SMOKERS’ CORNER: SWALLOWING THE LEFT

According to the political economist S Akbar Zaidi, approximately 35 to 40 percent of the population in Pakistan can be described as middle class (bourgeoisie). This percentage may also include the ‘upper-middle class.’ The upper class in the country is estimated to be around 2 to 4 percent. 

This means approximately 50 to 55 percent of the population belongs to classes below the upper, upper-middle and middle. These are the working classes (the proletariat), the ‘lumpenproletariat’, peasants and lower-middle classes (petite bourgeoisie). 

Ever since the 1990s, discussing and determining class has become a rather complex undertaking. Most economists often go round in circles and eventually settle for the most ambiguous and vague explanations. This has been the case in the Global North as well as in the Global South. I believe one of the main reasons behind this has been the growing repulsion towards understanding class as the 19th century German ideologue Karl Marx did — or how Marxists evolved this understanding till at least the 1960s. 

By the 1970s, Western intellectuals who had once identified with the ‘Left’ turned hostile towards the whole concept of ‘class war’, which is at the heart of Marxism. In some cases, these intellectuals fell to the right because, according to them, the proliferation of Marxist ideas had weakened the internal purpose and external calling of their nation states. This, they feared, encouraged Soviet-backed ‘Third World’ countries to challenge the West’s economic and political influence. 

The middle classes, in both the Global North and South, have co-opted the Left’s ideological tools to serve their own upward mobility, while leaving the working class at the mercy of far-right populism

They began to understand the proletariat as ignorant facilitators of destructive Marxist ploys. Consequently, many such former leftists would go on to formulate what began to be called ‘neo-conservatism’, which sought an aggressive foreign policy, a free market economy with limited government regulation, the rollback of social welfare policies and a crackdown on ‘immoral’ acts such as abortion, consumption of drugs and the undermining of ‘traditional family values.’ Its advocates began being referred to as ‘neo-cons.’ 

But most leftist intellectuals in this regard stayed on the ‘Left’ even though, as the economies of European countries and the US came under duress in the 1970s, the intellectuals actively began to redefine Marxism. 

In the 1980s, when workers’ unions and welfare policies were being dismantled (as advised by the neo-cons), the Left in the Global North, now disconnected/disillusioned with the working classes, returned to the universities to rekindle the Left there. 

In contrast to the ‘radical 1960s’, they found a much larger and more diverse number of students. Most were from middle income families, and many were from the working classes as well. They were now a more robust mix of white, black, Latino, Chinese and South and East Asian youth. 

According to the American social theorist Vivek Chibber, from the late 1980s, the middle income students on campuses established a process of reproducing the upward mobility of their class, whereas students coming from the working classes looked to follow the example of their middle class contemporaries. Yet, the intellectuals, now firmly seated in universities, noticed a yearning in the students to rebel.

The idea of organising the working classes to enforce structural change and acquire resources, through which these classes could actually exercise their rights, had gone out of favour — so much so that working class students mostly hid their class background. This was taking place on campuses in the Global South as well. 

The result was a ‘cultural leftism’ with no desire to analyse the challenges of the working classes in a world where ideology and policy had abandoned them. The growing middle classes in the Global South became a favourite subject of study and so too was the state of the middle classes in the Global North. Those studying these kept landing on the fate of the working classes and the peasants as well, yet they ignored these as an increasingly irrelevant strata. And anyway, since these classes were now understood as being culturally underdeveloped, there was no room for them in cultural leftism, which looks to ‘fight the status quo’ through cultural means. 

Cultural leftism does not threaten the upward mobility of the middle classes. These classes like to speak about an ‘elite capture’ of economic and political institutions, but they conveniently ignore the fact that they too are a rising elite who have captured leftist ideas

and turned them into cultural salvos, using not class tensions, but tensions related to race, ethnicity and sexual orientation as ammunition. They refuse to see these as manifestations of economic/class tensions. 

The growing middle classes in the Global South have played a major role in all this, mostly by becoming ‘native informants’ in Western universities, as a way to safeguard their upward mobility in Europe and the US without compromising their supposedly ‘progressive’ and ‘anti-colonial’ credentials. They have vigorously applied relativist, anti-universalist and even anti-rationalist theories first churned out by 20th century ‘postmodern’ French intellectuals, and through a somewhat adulterated reading of ‘post-colonial theory’, in which Marx is debunked as being ‘yet another white guy.’ 

Cultural leftists have gone on to explain secularism as a ‘Western construct’ (and, of course, therefore ‘oppressive’). For years, they have been busy scribbling theses on the social and spiritual benefits that faith provides to millions in the Global South (and thus neutralising class tensions). 

After all, in 1979, the frontline French postmodernist Michel Foucault had excitedly described the ‘Islamic Revolution’ in Iran as a ‘spiritual revolution’ (as opposed to one triggered by class issues). He went very quiet, though, when the clerics in Iran started to publicly hang dozens of men, including homosexuals. Foucault was a declared homosexual. 

In India and Pakistan, almost every political or non-political talk show, vlog, TV serial and film focuses on how the middle classes understand politics, morality and economics. It is an understanding that is exhibited as being noble and even ‘revolutionary’ but is, in fact, rather self-serving, regressive and, at times, quite reactionary. A case in point is the overwhelming support the Hindu nationalist Modi attracts from ‘educated’ middle class folk. 

Meanwhile, across the world, the abandoned working classes have been co-opted by the far-right, which doesn’t provide them any material relief as such, but attention, scapegoats and a vengeful understanding of faith. Think Tehreek-i-Labbaik in Pakistan, or the fact that, in 2024, 57 percent of France’s working class voters cast their ballots for the far-right Rassemblement National. 

Cultural politics was once a right-wing vocation. It was interested in the moral cleansing of societies and in guarding faith from being banished by communism or being relegated to the private sphere by secularism. It was mainly shaped by the middle classes. So is cultural leftism.

No wonder then, instead of the ‘bold’, ‘politically correct’ and ‘radical’ entity that it claims to be, cultural leftism has actually become a glorified and attractive apologia for whatever right-wing cultural politics stood for. 

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 13th, 2025