The Imagined Proletariat

Rhetoric without a Subject

I. The Biographical Sentence

Since 2016, the opening of the American leftist candidate’s biography has settled into a recognizable form. It appears in the second paragraph of campaign websites’ “About” pages written by Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated candidates, Working Families Party endorsees, and post-Sanders insurgents in Democratic primaries at every level from school boards to the United States Senate.

Candidates phrase the claim variously — I grew up in a working-class family, my parents were working-class people, I come from a working-class background, I was raised in a working-class household — but the work the claim does is the same each time. The candidate uses the opening to assert a class identity, and the assertion is then repeated, unexamined, through the campaign material, through endorsement letters issued by aligned organizations, through press coverage in sympathetic outlets such as Jacobin, In These Times, and The Nation, and eventually in the legislative biography that follows the candidate into office. Whatever the candidate now does for a living, however much the candidate now earns, whatever class position the candidate now occupies as a matter of present economic fact, the campaign continues to assert the founding sentence. Once made in the second paragraph of the biography, the working-class membership claim does not expire. The founding sentence of the biography establishes class identity before any other fact about the candidate is introduced. It’s as if Abe Lincoln lived his whole life in the log cabin of his birthplace.

The persistent claim describes very little: a parent who taught middle school in a Midwestern suburb, a parent who worked a manufacturing line that has since been offshored, a parent who served 20 years in the military and retired into a mortgage paid through the GI Bill, a parent who cleaned houses, drove a truck, ran a small auto-body shop, or carried mail. The political content is far larger. By claiming a working-class background, the candidate establishes a political identity that the American left treats as both the principal agent of left-leaning politics and the moral subject in whose name policy is conducted. Working-class identity carries political standing, and political standing carries the authority to speak for the class. The biographical claim is the credential by which the candidate establishes both the identity and the authority.

The claim also has coalitional uses. It tells organized labor, progressive nonprofits, and high-dollar left-wing donors that the candidate is one of theirs by origin, even if not by present circumstance. It tells the press that the candidate’s policy commitments proceed from authentic class experience rather than from ideological choice. And it tells voters that the candidate’s wealth, profession, education, and donor coalition need not be examined too closely, because the founding claim has discharged the question in advance.

II. Marx’s Two Senses of Class

The working-class identity these candidates invoke is incoherent, and the incoherence can be specified.

Marx distinguished two senses of class. The first, Klasse an sich, names a class in itself: a structural position in the relations of production occupied by people who share a relation to capital, whether they recognize it as such. The wage workers of nineteenth-century Manchester, Lyon, and Lowell were a single class by virtue of their shared position in the production process, regardless of how they understood themselves or which church they attended or the political party with which they identified.

The second sense, Klasse für sich, names a class for itself: a class that has come to recognize its position, organize around its interests, and act collectively on its own behalf, typically through trade unions, working-class political parties, and mutual aid societies. The transition from the first to the second was, for Marx and the entire socialist tradition that followed him, the central political problem of the modern era. A class in itself was a sociological fact. A class for itself was a political achievement, one that could not be assumed and had to be made. The German Social Democratic Party, before 1914, came closest: a million members, parallel institutions for press and education, and an explicit programmatic commitment to working-class political organization.

From a Marxist perspective, the American working class today exists as a class in itself. It does not exist as a class for itself. Its members do not share a political consciousness; they vote in different directions; they identify with different cultural formations, hold sharply different views on immigration, social issues, and foreign policy, and divide along sector, region, citizenship, language, and skill. The structural divide between the unionized minority, currently at or below ten percent of the American workforce and concentrated in public-sector employment, and the non-unionized majority cuts across all these divisions.

What constitutes the working class today is itself contested. The industrial proletariat Marx wrote about is a much smaller fraction of the American workforce than it was in 1900 or even 1970, and the literature on contemporary class composition has specified the problem: precarious service labor, debt-burdened salaried employees, gig and warehouse workers organized through channels Marx did not anticipate. The argument here does not require treating the industrial proletariat as the working class proper. “Working class” is being used in the broad sense the post-Sanders left itself uses. The point is that whatever today’s working class is, the post-Sanders left has not organized it. The class in itself exists. The class for itself does not. When the American left invokes “the working class” as a coherent political subject with shared interests and a discernible voice, it refers to a class for itself that does not exist as such.

III. The Rhetoric of the Universal Subject

The post-Sanders American left continues to use the term nonetheless, because the rhetorical work the term does is too valuable to abandon. Since 2016, the left has simplified the term through a particular rhetorical move: the working class is defined by negation against the billionaire class.

Sanders introduced the construction in its current form during his 2016 presidential campaign, and the post-Sanders left inherited, refined, and amplified it across the subsequent wave of DSA-aligned electoral efforts. For the better part of a decade, Sanders deployed a single phrase, ‘millionaires and billionaires,’ alongside more substantive references to corporate monopolies, private equity, and the broader owner class. The shorthand proved more portable. As book royalties boosted his household net worth into the millionaire bracket and public reporting increased, Sanders dropped “millionaires“ from the phrase and used “billionaires” alone. The contracted form is now the standard formulation across the post-Sanders left: the working class is defined as everyone who is not a billionaire.

Defining a class by what it is not, however, and specifically by negation against a small number of extremely wealthy individuals, collapses every other class distinction into the same undifferentiated category. The petite bourgeoisie; the professional-managerial class; salaried knowledge workers in technology and finance; public-sector professionals; university faculty; small business owners; mid-career physicians; and actual wage laborers in manufacturing, agriculture, food service, retail, and warehouse work all become “working class” by virtue of not being Bezos, Musk, or Zuckerberg. The professional-managerial coalition that dominates the American left can claim working-class identity through opposition to billionaires while remaining structurally distinct from the wage laborers in whose name their political aims are pursued.

Defining a class through what it opposes has a long pedigree in political rhetoric. Every ruling class presents its particular interests as the universal interests of society. Marx made the point in The German Ideology. The American left has carried out a smaller version of the same substitution. The category ‘professional-managerial class,’ introduced by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 and contested in the literature since, remains useful for naming the credentialed strata that dominate leftist electoral coalitions. This group presents its particular interests as the universal interests of ‘the working class’: credentialing, public-sector employment, redistributive transfers funded by taxation rather than by socialization of production, cultural recognition of identity-based grievances, and regulation of the largest concentrations of private capital. The substitution is rarely deliberate; it is structural. The people doing the substituting are mostly sincere; the sincerity does not change the substitution.

IV. Two Forms of Progressive Claim

The construction works at every scale; a local case shows what it looks like in practice. The current Oregon political cycle has two forms, both recognizable without naming any individual.

An organization can claim a constituency without ever speaking to it. The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America presents itself, in its own published materials, as an organization devoted to “build[ing] working class power” and to constructing “an organized working-class movement big enough to take on” the ruling class. The chapter’s electoral working group describes its mission as electing “DSA champions for the working class.” The chapter repeats the phrase across its About page, its issue pages, its voter guides, and its social-media biographies. With each repetition, it names a constituency it claims to represent. The chapter does not specify on what basis it speaks for that constituency, because no one has raised the question.

A candidate can claim a class position she no longer occupies. A typical campaign biography for a DSA-affiliated or DSA-aligned candidate in the post-Sanders Oregon wave opens with the founding sentence in one of its standard variations. The candidate’s current profession is named in the third or fourth sentence, after the working-class biography has been established. The professions are recognizable as a class: physicians and nurse-administrators, software developers and product managers, university professors, hospital administrators and nonprofit executives, sitting elected officials, and a smaller number of small-business owners. The structural distance between the founding sentence and the current class position is then unexamined through the campaign material into the endorsement letters, the press coverage, and the legislative record that follows the candidate into office.

V. Lenin, Inverted

Politics, a sympathetic reader might object, is conducted by organized minorities on behalf of disorganized majorities. No political coalition has ever waited for its constituency to spontaneously self-organize before acting. Lenin himself understood that the proletariat could not attain revolutionary consciousness on its own and required a vanguard party to bring it from outside. The DSA’s electoral practice, from this view, is a modest current version of the same Leninist insight, conducted within bourgeois parliamentary forms because those are the forms currently available.

Lenin’s most relevant text on this question is “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written in spring 1920 for the Second Congress of the Communist International, addressed against the Western European ultra-leftists who refused on principle to participate in bourgeois parliaments, to work within reactionary trade unions, or to enter tactical alliances with non-communist workers’ parties, including the British Labour Party. Lenin called the stance infantile because it confused strategic patience with ideological compromise. His argument was that revolutionary parties must work within the existing mass organizations of the working class to win over workers still within those organizations rather than purifying themselves into irrelevance outside them. The argument was about engagement with the working class as it had organized itself. Lenin’s pragmatism presupposed a working class already organized as a force and a vanguard party with a revolutionary theory adequate to lead it. The American left possesses neither: the mass organizations have collapsed, and the DSA, whatever its merits, is an electoral coalition with a labor working group, not a vanguard formation in the Leninist sense.

The DSA has, in fact, formally adopted a version of this Leninist mandate. The Rank-and-File Strategy, adopted at the 2019 national convention, explicitly calls on socialists to enter existing trade unions as workers, build relationships with non-socialist co-workers, and organize from within. The strategy has contributed to the Teamsters reform efforts that elected Sean O’Brien, in the UAW reform that produced Shawn Fain, and in elements of the Amazon and Starbucks organizing campaigns. The DSA is not refusing the work Lenin prescribed.

The problem is that the work Lenin prescribed and the work the DSA is best known for are not the same, and the relationship between them has inverted the original Leninist priority. Lenin placed engagement with authentic workers at the center of socialist practice, with electoral and parliamentary work subordinated to that engagement and accountable to it. The DSA has reversed the relationship. Rank-and-file work continues, conducted by a small fraction of the membership in the sectors where organizing is currently active. The organization’s public-facing identity (candidate biographies, endorsement decisions, electoral coalitions, the framing of leftist policy in the language of working-class representation) runs on the imagined working class rather than the organized one. The second practice dominates the first in budget, in staff time, in press attention, and in the criteria by which the organization presents itself to voters and imposes itself on unsuspecting workers with different political views.

The infantile disorder Lenin diagnosed was the refusal to engage with r actual workers. The current version is more subtle. A real engagement sits alongside a much larger rhetorical practice that constructs the working class through biography and negation rather than encountering it through organization. The imagined class is more comfortable than the work of building an organized one, and the imagined class is what the broader public hears.

The empirical conditions that gave Lenin’s argument its power in 1920 no longer exist in the United States. Trade union density stands at or below ten percent and is concentrated overwhelmingly in public-sector employment. The fraternal associations, mutual aid societies, and neighborhood institutions that constituted the social infrastructure of pre-1970 working-class life have been dispersed by deindustrialization, by suburbanization, by the collapse of the parish networks that hosted them, and by the broader atomization of American civic life.

The mass institutions Lenin presupposed do not exist: trade union federations with millions of members, working-class parties with their own newspapers and schools, cooperative societies, and dense neighborhood networks. The rhetorical practice may partly be a response to that absence, a way of invoking a class one cannot reach through the channels Lenin assumed were available. The substitution is constrained more than chosen. Constraint does not make the substitution legitimate, however. A practice that constructs an imagined class through biography and negation does not become more accurate because an authentic class is harder to organize. It becomes even more misleading because the rhetoric continues to imply an organized constituency that the speaker cannot deliver on. Without doubt, the DSA’s rank-and-file work has contributed to organizing wins, but on its own, it cannot make a class for itself out of a fragmented and demobilized class whose actual interests may not align with the DSA’s. The rhetorical practice does not assist the rank-and-file work; it substitutes for it.

VI. Moving Beyond the Imagined Constituency

The post-Sanders left has substituted a class it has not organized for a politics it does not defend. A coalition of professionals, public-sector workers, organized labor staff, and leftist donors is conducting electoral politics on behalf of a redistributive and regulatory program the coalition believes would benefit a working class it has not organized and cannot, on its current scale of engagement, claim to speak for. The agenda may be good. The coalition may be effective. The candidates may serve well in the offices to which they are elected. None of those possibilities requires the working-class claim. The claim is included because the coalition believes it legitimizes the project, and because the conventions of the American left have made it a condition of admission to serious left-leaning politics.

A defender of the post-Sanders electoral approach will respond that the electoral coalitions the rhetorical practice has built have produced material gains for working people: the Teamsters reform that elected Sean O’Brien, the UAW reform that produced the 2023 Big Three strike, the Amazon and Starbucks organizing campaigns that emerged in part from networks the post-Sanders left helped sustain. The response is not wrong about the gains. It is wrong about their source. The Teamsters reform was won by Teamsters; the UAW reform by UAW members; the Starbucks campaigns by baristas. The rhetorical practice did not produce the organizing. It accompanied it, sometimes funded it, and often drew on its legitimacy. Removing the rhetorical claim would not remove the organizing. It would remove the substitution that obscures whose work actually won the gains.

A different reader will accept the diagnosis but reject the prescription. All political representation, the argument runs, involves the construction of the represented. Pitkin made the point in 1967; Mansbridge has refined it across four decades. The imagined class, on this view, is not a special pathology of the post-Sanders left but a feature of how representation works at all. In certain applications, this may be true at a generalized level, while still wrong about the specific charge. For instance, many, if not most, building trades workers tend to move to more central political views and see their worker interest hew to more traditional, even capitalist, values. A constructed constituency can still be falsely constructed, can still be invoked in ways its members would not recognize, can still be substituted for the work of building one. That all representation is partly imagined does not answer the charge that this particular imagining lacks any organizational counterpart. It only universalizes the problem.

This is the price of becoming, eventually, the kind of political force that could organize the real working class rather than represent the imagined one.

The class in whose name the program is pursued exists as a class in itself. It does not yet exist as a class for itself.

The author is a faculty member at Portland State University and writes about Oregon politics and public higher education at Academic Gadfly.