Left-wing politicians, commentators and activists have increasingly become divided into a number of groups, all equally useless from the point of view of real social change. One group has replaced class politics with politically correct incantations on the rights of every conceivable minority. This is completely in line with the logic and demands of the neoliberal capitalism that is fragmenting society. Another group, while continuing to swear its fidelity to the working class, has replaced politics with role-playing, seeking to convince itself that nothing in the world has changed since 1917. Inasmuch as the working class imagined by this group no longer has anything in common with the actual working people who live under the new conditions (not always better, but different), each successive round of role-playing sees the members of the group increasingly remote from reality. Finally, a third group has ceased even to pretend to take part in politics, shutting itself away in the sphere of culture. The members of this group have built themselves the same kind of ‘ivory tower’ as the aesthetes of the early twentieth century, refusing to have anything to do either with bourgeois philistinism or with the crudity of the proletariat. This time, however, the tower has finished up daubed with radical slogans, and some-times may even be decorated with red flags.

The paradox is that the decline and disorganisation of the left movement (in all its varieties from moderate social democracy to hard-line communism) has done nothing to help capitalism, and in a certain sense has even served to deepen the crisis in bourgeois society. Left to its own devices after coping with external challenges and overcoming the danger of socialist revolution, capital in a strikingly brief time span has pushed all its own contradictions to the limit, creating the conditions for the multitude of crises – social, environmental, economic and so forth – that are now heaped one upon the other.

—Boris Kagarlitsky, The Long Retreat, (London: Pluto Press, 2024), xvi-xvii