Crisis, Class, and Political Recomposition
Recent
electoral developments in Germany complicate a diagnosis that has become
fashionable across parts of the contemporary left: that the deepening crisis of
capitalism has rendered class politics obsolete, and that any apparent revival
of class-based organization can only be illusory, nostalgic, or politically
empty. The renewed
momentum of Die Linke – 2025 marked its best electoral performance since 2017
and a significant improvement over 2021 – does not mark a return to a vanished
social-democratic world, nor does it resolve the contradictions of an economic
order in visible decay. But it does present an inconvenient fact for theories
that mistake systemic breakdown for historical finality.
What calls for
explanation is not the existence of crisis – this is beyond dispute – but the
persistence, under conditions of generalized insecurity, of attempts to rebuild
collective agency. Die Linke’s gains have coincided with a sustained engagement
with the lived material experience of major strains of the country’s population,
marked by stagnating wages, chronic housing shortages, the normalization of
precarious work, the feminization of insecurity through care labor, and the
everyday coercion of a labor market organized around flexibility and
disposability. These forces are unevenly distributed, but widely shared. They
traverse the lines separating native German workers from immigrants, men from
women, and majority populations from racialized minorities; not by dissolving
these differences, but by subjecting them to a common regime of exploitation.
In this
setting, class solidarity cannot be dismissed as an anachronistic mirage generated by
desperation or false consciousness. Neither can it be reduced to an ethical proclamation. It emerges rather
as a practical response to converging conditions. The tentative unity that has
taken shape is not grounded in cultural homogeneity or national belonging, but
in the recognition that the same economic order that devalues migrant labor
also corrodes the security of native workers, that the system dependent on
women’s underpaid and unpaid care work disciplines the entire working class,
and that the erosion of public provision ultimately weakens all those whose
lives depend on wages, services, and collective infrastructures. Class
reappears here not as an abstraction, but as a lived relation, necessarily multi-ethnic,
gendered, and heterogeneous; fractured, conflictual, and nonetheless articulable.
What defines the present is not the disappearance of class – or of class struggle, for that matter – but its recomposition under conditions of fragmentation. Far from rendering class obsolete through the exhaustion of value, the microelectronic revolution displaces class antagonism from accumulation to crisis management, recomposing class from a relation centered on labor-time into one structured by neoliberal dispossession, social reproduction, and organized abandonment, in which exploitation persists in new forms alongside the coercive governance of surplus populations.
Today’s working class is more
diverse, more polarized, and more insecure than in earlier phases of capitalist
development. It is also increasingly bound together by shared exposure to
market discipline, by the collapse of social reproduction, and by the
privatization of risks once collectively absorbed. When political projects
succeed, even partially, in giving these experiences a common language without
translating them into moral denunciation or cultural warfare, they demonstrate
that class unity is not a theoretical inheritance but a contingent achievement.
The
alternative – retreating into the claim that any political movement is
illusory, that class organization itself belongs to a bygone epoch, or that
emancipation can only follow total systemic collapse – amounts to analytic
resignation. Draped in the rhetoric of radical critique, it risks reproducing
the passivity it claims to diagnose, leaving the field open to reactionary
forces far more adept at converting material suffering into exclusionary forms
of belonging.
The lesson of the present conjuncture thus is not that electoral politics can resolve capitalism’s contradictions, but that the terrain of class struggle remains open and contested. Class politics survives not as neo-Keynesian systemic regulation or an ethereal project of value abolition, but as solidaristic struggle over the infrastructural, ecological, feminist, and anti-racist conditions of collective survival. A left capable of grounding solidarity in material life – across lines of origin, gender, and color – stands a better chance of confronting exploitation in its contemporary forms than one content to pronounce the end of history from the sidelines. As with the reconstruction of any oppositional public sphere, the decisive work lies not in theoretical closure, but in the uneven, unfinished effort to rebuild collective power where everyday life is actually lived.