While Marxists and others on the Left are correct to point out that many college-educated progressives are themselves part of the working class — even many lawyers and doctors must work for a paycheck to survive, after all — the key to socialist political strategy is uniting the whole working-class around a majoritarian agenda. For a civilizational challenge like shifting away from fossil fuels, only broad-based working-class power is capable of achieving what planetary systems require. To build that power, we need to understand why we are failing to win many workers to our politics, and how we can change that.
The “punk” part ain’t no joke
This is a US centric article but I expect there are similar effects in most “western” countries.
I’m a left-wing indigenous Australian, but find my own political priorities don’t align with most other left indigenous people I meet. I consider the climate crisis the #1 problem in the world, with the potential to cause the literal extinction of humanity. Wage equality and racial issues aren’t going to be a problem if everyone is dead.
I think a useful path to solidarity is that almost all of these things are promoted or exacerbated by the same antagonists and that unifying against that shared enemy is the best tool to counter them. Taking power away from the hyper capitalists advances all these goals. If we get to the point where any one of them isn’t that much of a concern anymore and people who were only in it for that start to peel away we’ll have made pretty good strides towards all of them. And by then hopefully they’ll have come to care deeply about the struggles of the other groups and continue on.
We don’t need to figure out what the #1 problem is when we all have the same villains.
I agree with this in general - it’s the billionaire class that’s causing most of the problems for everyone else. Unfortunately for some activists, their anti-colonialism and anti-authority approach spills over into anti-intellectual, anti-science attitudes like rejecting scientific consensus on climate change, vaccines, infection management etc.
During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic I was saddened to see many people whom I considered comrades reject science based medical advice, falling into anti-vax conspiracy theories and other nonsense because of their distrust of what they dismissed as “Western Science”. It’s that pathway that worries me about climate change. I’ve seen that happen already, with people who love their V8 petrol cars rejecting EVs and green energy because they see it as being pushed by “the government” which they don’t trust.