The Packaging

The left’s failure to reach the working class is not a failure of ideas. It is a failure of form. The ideas are available to the people who are not being reached. What is not available to them - what the left has consistently failed to provide - is a political culture they can inhabit.

Noah Carter is twenty years old, from Drumchapel in northwest Glasgow, and has been a union shop steward in a supermarket since he was nineteen. He has attended socialist meetings in Glasgow. He has a clear verdict.

NC: I’ve been to a few socialist meetings in Glasgow and I’ll be honest - they can be a bit much. The amount of theory, the specific vocabulary, the assumption that everyone’s read the same things. I haven’t read all the things. I understand class through working in a supermarket, not through reading about it.

‘A bit much’ is a careful formulation. Carter is not saying the meetings were wrong, or that the people in them were hostile, or that the politics being discussed was irrelevant to his situation. He is saying the form was inaccessible - that the specific vocabulary, the assumed shared references, the meeting culture itself created a barrier between the ideas and the people who could most use them. And he is pointing to an alternative form of understanding that is equally valid: knowing class through working in a supermarket, through the concrete daily experience of who can tell you what to do and who cannot, is not a lesser form of knowing. It is a different one, and in some respects a more precise one.

Tunde Ajayi, from Bulwell in Nottingham and ten years in the Amazon fulfilment centre there, is more analytical about the failure. He has engaged with socialist groups that have tried to organise among warehouse workers and has a precise account of what distinguishes the useful engagements from the useless ones.

TA: The most useful engagement I’ve had from the left has been people who show up, ask what’s happening, listen to the answer, and then offer tools - legal knowledge, media contacts, organising experience - rather than telling me what my experience means. The least useful has been the theoretical framing first, the workplace reality second.

Theoretical framing first, workplace reality second. The sequence is the problem. When the left arrives with a framework already in place and organises its engagement around fitting the workplace reality into that framework, it is doing something that the warehouse worker experiences immediately as disrespectful - as the claim that they do not know what their own situation means, that the external analyst is required to interpret it for them. Ajayi knows what his situation means. He has been living it for ten years. What he needs from the left is not interpretation. It is tools.

The same failure across sectors

The pattern Shaw identifies in the construction trades and Carter and Ajayi identify in retail and logistics is not sector-specific. It is a feature of how the British left has organised itself across sectors, and it appears in the accounts of working-class activists across the collection wherever left organising is discussed.

Dee, a university lecturer who came to education through cleaning other people’s buildings and fighting for access as a single parent in her thirties, is the most scathing. Her anger is not at the left’s ideas. It is at the structural position middle-class left actors occupy in relation to the working class they claim to represent - the way that position produces a specific set of dispositions that make genuine solidarity nearly impossible.

Dee: Working class experience gets filtered through the perspective of middle class people. There’s no working class voices in the public sphere. And I think the middle class mistake is confusing networking with solidarity.

Networking with solidarity. The distinction is between the maintenance of mutually beneficial professional relationships - which is what middle-class political culture is very good at - and the commitment to showing up for people regardless of professional benefit - which is what working-class political culture, at its best, has historically required. The left’s culture has tended toward the first while using the language of the second. Working-class people notice.

Sascha, in her mid-sixties, puts the same point more viscerally. She has been living the class analysis long before anyone offered her a framework for it, and her account of the left’s failure is rooted in decades of watching it operate at close range.

Sascha: I think the fundamental weakness in working class people is we’re far too nice, essentially, when it comes to people pushing us around and being horrible to us. We’re just far more accepting than we really ought to be. We don’t like to cause trouble and we don’t want to be thought of as ungrateful.

This is not a critique of left communication strategy. It is a description of the power relation that left communication strategy has consistently failed to disturb. The working-class person who is too polite to name what is happening to her, who does not want to be thought ungrateful, who absorbs the condescension of middle-class political actors without naming it - this is not a problem the left can solve by finding better language. It is a problem that requires a different relationship to power within left organisations themselves.

What reaches people and what doesn’t

Carter’s account of what does reach his supermarket colleagues is the clearest positive statement of what the left’s communication needs to do differently.

NC: The workers in my store - most of them aren’t going to come to a socialist meeting. They’re going to respond to something that speaks to what’s actually happening to them at work this week. The rota that keeps changing. The hours that were cut. The manager who’s making their life difficult. Starting there - from the immediate experience of work - and building outward toward the bigger picture is the way to do it. Starting with the big picture and working down to their specific situation loses people. I see it happen.

Starting from the immediate experience of work and building outward. This is not a communication tip. It is a reversal of the left’s standard political logic, which has historically started from the big picture - the analysis of capitalism, the programme for transformation - and moved downward to the specific situation as illustration or application. Carter is saying: reverse the sequence. The immediate experience is not the illustration of the analysis. It is the analysis. Begin there and the bigger picture follows. Begin with the bigger picture and you have already signalled that the immediate experience is secondary.

Kemi Adeyemi, who does trans liberation work in Nottingham from a working-class position, describes the same failure in the specific context of trans politics. The public debate is almost entirely conducted at the level of principle and policy - should this person be allowed in this space, should this law be changed in this way. What is missing from that debate is the immediate experience: why are trans people disproportionately poor, why are Black trans women disproportionately subject to violence, what are the material conditions of trans working-class life and what would it cost to change them.

KA: The public debate about trans rights is almost entirely framed around: should this particular person be allowed into this particular space? And what’s missing from that frame is: why are trans people disproportionately poor? Why are trans people disproportionately homeless? The answers to those questions are class answers, and the public debate barely touches them.

The public debate barely touches them because the public debate is conducted by people for whom the immediate material experience is not the urgent question - for whom the principle is the urgent question. For Adeyemi and the people she works with, the principle is not separable from the material experience. The question of whether a trans woman of colour can safely access housing, healthcare, or employment is not a downstream consequence of the principle. It is the principle, stated concretely and urgently.

The activist space and its class problem

Several interviewees describe the specific culture of left activist spaces as itself a class problem - not because the spaces are hostile to working-class people but because they are built in ways that make working-class participation structurally harder.

Tyler Haines, who is twenty-one, from Harehills in Leeds, and organising in queer liberation politics, describes finding community in explicitly political spaces and online spaces, and feeling out of place in the mainstream queer venues of the city centre. The class signalling in those spaces is subtle - what you wear, what you talk about, what music you know - but it is real, and it communicates clearly to someone from Harehills that the space was not designed for them. The political spaces he has found most useful are the ones organised around specific shared material concerns - housing, the welfare system, workplace conditions - rather than around shared cultural identity.

TH: I’ve sometimes felt like I’m the working class presence in a room that doesn’t quite know what to do with me.

The room that doesn’t quite know what to do with you. This is the working-class experience of left activist spaces stated at its most precise. Not hostility. Not exclusion in any formal sense. Just the specific discomfort of being in a space that was not designed for your presence - that does not have the cultural resources to engage with you on your own terms, that relates to you as an interesting exception rather than as a central participant. The politics is right. The culture is wrong. And the culture, as Shaw keeps insisting, is a failure of the left.

Nyxie, a Liverpool anarchist who has been organising for years, describes the specific register of the problem in cross-class activist spaces. She is broadly on the same political page as the middle-class people she sometimes organises alongside. That does not make the encounter comfortable.

Nyxie: I tend to be a bit more annoyed with people that I think a lot of it comes from how I perceive them. So like even when the people that I’m roughly on the same page with, people that I know who have got a more middle class, a more privileged background, and I might kind of be a bit more sceptical of their views on it.

More sceptical. Not hostile, not wrong, but carrying a background scepticism that the middle-class political ally has not yet earned the right to dissolve. This is the conditional accountability that runs through the whole collection: political authority is earned through demonstrated reliability over time, not conferred by correct politics. The middle-class ally who is on the right page ideologically starts from zero in terms of the trust that actual organising requires. The left has tended to treat ideological alignment as sufficient. It is not.

The implication

Shaw’s formulation - ‘the packaging in which those ideas are often presented is not’ available to the people who could most use them - implies something more demanding than better communication. It implies that the left needs to change not what it says but what it is: the cultural form of its organisations, the modes of political engagement it treats as standard, the class composition of the spaces in which politics is made and communicated.

This is genuinely hard. The left’s culture is not incidental to the left. It has been built over decades by people who are not going to stop meeting in community centres or reading theory or using the vocabulary they have developed. The question is not whether that culture should be abolished - it should not - but whether it should be the only culture available, the implicit standard against which all political engagement is measured. The answer that emerges from these interviews is clear. It should not. And the cost of its continued dominance is being paid by the people the left most needs to reach.