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Class Relations in Germany in 2025
Originally published: Countercurrents on October 26, 2025 by Thomas Klikauer (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Oct 30, 2025)
German-born Karl Marx might well be the most prominent philosopher and economist to have elaborated on a capitalism that created a class system. Yet, Germany is moving from the denial of class towards a “rediscovery” of class.
Throughout West-Germany’s post-Nazi history, its version of media capitalism ensured that the official ideology of anti-communism became the all-defining lens through which almost everything was viewed.
Anyone using the term “class” in West-Germany during those decades was branded as ewiggestrig — stuck in the past. Germany’s power elite made clear that the conflict of interests between those who buy labour and those who have to sell their labour on the market no longer existed—if it had ever existed at all.
Today, discussions about the pathologies of Germany’s class society are omnipresent. Popular books vividly describe how life in the working class still shapes people’s pathways today, as social mobility hardens and upward movement becomes increasingly rare.
Journalistic TV documentaries about the “working class” and even scientific “reports on the class society” are met with great media attention.
Whether in sections of Germany’s quality media, research institutes, churches, trade unions, adult education centres, theatres, NGOs, or political parties—all are trying to figure out why, in a society supposedly becoming more individualistic, diverse, and colourful, a sharply unequal distribution of life chances continues to have such a profound effect. It even gains in importance.
Today, the richest section of the population—topped by the publicity-shy Frau Klatten—owns roughly 30% of all assets. For those below that—most Germans—even life expectancy differs dramatically depending on socio-economic status and class:
Women on low wages die on average 4.4 years earlier than their counterparts in the highest income group.
For men, the difference is as much as 8.6 years.
The poor usually die much earlier.
This gap between rich and poor runs largely parallel to the well-known dividing line between capital and labour.
Socio-economic inequality curtails life chances—and can even take years off your life.
In a capitalist society, not only companies but also workers are forced to constantly compete with each other. Workers still experience the dependence on selling their own labour. Unlike for BMW-owning Frau Klatten ($26bn), “no work means no money.” It also means being exposed to the last remaining fragments of what was once a mighty German welfare state—now turned into a punishment regime for the poor.
Meanwhile, the system that largely governs a class society—namely, the state—has made it particularly difficult to trace the dynamics of Germany’s class structure. The state follows the prevailing hegemony of anti-communism: class simply does not exist.
After Germany’s liberation from Nazism and the rise of a pro-capitalist, deeply anti-communist order, politics, capitalism, and its media attached great importance to portraying Germany as a country distinguished—supposedly in contrast to East-Germany—by the myth of “prosperity for all,” as announced by “strong-state conservative” Ludwig Erhard.
Conformist sociologists like Helmut Schelsky lent a helping hand by proclaiming that Germany was a “levelled” Mittelstandsgesellschaft—even replacing the word “class” in “middle class society” with the reactionary-feudalist term Stand, a term evoking a society divided by estate or caste: nobles and peasants.
Meanwhile, even within the class-camouflaging delusion of the Mittelstand, not everyone was the same and not everyone belonged to the middle class. Some were more equal than others.
The Mittelstand ideology benefited from the fact that even unskilled workers saw wages rise quickly, new forms of petty-bourgeois consumerism became possible, and many hoped for betterment for themselves or at least for their children.
These were the unfulfilled promises of the so-called “economic miracle”—made possible by the state-and-capital-engineered mass migration of those denigrated as “guest workers.”
These years were sold as the “golden years”—though, as always, some had the gold while others did not. Under these conditions, and kept at bay by the prevailing ideology, large parts of the working population were indeed enticed to see themselves as part of “the middle.”
West-German society was made to appear as a pear: a tiny shoot at the top and a relatively narrow bottom. Even after the “dream of everlasting prosperity” ended in the mid-1970s, petty-bourgeois sociologists like Ulrich Beck continued to hope for an “elevator effect”—the rising tide that would lift all boats.
Beck and his entourage believed that German society was on the right track to get everyone to the upper floor, no matter which floor they entered from. Beck took his false premises as “good news.”
Meanwhile, the denial of class society almost eliminated issues such as capitalism’s recurring crises, mass unemployment, poverty, precarization, and the neoliberal reshaping of Germany’s labour market and social policy—euphemistically known as the “Hartz Reforms.”
These “reforms” were named after Volkswagen’s personnel chief Peter Hartz, who was later convicted of fraud. In 2007, Braunschweig’s court sentenced him to two years’ probation and a €576,000 fine—confirming once again that top managers don’t go to prison; petty thieves do. Germany’s Wikipedia even mentions “prostitutorial” activities in connection with the case.
With the impact of neoliberalism setting in, German workers found that—instead of going up in the elevator—they were on an “escalator down.”
Despite all this, for many, “the middle” remains a place of longing, a myth they were made to believe in. The prevailing ideology of “the middle” was so persuasive that it seemed to need no justification. No reference to the continued existence of class society was required.
This has real consequences for the analysis of social structures. Because class differences are presumed not to exist, they are hardly documented and rarely examined.
Even today, Germany lacks official statistics—unlike, for example, Great Britain and France—from which one could discern changes in class structures. In 2001, for example, Britain’s Office for National Statistics announced the existence of eight classes:
higher professional and managerial occupations;
lower managerial and professional occupations;
intermediate occupations;
small employers and own-account workers;
lower supervisory and technical occupations;
semi-routine occupations;
routine occupations; and
never worked and long-term unemployed.
While these are sociological groupings by occupation, they triggered a lively debate in the UK—something impossible in Germany, where the all-pervasive ideology insists there are no classes.
Meanwhile, Germany—like any other society—remains defined by class: a Marx inspired class system of workers and the bourgeoisie, or, if you prefer, the sociologically invented “lower, middle, and upper class,” based on differences in income, education, and social status.
Worse, official data in Germany focuses merely on occupational categories—distinguishing only between workers, white-collar employees, and civil servants.
Based on the “no-classes-here” ideology, the prevailing language deliberately avoids emphasizing class antagonisms and social inequality.
Instead of class, Germany’s pro-business media and compliant researchers continue to appeal to an imaginary unity and ethnic homogeneity—the spirit of the antisemitic Volksgemeinschaft prevails.
The tendency to deny class differences has been reinforced by capital, the media, and virtually all party-political constellations since 1949. For many years, the two major parties—the conservative CDU/CSU and the social-democratic SPD—joined forces in sustaining capitalism under the pretence of a classless Mittelstand society.
This political-ideological disregard for class differences has a long and strong tradition in Germany—from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Nazis to West-Germany.
Despite the denial, class has a profound impact on people’s work and lives. Even in the mid-1950s, workers in West-Germany’s metal industry—interviewed by Heinrich Popitz, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Ernst August Jüres, and Hanno Kesting—had no doubt that there was a clear boundary between “those up there” and “us down here,” and they knew exactly where those boundaries lay.
On the downside, this awareness was hardly associated with class struggle. After all, Germany’s trade unions and workers’ movement had been crushed, tortured, and murdered under the Nazis only a few years earlier.
Under these conditions, workers had no illusions about class, but they also no longer assumed that they could make a significant contribution to overcoming Germany’s class society.
Instead, they settled in as best they could. This was made easier by the post-war economic upswing. After the boom, with neoliberalism on the rise, it became much more difficult for large parts of Germany’s working population to escape the proletarian class.
Although the grandchildren of Germany’s working class graduated from colleges and universities in increasing numbers, they still do so far less frequently than the children of other social groups.
Today, many lag behind union-won standards in wages and working conditions comparable to what their parents or grandparents achieved.
In politics and science, it remains disreputable to speak of a class society. Yet since the mid-1980s, growing parts of the working population have felt that it exists—and that class affects their work, lives, and futures.
In other words, Germany is constantly engaged in processes of class formation. A class takes shape when people, based on common experiences, begin to feel and articulate their interests—both among themselves and against others whose interests differ from or oppose their own.
Such processes of class formation change the relationship between capital and labour, as well as relationships among workers themselves.
The working class here is understood as the growing group of people who must secure their existence by selling their labour power.
They are wage-earners, absolutely dependent on the income from their work. They cannot live—or at least not permanently—on savings or other sources of income.
At the same time, they are employed under superiors, managers, and overseers—they have a boss—and are bound by managerial orders and instructions.
Since capitalism is based on the competition of all against all, relations between workers are also characterized by competition.
Although wage labour takes many forms, it also creates strong similarities among those affected by class. Virtually all workers share at least three common interests:
an interest in higher wages;
an interest in shorter working hours; and
an interest in good working conditions.
This is not unique to Germany. It applies to all workers—from a German car factory to a Filipino textile worker, a Colombian cleaner, an Egyptian nurse, or an Indian worker at Tata Motors.
Despite all the differences and competition, there are indications of overarching experiences, of connections between different groups of employees, and potentials for solidarity.
It is not possible to directly deduce class solidarity from everyday behaviour, but one can identify areas where an awareness of unifying interests exists—and where class consciousness can emerge.
https://mronline.org/2025/10/30/class-r ... y-in-2025/
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Build the Platform to strengthen the global anti-imperialist struggle
The deepening crisis of overproduction in the imperialist countries is intensifying the drive to war and deepening working-class impoverishment.
Proletarian writers
Wednesday 30 April 2025
The struggles of the world’s oppressed against imperialism are an integral part of our own struggle for emancipation from wage slavery.
The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.
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This congress confirms that the only correct analysis of imperialism is that made by Lenin:
“We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.
“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916)
This congress applauds our party’s role in assisting with the formation of the World Anti-imperialist Platform. Congress notes that the formation of the Platform was a response to:
1. The harmful confusion in the world’s working-class movement which saw the prestigious Greek Communist party (KKE) use all its influence to spread the erroneous theory that all capitalist countries in the era of monopoly capital must necessarily be imperialist. This anti-Leninist ‘theory’ has been propagated in the name of Leninism to justify denouncing the enemies of imperialism, in particular (but not only) Russia and China, as imperialist countries that are just as much enemies of the working class as the real imperialists grouped in the Nato camp. Thus the KKE and aligned parties around the world have condemned Russia’s SMO in Ukraine as ‘aggressive’ and defined the Ukraine conflict as an ‘interimperialist war’ in the outcome of which the working-class movement has no interest and should not take sides – the very opposite of the truth.
2. The accelerating drive to war by the imperialist countries, led by the USA, against all countries seeking economic independence, which the imperialists see as obstacles to their ability to loot resources for the minimum cost, especially Russia and China (but not exclusively these two, witness the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as the ‘colour revolutions’ in east European and former Soviet states such as Ukraine). The imperialists are trying to effect ‘regime change’ wherever a state tries to exert even a modicum of sovereignty in order to dismember the territories of its opponents and loot their resources at will, the drive to war being the result of the deepening crisis of overproduction in all of the imperialist countries, which is at the same time increasingly impoverishing its own working classes.
This congress recognises that imperialism is the chief enemy of the working and oppressed peoples, both at home and abroad.
Congress recognises also that in the current world situation of the deepening global crisis of overproduction, which is leading both to the increasing impoverishment of workers and to the accelerating drive to war by the imperialists, it is more important than ever that the revolutionary working-class movement in the imperialist nations:
1. provides a correct analysis of what constitutes imperialism; and
2. bases its work on the understanding that the struggles of the oppressed and anti-imperialist peoples and nations against imperialism are an integral part of our own struggle for emancipation from wage slavery and must therefore be unconditionally and wholeheartedly supported.
This congress acknowledges the importance, at this time and at this stage of the revolutionary movement, of the of the initiative taken by all those forces involved in the formation the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, recognises in particular the significance of the theoretical work of our founding chair, Comrade Harpal Brar, in helping to form its central positions, and confirms its full support for the Paris Declaration of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform made on 14 October 2022 (see document linked below).
Congress appreciates the important role played by some of our own comrades in helping to prepare many of the Platform’s statements and resolutions, and the significant commitment of time and resources our leadership has given to helping the Platform to develop, and to ensure that its international conferences are a success and the influence of its line continues to grow.
Congress applauds the success of the Platform over the last two and a half years in bringing together increasing numbers of progressive, anti-imperialist parties, which are gaining strength from one other’s example and experiences, and benefiting from the clear Marxist-Leninist leadership and analysis provided by the Platform.
Congress therefore resolves that our party will continue to devote the time and funds necessary to support the activities of the Platform (as far as our resources will allow), and to render all possible support to those who are delegated to carry out this important work.
Paris Declaration: The rising tide of global war and the tasks of anti-imperialists, 14 October 2022.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/04/30/ne ... -struggle/
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Class Consciousness at The World Transformed
16/10/2025
By Lewis Hodder
Although I’d joined the queue for the Assembly forty minutes early, by the time I entered the hall I soon found myself shuffling, single file, along the back of the hall where all the seats were taken, with too many people filing into a narrow dead-end made up of even more people. After apologising to those whose view I was blocking and some perfunctory humour from the chair, it became clear that the class consciousness of large sections of the room exceeds the movement’s leaders. Jeremy Corbyn is cited as a reason many people here were ever drawn to the left in the 2010s, but his own Bennite autodidactism that looks to concepts of peace and justice and to Percy Bysshe Shelley is a world away from the political experience of the British left today. The shared recognition of the hall was the necessity of building past the British left’s historical failures. Over forty proposals were submitted to be read and discussed across three assemblies at The World Transformed, each responding to the main challenges that face the left in Britain and globally, what were people’s vision for the new party, and what are its priorities and what is necessary to achieve them. Every speaker, whether speaking from the stage or from the floor, who at least openly declared their affiliation, was from a trade union like the British Medical Association, the National Education Union, or Equity, or RS21, Plan C, a faction of the new party itself, the Palestinian Youth Movement, from the Movement Research Unit, some students, people without any affiliation altogether, and a holistic mental health charity and members of the Greens. The established left-wing parties, the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, by contrast, dutifully held their stalls outside the box office and main hall to attract anyone who wasn’t already familiar with them.
The assemblies themselves moved from rightful indignation at parliament to something more reconciliatory. The latter mood was centred around the Greens; surety of electoral alliances were coupled with anxiety around choosing them or the new party, as a member of Plan C with an “EAT THE RICH” jumper wasn’t able to decide between the two. What criticism was directed at Parliament was explicitly aimed at Adnan Hussain, and at first only implicitly at Corbyn for having allowed him to be associated with the party at all and its keen contempt for democracy. Adnan Hussain’s property portfolio and rigid defence of his own transphobia – which he attempted to read into the history of socialism and defended as essential to the Muslim community – sparked indignation, and Kieran Glasssmith’s essay “MPs Don’t Make Good Leaders”1 soon found its audience on the British left as Corbyn’s commitment to the broadchurch politics of the Labour Party reasserted itself in its most meek form. In his first interview after Zarah Sultana’s impromptu announcement of the new party and her role in it, Corbyn told Owen Jones that he’d made a pact with the Independent Alliance MPs that, “Where we agree, we’ll work together. Where we don’t agree, we’ll say no more about it.”2 This form of politics was plainly unacceptable to the hall; a working class party socialist cannot give an inch to reaction or capital.
Numerous interventions from the floor confirmed this. One person stated that “We don’t want to take over power, we want to smash it”, with multiple people calling to explicitly draw on Marxist and revolutionary traditions together and affirmations that socialism means liberation for all oppressed people. Another person stated that there should be wealth redistribution within the party itself, through the sale of inherited assets and MPs and staff being given a worker’s wage with the rest being donated. The proposal from Organising for Popular Power began by describing how little alignment they felt with the leadership of the party, which was contrasted by the strength of solidarity in the hall. The lessons of 2019 needed to be learnt: leadership cannot be depended on, the people cannot be passive, and branches must be placed above the leadership.
The largest and most forceful applause of each assembly went to speakers from the stage and from the floor who told the simple truth that the leadership of the party were fucking this up, and this was not theirs to fuck up – this must be a party of the working class, a party committed to solidarity with trans people and against racism in all forms. The first of such necessary interventions described the “sham democracy” of the founding process, the forthcoming regional assemblies that don’t deserve to be called assemblies at all, and added, at the end, a thank you to Corbyn and Sultana for initiating the process, but that the party was ours. The chair sheepishly followed by stating that Sultana was in the room and would be an unscheduled speaker next taking the stage. With noticeably less applause than what had immediately preceded it, Sultana tried to match that energy and anger of the floor. “I’m not a Labour hand-me-down”, she started, recalling how she’d actually gained her start in Palestine solidarity movement, and that this new party must be one that is not ashamed of its class politics and must seize the means of production, but not before adding that the party must “fight elections for the working class.” According to her, any disagreements that had emerged at the top of the nascent party were not of personalities but principles, and that principle was maximum democracy for the membership. Reading the mood of the hall, she outlined how crucial transparency was, that conference must be sovereign, MPs accountable to the membership, and subject to mandatory reselection – but, essentially, these all still need to be fought for within the party; this was by no means settled.
This was the assemblies at their most productive: in articulating the frustration with the leadership and formalising the base against them, to express clear demands that surpassed the class consciousness of the leadership. But they were by no means seamless, punctuated by tangent after tangent that fell beneath the level of politics necessary to recognise the British left’s immediate task. One such intervention from John Talbot who opened by saying that there was too much agreement in the hall, and that the problem was with democracy – neither elaborating whether this was bourgeois or capitalist democracy, or democracy at all – which left the hall puzzled. Class analysis disappeared and reappeared, at times deferring to discussions of establishment and anti-establishment and the popular slogans of Occupy Wall Street were repeated – though in one instance this was extended to a global context with the centre of imperialism being the one percent. While their presence had been entirely overlooked through the discussion of the new party’s practical politics and the impasse of British left, discussions of the Greens re-emerged as one member stated that their MP was Carla Denyer which was met with a solitary woo followed by silence. Another member soon added that their commitment was not to a party but to socialism, again putting forward the idea of an electoral pact between the Greens and the new party. One point that was met with cheers was a refugee asking how many others were in the hall, which fell into silence as people looked around them to see who was holding up their hands. He then proposed that future TWT tickets be reserved for refugees, which garnered more applause that continued as he began to decry “Eastern imperialism”, the imperialism of Russia, of China and the Uyghurs, and Iran. The discussion of fascism centred around its footsoldiers as misguided members of the working class, rather than expanding that class analysis to recognise the role played by the lumpenproletariat and petit-bourgeoisie – with the exception of one member of RS21 stating that the fascists he had spoken to were landlords, and another likewise pushed back to say that speaking to fascists directly won’t bring people over.
Nevertheless, there was broad acknowledgement that Palestine had brought the British left together, but it still lagged behind the militancy and organisation of European solidarity movements; speakers noted that the British left struggled with long-term offence through its lack of formal structures that a party would solve – together with the fact that Palestinians have the right to armed resistance, even if it was still not recognised by British parties. Where prior to the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th support for Palestine had been uncontroversial it had since, one rep from the BMA told the room, it was now met with repression and people found themselves afraid to speak out. Someone from the Palestinian Youth Movement stated that what had destroyed British socialism in 2019 had been Zionism itself, as a centre of reaction, and that the smears of anti-Semitism against Corbyn would not work again. There was one moment that was only met with cautious sympathy, until the crowd came together in applause: a speaker from the floor condemned the selective anti-imperialism of the British left: those who condemned intervention by the British, American, and Israeli state but were seemingly at peace with attacks against Iran. Others stressed that climate change is already here, and that it is not an immediate cataclysm but one that makes itself felt economically first – through the increase of prices of commodities with complications of production and the intensification of the “superexploitation” of the Global South, a burden that must be borne by the fossil fuel companies themselves. Someone from the floor added that fossil fuel companies must be nationalised, without compensation.
In the final assembly, Archie Woodrow was the first speaker and immediately reopened the question of the party: the organisation of the party is a farce, and people were already far more organised than those who were still creating the party through closed doors; people should turn up to the founding conference whether they were selected by sortition or not. The party itself likely won’t be dead on arrival, but it will fail to achieve what is historically necessary, which is to resolve the sectarianism that past generations have clung to: “So we’re likely to see socialists divided in different local areas between Your Party, the Greens, and independent local groups. Based on local circumstances, not principled political divisions.”3 The base of the party are the members of the organisations in that hall, and the assemblies at the World Transformed themselves have already demonstrated points of unity: a deep commitment to anti-chauvinism in all its forms, against racism and Islamophobia and transphobia; Palestine is the vanguard of international class struggle, and as socialists in Britain our main enemy is at home; a resolutely working-class party that wages class war at levels of society.
Over the three days of the festival, seven factions and tendencies4 that had already been created by supporters and members of the new party met together to discuss the prospect of working together. With the largest of the faction having approximately 500 members, this in itself represented something of a different magnitude to the pre-existing formations of the British; a faction already surpassing the number of members of RS21 and multiple British communist parties combined. Submitting one final proposal on the last day, they came out to announce a provisional minimum programme and constitutional demands that built on the points already discussed in the assemblies:
Minimum political programme
Anti-capitalism & socialist horizon – Power to the people: Socialism is only possible through the struggle of the working classes to own and democratically control the means of production and the organisation of society for people, not profit.
Leave no-one behind: Solidarity with all oppressed groups, including but not limited to anti-racism and migrant solidarity, queer and trans liberation, resisting islamophobia and disability justice.
Anti-imperialism: Freedom for all peoples dominated by empire. We deserve a world where all people are able to determine their own lives free from the scourge of imperialism, whether through war, finance or trade. Socialists in Britain have a responsibility to fight for a free Palestine, weaken British militarism, NATO, Zionism, and all cogs of the British imperialist machine.
Constitutional demands
Workers’ wage: Elected officials and party staff should take a salary no higher than the median wage in the area they live. The remaining money should go either to Your Party or to local class struggle organising.
Sovereign conference: Decisions made at conference are binding, the parliamentary or council whip should be used to ensure MPs and councillors vote in line with conference decisions.
Mandatory reselection: Before an election there must be an open vote of Your Party members in the relevant constituency on who the candidate will be – MPs do not automatically get to run for their seat again.
A genuinely democratic and sovereign conference to be held no more than 12 months after the founding conference.
Branch demands
Branches are well funded: receiving a significant portion of members’ subs and any MP salary shares, with autonomy over branch spending.
Data access: After the founding conference, the party must own all membership data. Elected branch committees must have access to full membership data for the area covered by their branch.
Base-building (meaning bringing new people into class struggle and movements) should be a core part of Your Party strategy.5
The factions then asked that the hall vote then and there on that provisional programme, to be taken and pushed for in members’ proto-branches and the regional assemblies, and the chairs duly obliged. The hall voted in favour, with some amendments but with abstentions centering on the legitimacy of the assembly, with one person voting against also repeating that sentiment.6 Amendments were then taken to the floor: there should be an explicit mention of Islamophobia in the programme, why was there no mention of climate?, and the necessity of dual memberships. When more questions were opened up to the floor, the first person said that it was clear that the “adults in the room” weren’t organising the party but were instead at this assembly, and that their informal group of party members would soon be in touch with the factions to work together.
The normal course of an assembly soon resumed, however: points about topics which weren’t quite relevant were raised, and as the event dragged on the chairs attempted to tease out practical solutions against people’s inclination to read an essay from their phones that they’d written earlier.
The recognition of the missed opportunity of a seamless launch was widespread, with calls for the pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will repeated throughout the assemblies. But what the debacle has immediately revealed are the limits of the processes and the politics that are being built into the party. Any analysis must not remain at the level of personality – between a split or reconciliation of Corbyn and Sultana – but instead one of democracy and class-struggle; of the necessity of waging class against sections of society, against chauvinism in all of its forms, against landlords, the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself together with its parliament and parliamentary politics. And so it was necessary that Corbyn was the one to mount such a failure, as each failure radicalises the left further and further and clarifies the contradictions between the necessities of bourgeois parliament and the working class. Much of the British left had looked to him for guidance since his election to Labour leader in 2015 and, without him, remained demoralised and siloed in local organisations before coming together around Palestine but, with the prospect of a new socialist party, people are ready to extend the fight for Palestine to all levels of British society and see in him only caution and lessons that weren’t learnt. Corbyn stood for peace and hope, against the threat of the right-wing of the Labour Party – repeating the simple and ahistorical concepts that Marx critiqued first in Proudhon and then in the First International. But in a party where some of the most class conscious socialists and communists in the country constitute its base, that abstraction is laid bare and he is instead part of its right wing: a political wing that looks to alliances with the landlords and petit-bourgeoisie, that substitutes any Marxist analysis of class for a politics that is only capable of thinking in the dichotomies of establishment and anti-establishment – and willing to renege hard-won truths around the oppression of those who constitute the working class itself.
References
1. Kieran Glasssmith, “MPs Don’t Make Good Leaders”, Bristol Transformed, 26 July 2025,
https://bristoltransformed.co.uk/blog/p ... d-leaders/ [Accessed 11/10/2025]
2. “Exclusive Jeremy Corbyn Interview: Why We Launched Your Party”, Owen Jones, YouTube, July 30 2025,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49jppx61YhY [Accessed 12/10/2025]
3. Archie Woodrow, “Democratic Socialists Organiser, Archie Woodrow, Opens TWT Assembly Calling For Marxist Unity”, Democratic Socialists,
https://dsyp.org/2025/10/12/democratic- ... ist-unity/ [Accessed 14/10/25]
4. This includes: The Democratic Bloc, Democratic Socialists, Eco-Socialist Horizon, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Organising for Popular Power,the Trans Liberation Group and The People’s Front.
5. “For a Member Led, Socialist Party”, Prometheus, 13 October 2025,
https://prometheusjournal.org/2025/10/1 ... ist-party/ [Accessed 13/10/25]
6. When this was raised explicitly, the chairs reassured the hall that this was non-binding but is nevertheless the “popular will of the people.”
https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/cla ... ransformed
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