Lessons from Germany

Why Today’s Left Is Losing the Working Class

In the January 2025 French print edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, two articles appear back-to-back in what seems like an unintentional but revealing montage. The first, by Jens Malling, revisits , a town built in the 1950s, once envisioned as a socialist model city, designed to integrate labor, culture, and daily life into an egalitarian framework. It traces the steady erosion of rich, diverse public spaces, mapping the transformation of urban landscapes once anchored by libraries, community centers, and non-commercial gathering places, now gutted by privatization, surveillance, and the reduction of civic life to consumerist routine. The second, by Boris Grésillon, chronicles the dramatic — particularly in small towns and cities where public institutions that once structured collective life have withered away. Offering a parallel but sharper political portrait, it examines the rising disaffection of young white blue-collar men, increasingly isolated, resentful, and drawn toward right-wing populism.

Side by side, these accounts trace a grim historical arc: from the GDR’s attempt to build integrated, meaningful public spaces to a present where their absence leaves a vacuum the far-right has been all too ready to fill. This apparently unintended juxtaposition reveals something deeper: strip away high-quality communal spaces — youth centers, cultural halls, political forums — and what’s left is an unstructured drift, a social free-fall. And in that free-fall, in an era where social media dictates the terms of belonging, reactionary forces don’t just set up shop — they roll in with a full-fledged theme park, prepared to accommodate. As Grésillon notes, the AfD’s youth wing (Junge Alternative) doesn’t just hand out pamphlets on the glory of the Vaterland; they throw concerts, lead motorcycle outings, and cultivate a meticulously curated digital presence. This proactive engagement in shaping identity and belonging reflects a broader social shift that followed the collapse of the GDR’s socialist project, which created not only economic voids but also cultural and psychological ones — gaps the political establishment of the past three decades has failed to address. And as establishment parties struggle to retain trust, the AfD continues to exploit the resulting sense of betrayal and alienation.

As Perry Anderson outlined more than a decade ago (in ), the country’s post-reunification trajectory has been shaped by an economic model that has fostered both prosperity and social fragmentation, particularly in the former East:

‘For unification decisively weakened labour. When West German trade unions attempted to extend their organizations to the East, and uphold nation-wide wage rates comparable to those in the West, they encountered industries that were crumbling so fast, and workers so beaten by surrounding unemployment, that failure was more or less foreordained.’

Cheaper labor in Eastern Europe and the outsourcing of industrial plants to Third World countries drastically weakened German trade unions, both in membership and in their ability to resist pressure from capital. In every respect, Germany’s shift toward neoliberalism dismantled the structures that once provided stability and a sense of collective purpose for working-class communities.

The stark contrast between Eisenhüttenstadt’s egalitarian urbanism and today’s disaffected East German towns underscores the material conditions necessary for a culturally rich and socially meaningful life. A similar dynamic could be observed in the late Soviet era. Sociological studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s in Roubtsovsk and among the rural population of Novosibirsk reveal that, despite the Soviet system’s evident decline — and partly due to the underground economy operating in the shadow of the bureaucratic state — living standards improved during this period. Housing conditions and access to durable goods rose significantly, education levels increased, leisure opportunities expanded, and a third of the population had access to communal gardens, improvements that particularly benefited the less privileged.

Not everything was rosy — far from it. Yet, as Moshe Lewin showcased in The Soviet Century, cultural participation in former Soviet states declined sharply in the 1990s: fewer people attended theaters, circuses, concerts, and libraries, or engaged with literature and newspapers. Leisure, once culturally enriching, increasingly shifted toward passive, restorative activities, mirroring trends in the West, where the heavier workloads brought on by unrestrained capitalism left little time or energy for intellectual and artistic pursuits. Overall, while the expansion of liberal freedoms and services benefited the highly skilled and entrepreneurial, the majority saw its access to cultural life drastically curtailed. Long before the advent of the internet, social networks, and smartphones, television — coupled with its declining quality — was already exerting a particularly damaging effect on children, who spent hours alone in front of screens. Unlike in the West, this was not yet the case in the USSR during the 1980s.

Across the former Eastern Bloc and beyond, public space has withered under neoliberal capitalism — another casualty in its long con, leaving a void where collective life once thrived. In the face of this decay, rather than tending to the ruins, much of the contemporary Left — armed with postmodern jargon and the righteous fervor of a Twitter mob — has doubled down on a ghostly crusade of its own. In this theater, whiteness has become a metaphysical stain, masculinity a form of radioactive fallout, and working-class culture the ever-present suspect in an ideological witch trial. In the cleansed, gentrified neighborhoods of major Western cities today, where dive bars have become gluten-free bakeries, laundromats have been reborn as kombucha co-ops, and contact with working-class people, the poor, and the homeless has dwindled to a vanishing point — except when their service is needed to sustain a lifestyle reserved for a privileged few — the new urban clergy — performatively tolerant, polygender-friendly, vegan militant, holistic wellness-obsessed, and thoroughly convinced of their own revolutionary zeal — proselytize in the language of ‘epistemic disobedience’, ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘cis-heteronormativity’, and ‘white privilege’ — terms that, rather than serving as tools of material critique, often function as ritualistic incantations, summoning guilt, expiation, and the dull glow of self-congratulatory despair.

Of course, not all cultural progressives fit this caricature — many remain steadfast allies in the struggle against the forces of capital. But the Left’s fixation on identity politics — where gender and race emancipation are framed not as fundamental human rights but as an alternative, or even an opposition, to the focus on economic justice — has only deepened alienation and hardened resentment, leaving a void where working-class solidarity should be. And into that void, the far-right, lurking at the fringes, eagerly steps in, offering what much of the Left has abandoned: recognition, belonging, purpose. That it comes wrapped in tinfoil conspiracies and the gaudy nostalgia of reactionary politics makes it no less seductive.

Rebuilding a Left capable of taking on the far-right requires ditching the sermonizing, the neoliberal guilt-tripping, the endless TED Talk on why the working class and class struggle are relics of a museum exhibit, rather than the engine of meaningful change. Instead of lecturing young white men on their insufficiently deconstructed (or ‘decolonized’) identities, the Left must be able to offer new platforms for envisioning universal emancipation, where solidarity is built not on moral chastisement, but on shared material struggle.

At first glance, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party in Germany appears to be a step forward, positioning itself as a bulwark against the rise of the AfD. BSW’s call for economic interventionism, a robust welfare state funded by the wealthy, and a break from corporate dominance marks a genuine — if incomplete — effort to reorient politics toward material concerns. Her critique of today’s culturalist Left is not without merit — she rightly condemns its retreat from class politics into a narrow, moralizing focus on ‘Left-lifestyle’ issues, where diet and pronouns take precedence over poverty and inequality, and where structural injustice is framed as a matter of individual guilt rather than systemic transformation.

And yet, in seeking to reclaim the working class from the far-right, BSW mirrors some of the very tendencies it seeks to counter. Its hostility to immigration, cloaked in appeals of social solidarity, betrays the very universalism it claims to uphold. The idea that welfare must be confined within rigid national or cultural boundaries cedes ground to reactionary narratives, scapegoating migrants rather than confronting capital itself. Likewise, its rejection of gender inclusivity and embrace of ‘traditional family values’ signal an uneasy alliance with conservative forces that see cultural progressivism not as a misguided emphasis, but as an existential threat.

A conservative Left is a contradiction in terms. A genuine Left movement must look beyond national borders, to the fight against global inequality, the revival of internationalism, and the reaffirmation of solidarity, forged in struggle both locally and globally with all those dispossessed by capital, neo-imperialism, and ecological collapse. This begins, above all, with standing alongside the displaced, the migrants drowned at sea, torn apart by landmines, gunned down by vigilantes, asphyxiated in cargo containers, locked in detention centers, hunted by neo-Nazi gangs, and condemned to misery in the heart of wealthy nations. To turn away from their suffering is not just politically bankrupt, it is morally indefensible.

But solidarity cannot stop at bearing witness to suffering, it must translate into material change. The conditions that force millions into displacement are not accidents of fate; they are the direct result of an economic order designed to extract, exploit, and discard. Addressing these crises requires more than moral outrage, it demands a radical rethinking of economic power itself.

In a , the late Mike Davis was spot on about what needed to be done to counter today’s political ecosystems of fear:

‘The Left puts far too much emphasis on raising taxes and far too little on economic power. Who makes the decisions in the economy and who controls the economy? We need to talk more about public ownership of certain parts of the economy. Social media and Amazon are among the essential infrastructure of a society today. Socialists and middle-class progressives argued at the beginning of the 20th century to put telephone, water and electricity companies in public hands. Regulation is one thing, but nationalizing is better in some cases. During the financial crisis, many people realized that we had nationalized the banks outright. Then we quickly sold them again. Why didn’t we keep them?’

He had been touching on the same key at least since Occupy Wall Street: ‘The great issue’, he wrote in , ‘is not raising taxes on the rich or achieving a better regulation of banks. It’s economic democracy: the right of ordinary people to make macro-decisions about social investment, interest rates, capital flows, job creation, and global warming. If the debate isn’t about economic power, it’s irrelevant.’

For a clearer path forward, we should follow Davis’s lead in Old Gods, New Enigmas and turn to labor history — not as nostalgia, but as a blueprint for a new proletarian counterculture, one that resists bureaucratic inertia and transcends the narrow confines of economic calculus. This vision hinges on insurgent, innovative technologies and the radical democratization of urban life, anchored in a profusion of alternative institutions: public housing reclaimed from speculation, communal spaces for organizing, education, and militant action; labor colleges, consumer cooperatives, hiking clubs, even free psychoanalytic clinics — sites where class solidarity is built and autonomy forged.

A radical structural analysis of contemporary society gains real social force and momentum only when it is grounded in a transformative lived experience. Reclaiming public space doesn’t mean repackaging it as yet another gentrified marketplace, where once-thriving streets are sterilized as hipster food courts hawking overpriced craft IPAs. It means restoring the commons as a living, breathing foundation for anti-authoritarian culture, where politics is not a performance but a daily practice. And it means embracing history, not as a cautionary tale, but as a roadmap forward.

By addressing radical working class needs amid perpetual economic crisis and environmental breakdown — rejecting the false choice between making it to the end of the month and confronting the end of the world — this proletarian public sphere, as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge would call it, would serve as both the strongest bulwark against the rising tide of neofascism and a transformative blueprint for a new social life. A viable future depends on workers reclaiming control — over the economy, over public life, over the very terms of political struggle. Only through cross-border class solidarity and a revived oppositional public sphere can we break free from managed decline and build a world that bridges the everyday with the utopian, where collective emancipation is not just an aspiration but a lived reality.

[This article was first published on ]