The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism

Have you heard the news? The socialists are winning. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, having won their respective Democratic primaries in deep-blue congressional districts, are set to become members of the U.S. House. So is 29-year-old Melat Kiros, who recently stunned the party by knocking out 15-term Colorado Representative Diana DeGette by 13 points.

All of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The group, which went from obscurity in the 1980s to a Beltway punchline in the 2010s, now holds more than 250 offices in 40 states. Say what you will about DSA, but it’s is no longer a fringe organization.

I mention all this not to relitigate the merits of rent freezes, Medicare for All, abolishing the police, or government-run grocery stores. I agree with many of the group’s positions and with the underlying conviction that American society needs to be rebuilt from the foundation up. Which is exactly why DSA’s rise worries me. For it to truly succeed, and become a nationwide movement that transforms American politics, it will have to do more than fight on behalf the “working class” and actually start resembling the working class.

Appeals to the working class are rampant in the DSA. Mamdani, who acknowledges his “privileged upbringing,” is fond of saying, “I fight for working people.” Valdez, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who left a program assistant job at Columbia University to join the New York State Assembly, declared on the night of her primary victory that she would be “a fighting force for the entire working class.” Chevalier, who had a poor upbringing but went on to become a Columbia graduate and now a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, describes herself as a “working-class Dominican New Yorker.”

But here’s the problem: They don’t fit the part. Their finances may or may not equate with the working class, but they’re not working class. Sure, they might “work to pay … bills,” which Mamdani, rather squirrelly, has said is “one definition of being a part of the working class.” But that expansive definition won’t fly with most observers—especially not those whom we commonly think of as working class, which is to say non-college-educated workers who rely on an hourly wage. Rather, these DSA politicians are part, as their hipster glasses convey all too well, of the college-educated creative class. And that’s true of the DSA broadly. It simply is not a working-class organization.

If history is any indication, that’s cause for concern. George Orwell diagnosed the problem nearly a century ago. In 1936, with socialism in retreat amid fascist takeovers in Europe, he was sent north by the Left Book Club to document working-class life in industrial England. He came back not with the tidy indictment of capitalism his publisher was expecting but with The Road to Wigan Pier, half of which presented a devastating account of English coal-mining poverty, and the other half a lengthy, still-controversial essay about why working people, the miners themselves, didn’t like socialists.

It wasn’t that the miners disagreed with socialist principles, Orwell said. Instead, he pointed to the obvious fact of the class divide, diagnosing the problem of “middle-class” socialism: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

It remains one of the great insults in English political writing, and it still gets at the heart of the matter today, as it relates to the question of class solidarity. “I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists,” Orwell added, a little more soberly, “and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”

Needless to say, the Left Book Club was none too pleased. Victor Gollancz, its founder, agreed to publish the book only with a foreword registering his own severe objections to Orwell’s characterization of the movement. Critics have rightly pointed out the ways Orwell overstepped the historical truth by fixating on cranks, when in reality earlier socialist movements were largely organized and populated by actual working-class people, many of them diasporic immigrants.

Orwell himself admitted to some disquieting facts about his own formation, describing his upbringing as a member of the “lower-upper-middle class.” He confessed he’d been raised to believe that working-class people smelled, a tendency he leveled at middle-class socialists, as well. While Orwell sought to humanize the working class, scholars argue his accounts relied heavily on chauvinism and the reinforcement of early twentieth-century racial and gender hierarchies. But the core of his argument remains: Middle-class people and working-class people are not one and the same.

Which brings us to the current moment, and to the numbers, which are not especially kind to the theory that socialism has finally cracked the working-class code. In the convincing victory that made Mamdani a national figure, exit polls found that Andrew Cuomo won voters without a college degree by five points. Mamdani’s coalition was undoubtedly broad, including moderate Black voters, but like most of the DSA’s electoral coalitions it was disproportionately young, college-educated, and concentrated in the city’s more gentrified precincts.

The DSA’s own 2021 membership survey found the organization was 85 percent non-Hispanic white, against a working-class population that is only 55 percent white. Half of its membership worked in education, tech, white-collar companies, nonprofits, the public sector, or the arts; just 4 percent identified as “blue collar.” In the primary that sent Claire Valdez to Congress, she carried college-educated areas by 37 points and won younger residents 64–32, while her opponent ran strongest in the district’s lower-income, majority-Hispanic precincts. The DSA’s own candidate, running as the tribune of the working class, lost the working-class parts of her own district.

But they won nonetheless, as did Kiros in Colorado. After her victory, some House Democrats tried to write the result off as a blip. “One more case in the growing dynamic of performative politics,” one told Axios. Another was blunter: “[That] DSA is … winning some safe seat primaries with these young white college-educated voters is just no shock. It’s literally their entire playbook.”

But this isn’t a blip. Socialism is having a renaissance, which makes remembering its own history all the more important. Movements built by outsiders on behalf of a class have a habit of curdling into something approaching paternalism. Orwell was at least honest enough to turn the critique on himself as well, tracing his own socialist leanings to his guilt for having enforced empire as a British Imperial Police officer in Burma. He admitted that the English working class first entered his imagination as a kind of screen, representing the “symbolic victims of injustice,” standing in for something he could project onto while masking his own guilt.

So what do working people really want? A revolution against the “capitalist oligarchy,” the “end of the U.S. war machine,” the “abolition” of the nuclear family, or something simpler and more mundane? My grandparents immigrated from southern Italy to the anthracite coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania at the turn of the twentieth century. Our family lived in towns where men went down into the ground and did not always come back up, and where labor politics were hardly theoretical. Their fight was for dignity, shorter hours, some guarantee of support in the case of inevitable injury, and a measure of certainty that in the face of death—whether it arrived through a fall of rock, a kick to the head from a mule, a gas explosion, or the slower suffocation of black lung—their families would have something to live on. It was, at root, a communal effort, seeing women on the front lines of pickets and child laborers feeding the “family economy.”

In the 1910s, radical movements held real sway in the region. The Industrial Workers of the World, and even Communist groups, found a genuine following among Italian and other immigrant miners. But the more instructive point is found in what the mainstream labor movement and its offshoots did, taking the fight to the mat without overt ideology, enduring extreme forms of violence, so that miners and their families could simply live their lives in peace. Orwell saw this too in the miners of North England, writing that for the ordinary working man, socialism “does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing him about.” A life in which the things that mattered stayed the same: “family life, the pub, football, and local politics.”

In the end, Orwell believed that “the misery of class prejudice” would not be solved through messaging or persuasion, but through an actual collapsing of class distance itself. Anticipating the inequality of our day, he foresaw potential solidarity emerging from the “sinking” of the middle class—“the private schoolmaster, the half starved freelance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with 75 pounds a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate”—into “the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared.”

Given the dire predictions about AI’s decimation of many middle-class professions—like those held by a majority of DSA members—here’s to hoping that Orwell was right. ...