warren target upper middle class and people aspiring to it.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    I was referencing the article which states, it's (almost) against class interests for these people to do so. That said, I disagree with any distinction in classes other than their actual function, workers vs owners. The upper/middle/lower descriptions don't mean much to me.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Agreed. The author is looking through slightly blue tinted glasses. The "working class" put "their guy" in a certain colored house in the US and got together to tell the EU to screw off in the UK. They might not be using their political power for things we all agree with or you could argue they're all being duped but they certainly aren't powerless. Furthermore, I think the author is over stating the homogeneity of white collar political professionals. Tech and academia are very homogeneously blue/left leaning (relatively speaking) but other industries less so. The author seems to be very confident in his predictions of where politics will move over the next decade or two but I see some massive variables that are not controlled for. Things could go any which way.
- frockington1 7y ago
  I agree with you, the author seems to assume that Brexit/Trump/France are all one-off political movements. I'm not even so sure as to how homogeneous tech i if the drama at Google is any indication. Academia probably is as they have a financial interest in the federal government expanding.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  American Affairs Journal was actually founded by a conservative nationalist as a pro-Trump journal, designed to "to give the Trump movement some intellectual heft." The editor changed his mind (and his political position) 6 months after the election, after Charlottesville. I think that what you see here may be some amount of bitterness after watching how events play out and what actually changes. The working class he decries as powerless were his people (he grew up in a small town in South Dakota); it's just that now that we've had 3 years of Trump he sees just how ineffective it's been.
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  Which variables?
- igravious 7y ago
  The author explicitly acknowledged that the deplorable majority can pull the lever once every four years, “At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies” But once in office their guy maintains the status quo even though populist rhetoric got him into office. So far this theory appears to be true. Historical data corroborates. What is less certain imho is that grassroots activism has ceased to be ineffective. Nobody expects the pitchforks and guillotines until they show up on their doorstep.
unraveller 7y ago
>they have the power to publish On the off chance some unsubscribe from their media streams to create then platform X is well prepared to flag their ideas as too similar to other quarantined fake news items.
hnuser77 7y ago
I think the author's take would be that the working class can radicalize all they want, but it probably won't change anything without the support of a significant part of the 10%-0.1%. I wish he had gone into detail on why he thinks the upper-middle class is required to effect political change. Is it because they have just enough capital? Or maybe they are closer to and more familiar with institutional power?
- kingkawn 7y ago
  Because his class consciousness is with them so he sees their participation as pivotal to anything taking root across the whole of society because they are how he relates to the whole of society
  - kaycebasques 7y ago
    It’s also not a coincidence that this thread has 400 comments
    - throwaway100773 7y ago
      Well said.
- jacobush 7y ago
  You can't run the world without them. (Yet, barring some sci-fi hell dystopia.) That's why.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Looking forward to it since I believe the professional barrier to be quite dysfunctional in recent times.
buboard 7y ago
This assumes that internet radicals are working class , which they are really not. Not even the majority. Isn't it mostly college kids and older boomers?
asdff 7y ago
The working class is already radicalized, however it's powerless through division. A poor minority in the city and a poor majority in the countryside have a lot more in common than either of them might like to believe; their economic interests are shared as they are both simply the working class. However, the poor person in the city is unlikely to vote at all, and the poor person in the country is likely to vote against their own economic interests in favor of perceived social narratives. As long this remains true, I wouldn't hold my breath on a working class awakening anytime soon.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  IIRC, revolutionaries in Russia didn't wait for the proletariat class consciousness to arise on it's own, as it had been predicted by Marx. The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually. The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Have a look at the cadres of the early Bolsheviks. Stalin - the supposedly uneducated thug - quit seminary school through disillusionment and decided the join a revolutionary party instead. At a time where the majority of people in Georgia got 4 years of part time schooling at best he spent over 10 years in education.
  - lainga 7y ago
    > The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually. That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.
munificent 7y ago
> They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate If by "talking to each other" you mean "increasingly consuming only whatever media the machine learning has been trained to foist onto them", yes. > uncoupled from professional barrier. This was true ten years ago, but not today. The recommendation algorithms run by the big tech companies are the window most people use to look into the Internet now.

petermcneeley 7y ago

That window might be closing with the current attempts to censor the internet.

larnmar 7y ago

The election of Donald Trump could be seen as the result of the radicalisation of the working class.

Pigo 7y ago
I'm sure a lot of people agree with you, but I still see putting a war-hawk like Hillary in the oval office as a radical concept.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
It's not the working class, it's exclusively the white working class.
aphextim 7y ago
I think it's more likely due to the echo chamber of the media/pollsters and big cities who didn't count of all the 'fly over' areas actually coming together. I remember working a temp job at a polling call center and although I was just doing grunt work of calling people, it was clearly obvious they were doing polls to hear what they wanted. There was only 1 survey out of maybe 200 that was what I would consider unbiased and didn't have any leading questions or pre-picked answers. You would screen out people in the beginning of the survey that were obviously not interested in whoever candidate you were calling in regards to, and more often than not the survey itself would have leading questions to get the answers they want so they can take the results and be like, "See our Candidate is winning!!!" - yet they only called people and did the survey with those who were already willing to vote for said candidate. Polls are literally circle jerking people who were voting democrat and those regarding republican candidate were always negative. It also could be that the particular call center I was working out of only had contracts with Democratic parties/PACS but from my time there it was clear that polls are a racket.
kingkawn 7y ago
I’m not sure why you’re downvoted, this is definitely true at least for the white uneducated working class. Yes, it is a reflection of old ideology that was used to exploit them in the past, so it is tragic that this is where their expression of group assertion is getting its start. Yet I think as the public discourse among this group continues to grow in sophistication it will develop a more nuanced worldview and will assert its power with greater wisdom.
joeblubaugh 7y ago
Trump voters are on average wealthier than Clinton voters: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?outputType=amp https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...
- war1025 7y ago
  I would guess (completely based on personal experience) that most in the service class voted for Clinton, while working class is more centered around manufacturing, which does pay better than the service industry. A big part of the issue is that people have different definitions for all the various social classes, so it's hard to compare things correctly.

_bxg1 7y ago

There's radical energy there, but here's the clincher: it will never turn into anything productive because the Republican propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class into continuing to think that public services are their enemy. They will rant and holler about communism until the billionaires have milked them of their very last dollar, and then blame that on communism too. The very policies that could be turning things around for them are the ones they most passionately disparage as power-grabs by the elites. As someone with many relatives in that camp I cannot express how exhaustingly frustrating this is.

larnmar 7y ago
If the working class turns to radicalism what makes you think it will be the kind of radicalism you agree with? It’s more likely to be the kind of radicalism you find terrifying.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  The kind of radicalism that raises my taxes to keep our country from falling apart is the kind I'm fully on-board with. Or, better yet, taxes the massive, useless dragon-hoards of the 0.1%. But I'm a team player; I don't mind if mine go up too.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Yes, but I think a lot of people are worried about the kind of radicalization that blames everything on intellectuals, foreigners, minorities and women.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Well right now we have that kind without any of the useful economic kind. So it can't get worse.
      - nl 7y ago
        Yeah it absolutely 100% can get worse. The Cambodian killing fields were less than 50 years ago. The Rwandan genocide was only 25 years ago. The Rohingya genocide was less than 3 years ago. "Us vs Them" is a dangerous game.

BuckRogers 7y ago

I think that's evident in the Bernie Sanders movement (and to a lesser extent, Warren). Folks like myself support him even though we're some sort of "upper middle class" or some form of middle-merchant class. Not owners, not truly capitalist/investment class, but solidly aligned with everyone else who also has to show up at 9AM daily to get their checks. This more affluent middle class of information workers are leading the rest of the folks who punch a clock for a living to a better life. It's not everyone though, there's older folks who are fully committed to a dog eat dog existence, because it worked out easily and well for anyone willing to even try their hand in the post-WW2 era. It's understandable that they don't see the connection between relatively easy prosperity, and destroying all of your industrial competitors. Some of the younger conservatives don't have the life experience of being exploited and tossed out to form well-informed views on labor, and are often afraid of challenging their tribe's view, with their fathers often being the aforementioned Boomer. Then you lose another chunk from those who are not very capable, but inherited wealth. Insecurity that they couldn't duplicate their position in life from scratch leads to extremely anti-social behaviors that we see from the capitalist class. Claiming some defectors from each of those groups, add in the blue collars who know the score, and add in the "Bernie Sanders" educated folk and I definitely am seeing more support for the movement in American society today than I do for any other grassroots movement. Judging from the strength of support of someone like Sanders, the only competent base of support that rivals it is Trump's. It may not be tomorrow or next year when it succeeds, but we're definitely seeing what you're describing and I suspect it'll continue to build until big money can't stop it any longer.

blfr 7y ago
Folks like myself support him even though we're some sort of "upper middle class" or some form of middle-merchant class. Why do you say "even though"? Sanders and Warren target upper middle class and people aspiring to it.
- BuckRogers 7y ago
  I was referencing the article which states, it's (almost) against class interests for these people to do so. That said, I disagree with any distinction in classes other than their actual function, workers vs owners. The upper/middle/lower descriptions don't mean much to me.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

Agreed. The author is looking through slightly blue tinted glasses. The "working class" put "their guy" in a certain colored house in the US and got together to tell the EU to screw off in the UK. They might not be using their political power for things we all agree with or you could argue they're all being duped but they certainly aren't powerless. Furthermore, I think the author is over stating the homogeneity of white collar political professionals. Tech and academia are very homogeneously blue/left leaning (relatively speaking) but other industries less so. The author seems to be very confident in his predictions of where politics will move over the next decade or two but I see some massive variables that are not controlled for. Things could go any which way.

frockington1 7y ago
I agree with you, the author seems to assume that Brexit/Trump/France are all one-off political movements. I'm not even so sure as to how homogeneous tech i if the drama at Google is any indication. Academia probably is as they have a financial interest in the federal government expanding.
nostrademons 7y ago
American Affairs Journal was actually founded by a conservative nationalist as a pro-Trump journal, designed to "to give the Trump movement some intellectual heft." The editor changed his mind (and his political position) 6 months after the election, after Charlottesville. I think that what you see here may be some amount of bitterness after watching how events play out and what actually changes. The working class he decries as powerless were his people (he grew up in a small town in South Dakota); it's just that now that we've had 3 years of Trump he sees just how ineffective it's been.
kaycebasques 7y ago
Which variables?
igravious 7y ago
The author explicitly acknowledged that the deplorable majority can pull the lever once every four years, “At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies” But once in office their guy maintains the status quo even though populist rhetoric got him into office. So far this theory appears to be true. Historical data corroborates. What is less certain imho is that grassroots activism has ceased to be ineffective. Nobody expects the pitchforks and guillotines until they show up on their doorstep.

unraveller 7y ago

>they have the power to publish On the off chance some unsubscribe from their media streams to create then platform X is well prepared to flag their ideas as too similar to other quarantined fake news items.

hnuser77 7y ago

I think the author's take would be that the working class can radicalize all they want, but it probably won't change anything without the support of a significant part of the 10%-0.1%. I wish he had gone into detail on why he thinks the upper-middle class is required to effect political change. Is it because they have just enough capital? Or maybe they are closer to and more familiar with institutional power?

kingkawn 7y ago
Because his class consciousness is with them so he sees their participation as pivotal to anything taking root across the whole of society because they are how he relates to the whole of society
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  It’s also not a coincidence that this thread has 400 comments
  - throwaway100773 7y ago
    Well said.
jacobush 7y ago
You can't run the world without them. (Yet, barring some sci-fi hell dystopia.) That's why.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Looking forward to it since I believe the professional barrier to be quite dysfunctional in recent times.

buboard 7y ago

This assumes that internet radicals are working class , which they are really not. Not even the majority. Isn't it mostly college kids and older boomers?

asdff 7y ago

The working class is already radicalized, however it's powerless through division. A poor minority in the city and a poor majority in the countryside have a lot more in common than either of them might like to believe; their economic interests are shared as they are both simply the working class. However, the poor person in the city is unlikely to vote at all, and the poor person in the country is likely to vote against their own economic interests in favor of perceived social narratives. As long this remains true, I wouldn't hold my breath on a working class awakening anytime soon.

gerbilly 7y ago
IIRC, revolutionaries in Russia didn't wait for the proletariat class consciousness to arise on it's own, as it had been predicted by Marx. The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually. The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Have a look at the cadres of the early Bolsheviks. Stalin - the supposedly uneducated thug - quit seminary school through disillusionment and decided the join a revolutionary party instead. At a time where the majority of people in Georgia got 4 years of part time schooling at best he spent over 10 years in education.
- lainga 7y ago
  > The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually. That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.

munificent 7y ago

> They too are out here on the internet, talking to each other and culturally evolving at an unprecedented rate If by "talking to each other" you mean "increasingly consuming only whatever media the machine learning has been trained to foist onto them", yes. > uncoupled from professional barrier. This was true ten years ago, but not today. The recommendation algorithms run by the big tech companies are the window most people use to look into the Internet now.