Head Tale

Saw the story I’ve copied below online and it made me think of the current Federal NDP Leadership Race where this is a major topic of conversation.

It was also in the first provincial NDP Leadership race I was involved in where I got introduced to the term “Granholier Than Thou” as someone who was *very* left wing  in their views (eg. crunchy granola), also acknowledged the propensity for left wing parties to do Purity Tests (that no one can pass as there’s always another level – you don’t think there’s should be unhoused people?  Well, I signed an online petition!  Well, I donated some old clothes to the homeless shelter!  I served food at a shelter!  Well, I go there and volunteer weekly!  Well, I sold my house and all my belongings to live on the streets as that’s the only authentic way to understand homelessness, man!”

I think one of the most perspective changing ideas I came across is to not think about politics as left vs. right but more bottom (99% of us) vs. top (the fabled 1%.). Part of the issue is making sure that the educated and the management class and the well-off through inheritance or privilege or whatever realise they’re still closer to the bus boy than the billionaire.

Normally, I was told, about six people turned up. That night, the room was packed with maybe forty or fifty people. A mix of ages, backgrounds, accents. People who looked hopeful, a bit nervous, a bit excited. People who felt invited.

And then something happened that’s never really left me.

One of the long-standing regulars stood up and absolutely raged. Not at the billionaires or the landlords. He raged at the room, at the “elites” who had dared to show their faces. He sneered at how people were dressed and how well spoken they were and at what he imagined they represented.

It was despicable, and I don’t use that word lightly. The woman sat next to me was literally shaking with fear. What I witnessed wasn’t class politics, it was gatekeeping. A man mistaking familiarity with a room for ownership of it, and mistaking resentment for solidarity.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot since, because it turns out it explains rather more than I realised at the time.

For most of the 20th century, class was lived collectively. If you worked in a factory, a mine, a dock, you shared conditions, risks, and power structures with the people around you. Unions made sense because work was shared and labour (and ‘Labour’) made sense because class was tangible. The vote followed the job because the job followed the structure of power.

Now the job has dissolved into fog and that world is gone. Today, class doesn’t organise people’s lives in the same way: precarious work, gig contracts, multiple jobs, benefits topping up wages that no longer work. No shared workplace, no shared leverage, no obvious “we”. It’s the quiet collapse of class as lived experience. You don’t join a union when you don’t even know who you’ll be working for next week and you don’t see yourself as a class when your life feels like a juggling act rather than a collective endeavour.

Precarity atomises people and exhaustion, isolation, and a constant low-level panic, replaces solidarity.

What’s filled the gap isn’t class, but culture. Education has become the proxy and “graduate” now stands in for “elite”, not because graduates own anything (except student debt and a bike helmet) but because they’ve been exposed to structural thinking and a language that can describe systems. University becomes less about elite status and more about acquiring a language for power. And that alone is now treated as a threat.

At the same time, a group routinely described as “working class” has come to dominate working-class culture without actually being working class at all. The self-employed small business owners, contractors, landlords with one or two properties.

Marx had a name for them: the petit bourgeois, and that’s the part polite liberals often tiptoe around.

They’re doing alright. The van-and-invoice guy that owns their own tools. Sometimes they own other people’s labour. He is materially incentivised to side with capital, even if culturally he shares a postcode and a pub with people who are being crushed by it. Their interests lean towards money and hierarchy, not solidarity. Historically, that group has always been the shock troops of reaction, not because they’re evil, but because they’re anxious about falling downwards and furious at being told they’re not on the way up.

Enter the grifting spiv, Farage, who sells them dignity by letting them punch sideways instead of looking up. Murdoch supplies the vocabulary… the pub supplies the reinforcement loop.

Meanwhile, the “educated working class” ends up in a weird half-space. Teachers, nurses, social workers, public sector staff. Still selling their labour and still dependent on wages but culturally separated from the people they supposedly share a class with.

Reform thrives in the cracks left behind by the collapse of the old labour movement. It doesn’t build solidarity, but instead redirects resentment sideways. “Elite” stops meaning people who own and control everything, and starts meaning the person next door who reads books, works in the public sector, or turned up to a meeting wearing the wrong clothes.

That night in the Labour meeting, I saw the fracture in miniature. A room full of people who might have become a “we”, and a voice that chose to draw a line instead.*