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I think you touch on a huge number of interesting questions in this post.
My view on why 'material' (ie 'orthodox marxist'; economic) socialist views have declined is that the average quality of life for the 'urban proletariat' is vastly higher than it was at the high point of communism. Especially if you look at the richest, most industrialized countries (where Marx predicted the revolution would happen first), ie. Germany, the UK, the US, the 'high point' for massively popular radical leftism was 1880-1930. Even by the mid-1930s in the UK (I choose because Germany saw democracy end in that time, while the US had a weird double dip recession due to extremely stupid policy by FDR) newfound prosperity had marginalized the truly radical left, which had its last great moment in the general strike of 1926.
You just can't compare the 'material conditions' of a miner in Lancashire in 1905, or a worker in a steel mill in Pittsburgh in 1890, to the conditions of a modern 'American proletarian', like a nurse, a content marketing manager, a mid-level employee of the local municipal government, or even a skilled blue collar worker like a modern steel industry worker. In 2010 pay for a fresh miner, in a huge recession, right out of high school was $70,000 a year in West Virginia. Still tough work, but much more than many 'white collar' jobs paid at that time fresh out of college (if you could get one at all), and in a state with a low cost of living.
This has happened every six months since the invention of social media, and nothing changes. As the old quip goes,
Lesbian separatism failed for a reason (well, many reasons, but one primary reason); women like men too much to commit.
Well - you actually can. If one thing they all have in common is that their only source of income is their wage/salary i.e. their own labour is their only means of survival, and they have (practically) no savings, no inherited wealth, no silver, no gold, no stocks, no livestock, own no land, and don't own any real estate besides (maybe) the one they live in, then yes, objectively speaking, according to socialist terminology, they are the proletariat. Whether they use smartphones or not, what color their collars are, whether they perform physical labour or not, is of no importance.
Marxist definition has a big 19th century assumption that the proletariat actually produces the material goods keeping the society alive and can threaten the existence of the entire system if they simply stopped.
This largely doesn’t hold anymore since most of the manufacturing is shipped to a myriad of third world countries who are willing to use extreme coercion on their workers (which was common in turn of century western countries as well and eventually got an ideological banner under European fascism) to keep the production going. If the workers of a manufacturing country somehow gets the upper hand, the country is cut out of the international trade system and replaced by one of 50 other willing nations.
Western proletariat in this system still technically fit the Marxist definition but not really. They are by and large service workers who don’t hold such power because usually they don’t make anything really crucial to the functioning of the economy. Their role is not to produce but to manage some steps of the production happening abroad, and to serve the wealthy few who got rich from being adjacent to offshoring. Their strikes can hardly cause a nuisance and are easily broken.
Labour immigration acting as inverse offshoring also has a strong effect here. Many lower level jobs are held by foreigners who don’t even have citizenship rights and are glad for the opportunity. They will gladly act as strike breakers.
So no, this isn’t really what the word proletariat was meant to apply to.
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The class that is most precarious today are surplus elites. The low income high status people struggling to not fall into the working class. An electrician with a good salary and zero risk of unemployment benefits from low taxes. The sociology major or artist who makes less than an electrician is dependent on state handouts. The class represented by the modern left isn't the working class, it is the state handout class. This can either mean underclass living on welfare or art history major managing a project that is supposed to help the underclass (don't ask for statistical evidence of the efficacy of this project). Canceling student debt and more money for modern art benefits people with upper middle class parents who didn't make it to medical school yet are terrified of becoming a nurse. The modern left is in a conflict with the working class as the working class doesn't want to pay for LGBTQA+ certifications while the downwardly mobile middle class desperately needs it so they don't end up in the working class.
Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.
These social media campaigns work, they provide new jobs for chief diversity officers.
And this is a self re-enforcing cycle; the more it becomes a default that mentally healthy non-underclass women have degrees, the more women get degrees in communications and psychology(typically the two least rigorous majors) because women are susceptible to societal pressure and low-rigor degrees make it difficult to get a job, which means there’s outcry to make more jobs specifically for degree holders.
Feminism doesn’t help- the way to break the cycle would be to acknowledge that most but not all women should just be homemakers, yes often for men who make $65k/yr, but it isn’t the root of the problem. Pretending that everyone can be an elite is the root of the problem.
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I think it'd be more accurate and simple to just call them intellectuals.
Elites who didn't develop some great new tech, trade their way to a career on wall street or become a surgeon.
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