“… the left is no longer the left once it has broken with the working classes.”

Guillaume Herblot  @Guigz75116

The Far Left, or the Secession of the Cultural Elites.

French geographer and essayist Christophe Guilluy put it better than anyone: the left is no longer the left once it has broken with the working classes.  

And contemporary far-left activism is not the uprising of the “people from below.” It is the pinnacle of the cultural petite bourgeoisie that has colonized the language of poverty to turn it into a marker of distinction.

The typical profile of the activist and intellectual core is not the factory worker, the suburban office clerk, or the precarious resident of the banlieues. It is predominantly white women, college-educated (bachelor’s plus three years to grandes écoles or equivalent in social sciences, education, culture), urban, hailing from Metropolia. They fancy themselves “close to the people” they claim to defend, but they are the exact sociological and cultural inverse. 

Guilluy speaks of an “almost anthropological rupture” between those who speak about the people and the people themselves. The sociology of the militants and spokespeople is very much upper-middle-class.

• The Mechanism.

Since the 1980s, the dominant left has abandoned the social question. It has replaced the alliance of teachers and workers with a bobo alliance of the metropolises and electorates from immigrant backgrounds in the neighborhoods.  

Result: the working classes of peripheral France (small towns, suburbs, rural areas) have culturally autonomized themselves. They no longer recognize themselves in the narrative produced by intellectual, media, and academic elites. The real people vote elsewhere. The far left, meanwhile, remains trapped in its progressive bubble.

• Colonization of Poverty.

That’s exactly it. We appropriate the words of oppression, domination, and “decolonization” to inject them with priorities that are those of the cultural bourgeoisie: identity issues, migration, gender, radical ecology. The working classes, by contrast, have pragmatic diagnoses (jobs, purchasing power, security, schools, migration regulation). Guilluy sums it up: bobos are “Rougon-Macquart characters dressed as hipsters.” They preserve their position, their real estate assets, the schooling of their children, all while draping themselves in virtue. They practice residential and school avoidance while demanding that others bear the consequences of their “luxury beliefs.”

• The Anthology of Contradictions.

- They defend “the people” but despise those who don’t share their codes (the “redneck,” the “racist” from the periphery).

- They talk of solidarity and diversity while living in socially and culturally homogeneous circles.

- They denounce elites while forming the new cultural elite that has captured education, culture, part of the media, and the civil service.

- They claim to fight capitalism while being the products and beneficiaries of the educational system and the metropolises that concentrate resources.

Guilluy has mapped the schism: on one side Metropolia (the big cities where the progressive cultural bourgeoisie and its electoral allies are concentrated), on the other Peripheria (the ordinary majority, everyday people, multiethnic but culturally autonomous). 

The far left is the discursive armed wing of the former against the latter. It is not a revolution. 

It is a secession of the elites masquerading as the voice of the oppressed.  

The people don’t need to be symbolically colonized. They need us to stop despising them.